The Great AMEN of the Great I-AM

God in Covenant with His People in His Creation

McKenna, Miller

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781498276382
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The author would take his readers on a ride from the Self-Revelation of the I-AM that the Lord God is with Moses, through King David, to the I-AM of the Messiah of Israel and of the Incarnation, and to the I-AM of the Dogma of the Church as the People of God. It is argued that the Grace and Truth of the Lord God cannot rightly be grasped in all of their depth in the world without becoming able to integrate both the continuity and the discontinuities of this Revelation with us, even in our own times.

1

An Explanation

. . . Apart from me you can do nothing.

John 15:5b

Why read a book about an ex-alcohol and drug addict, come out from under the volcanic eruptions of a self-destructive existence for life as a Jesus Freak? Are not the stories of such conversions tired forms of some practical Narcissism rabid as dogs in the wilderness of our society? My critics also tell me that I am as this one too difficult to understand. My thought is too obscure. My writing is too dense. Whatever it is that I am trying to say is not said with the simplicity that is required by ordinary human beings everywhere. I am sure the critics are right. I ought not to write my book. Yet I must speak, however pathetically. There is a call upon my life. I must write it down on paper. Never mind how complex it is. Who can heal his or herself in any case? However poor the words of this book are, they are what they are as witnesses to their Lord and God.

I say that with real human frailties we move towards all that truly matters, like it or not, with the tender mercies of the One who is who He is in all of his simplicity and complexity and mystery. I would say that, though we appear to spend our times upon this earth on a great river of time, like fish in the water, or specks among the stars of the galaxies, known and unknown, with astonishingly perishable and explosive existences, though we move silently in an impressive vastness that dwarfs any meaning we may want to give ourselves, our significance is something that really matters. There is something moving in the world that would take us quite beyond ourselves, something truly resolute, answering what and how and why and where in the questions of our lives. We are “not-nothing” here. But the way to understanding this ‘something-ness’ is resolutely unique, a clearly particular reality, one that somehow possesses a patently universal significance. I will write about why we are “not-nothing” in this case.

I mean to speak that which takes us quite beyond ourselves. I want to see us as individuals in community with what and who it is that lives beyond our own existences. I intend to tell of a freedom, which, as both divine and created human freedom, belongs to the Lord of the New Creation. I would proclaim that we belong to all that matters, to the New World of our God. Especially for terribly perishing people in a very perishing universe are the new dimensions of the new nature of this world absolutely valuable. I would take us on a trip that would point us to the time and space where human life is given to bear witness to the One who truly is the One He is, the Lord God among us, under the heavens and upon the earth. I mean to ask my reader to take this journey with me, to go on this ride, on paths or waves where we may hear and see the Eternal Life God Himself is among us. I mean for us to hear and see what we cannot tell ourselves, what we cannot ourselves image. I mean for us to travel along lines that will allow to think what cannot by thinking be thought. I mean for us to discover a freedom that finds the impossible is actual. We need to discover that space and time in which we truly matter, God’s own space and time for us. We need to be able to say about ourselves that we are by the grace of God who we are. We need to tell He is His grace for us in our time.

My argument will attempt to frame a witness to the grace and truth that God is as taught us in the Holy Scriptures. I will claim that it is not impossible to know the One who is who He is, the Great I-AM He is in His Revelation, as truly the Lord and God of our world, a world that is created and made and sustained in its existence with his divine freedom, with his holy love, and with the mysterious being of his wisdom and grace and truth. I would argue that our freedom is meaningless unless we are free in his freedom to be who He is with us, that the significance of our freedom is rooted in the ground the freedom of his being, the mysterious and wonderful being whose way of with his very own freedom, love, and wisdom would give us the grace to think openly and freely of his living presence in this world. I will that he is free to make himself present and known within the created structures and creative freedoms we enjoy with our experience under the stars and upon the lands beside the seas. I will seek to persuade my reader that we are under his command here, even when we will not to believe him. I will argue that we need to know him for who he truly is as his grace for us, and not as another, not as somebody we imagine for our selves in this world. I will seek to understand him in his divine freedom and holy love and mysterious wisdom then as taught in the Bible with us. I would like to speak of the freedom he is as his grace even with the Holy Scriptures. I would like to speak freely as a free man, a man who has been set free by the truth of the grace he is. Even while all things created, great and small, are perishing in our experiences in the world, we need to hear this One in his divine freedom speaking with us and for us in our times. Without this speaking, we may tell only of the dusts of death in this world, the ‘nothingness’ that seems to surround this world with a silence we may taste in our lives.

