Bigger than we can imagine

We sang a hymn in church today which I don't think I have heard before. I really liked it. It is called "One Bread, One Body." The scriptural basis is 1 Corinthians 10:16-17, Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12. Here is the first verse and the chorus:

Gentile or Jew, servant or free,
Woman or man no more.

One Bread, one body, Our Lord of all.
One cup of blessing which we bless
And we, though many throughout the earth,
we are one body in this one Lord.

I like the hymn, and I like the connection between the chorus -- One bread, one body, one Lord -- and the passage from Galatians.

Shane Raynor on the Wesley Blog wrote a post Friday entitled Why Calling God Father is Important. I'm pretty sure that what we call God isn't as important as the fact that we call on him at all.

Shane makes the point that he believes calling God "Father" is biblical, whereas calling him by a feminine name is not. One of his points is that all throughtout the Bible we encounter a God who is male. Could it be that the God in Jesus' time is portrayed as masculine because that was the only concept of a God that they were able to grasp?

Personally, my concept of God -- the picture I have of God in my head -- is that of a father. I hope, though, that while that does give me a way to try to grasp the ungraspable, that it does not limit my picture of God. There are certainly scriptural examples of God having maternal characteristics.

Consider again the hymn listed above, and its reference to Galatians. "Woman or Man no more." I have a feeling that God wants us to see each other as Children of God, without limiting each other to the roles we assign to each other based on gender. Can we not extend that same expansive concept to God himself as well? If seeing God as a Father is helpful, then fine, but perhaps we need to avoid placing God in a box -- limiting him by our preconceptions of what a father is.

JtM pointed me in the direction of a hymn in the book The Faith We Sing called Bring Many Names. Click on the title to check out the lyrics. In it, God is portrayed as mother, father, and of every age -- a large, expansive view of God (interpretation of the hymn found here).

One bread, one body, one Lord -- but He is God. God will not be limited by our own interpretations of him. He is huge -- bigger than we can possibly imagine. Perhaps trying to name him with only one name is futile.

God is 'I am.'