We live in God’s Creation and not elsewhere. Here is the place where God’s Life has been revealed for us. This is the space where God’s Light shines in time and times, giving direction to our destinies with him. In precisely this world, we have been made to hear God’s Word, to go to the One who calls us, to worship him as the One He is for us. But who in their freedom hear this One, who among us believes His Voice? Who can believe what they have heard about him? I certainly could not. For 37 years, I lived not merely without him but at times consciously against him. I lived a self-destructive existence as if it were a righteous life, a barfly living as a volcano able to spew forth the burning leave of a primordial rage that exist very clearly and plainly in our times. (To all those who knew me, I ask, “Who but God can forgive us?”) In those days I carried around with me an image, drawn by a drinking buddy, of a man in a glass bottle. The bottle is sailing on the waves of a sea. The man’s head has been severed from his body and serves to cork the bottle upon the waves. His nerves extend down from the cut of his neck, falling like lightening towards his nude body at the bottom of the bottle. In his hands, he holds a wilting lily, as if the artist wished to send a message in this bottle of a man doomed on the waters. I carried the image around with me for years. I hung it in rented rooms from town to city. I thought that it spoke of my existence in the world. I was a homeless mariner on a sea of troubles no matter where I lived. I was never sure what the lily meant. But near dead from alcohol, cigarettes, carousing, and drugs, in this loveless glass upon the waters of a troubled world, more than 35 years ago now, in the Mission District of the City of San Francisco, the Lord delivered me from the bottle, healed me from my tormented life, and freed me to become a man at home in this world. Two things I knew immediately about this Lord and God. He was almighty and he was very tender. As the almighty, he was compassionately forgiving. As his tender mercy, he was passionate about doing the impossible and becoming our Savior. He sent His Word to me in the midst of those days. He sent His Light and healed me. He filled me with the joy of his salvation and a longing to know him as the One he truly is. I was no more a man alone in this world. I was not that creature in the glass bottle drawn by my artist friend. I was a man who needed to learn of him. I have now spent more than 35 years learning of him. As this tender and almighty Lord God, he is more than I ever could imagine.

With the Light of His Word comes the freedom to see and to follow Him. With this freedom, I am not the same man that I once was. I have come to cherish the gift of this freedom, more than I can say, and I have learned to live my life beyond the bitter rage, the hours of tortured emptiness and loneliness, to be free from their torment and pain, to be able to live with a joy that only He can speak into our lives. From elsewhere than the abyss comes this unspeakable condition in which life knows its origin in God. I can speak of it only as the tender mercies of the Almighty, as the truth that belongs only to the Word of His Being for us in this world. With this freedom, the Almighty touches our lives, makes the One He truly is known to us, and in the midst of our rage makes us to know that we belong to Him. We belong to his divine freedom to be with us. In this freedom, he has forgiven me. He fills us with his joy, and for me this meant that I knew that I was not alone in this world with all my aberrations in its nothingness.

I remember the night I came back to my rented room in the Mission District of San Francisco, when I bowed down there for the first time to thank Him for the mighty thing He had done in my life. I actually looked around me in that barren space to make sure that nobody was watching me. It was not thought manly for a man to be seen weeping for joy down on his knees to God, our Father. We are such strange creatures. Even free to be who we are in this world with God, we can fear what others might think of us. In any case, I knew I was no longer alone, and now even as I write this book, I still prefer that people should not see me down on my knees in tears before Him. I would prefer that my reader see me as a heroic witness to His Salvation. But these are but vain wishes. I am learning to stuff them back into the bottle from where they come, out upon the waters of the seas. What I really need to say cannot be said except upon my knees, not without tears of joy. I must seek to say what our Father has given me to say to my reader, as one of those poor creatures He has forgiven.

It is like being carried down the rapids of the waves in the waters of a great river, tossed and turned and thrown about in a whirling turbulence taking one rapidly towards toward the sea. It is like being sucked by riptides by an anomalous energy down to the depths of the dread darkness, being shaped by the pulls and pushes of the unpredictable powers of wind and storm. It’s like being drawn beyond the horizon of a black hole, down into the exotic forces that shred with journey what has mattered, lost in wormholes from infinite curves of space and time vanished onto a singularity as yet unimagined by any physical law we know. That is what life in the Life of the Spirit of the Word of the Father seemed at first to be for me. How do you learn to walk upon the waters of a chaos that appears to be homeless? How can you survive the tides and rip tides of the indifferent oceans out of which we must climb? How may we learn to hear what we cannot see? How may we seek to walk the wild side of boundaries whose definitions mostly escape our attention? How may we talk about the One who heals us? How may we understand the grace of His truth and the truth of His grace for us? Perhaps I should entitle this book The Great Peace of the Great River, where running though His creation is a singular wave above the waters that would take us, however thrilled, home to Him? It is not easy to say what is beyond the chaos and nothingness of this world’s primordial rage and emptiness that is for us. It is not by principles that govern how things are what they are that we may mount up, as if upon the wings of eagles, to go to the places he has prepared for us. This is not and cannot be a ‘how-to’ book. We do not wear upon our sleeves answers to the questions that ask ‘why!’

His paths belong to an arrow of time only His light can draw into the boundaries of space as this world. They seem to belong to waves of energies whose direction spirals up against a perishing world, my world. They lead, I believe, to His new creation, but they take unimagined space and time out of the dark abyss of the past into a becoming that is not merely new but truly new, truly new for you and me. I have felt again and again on these paths a certain progress in which I am becoming for the first time more the human being that I ought to be. I hope to become that man who was meant to be, even before the Creation, and this progress occurs, again and again, because he is the Great I-AM He is, the Lord and God of whom we read in the Bible. (In those nights I spent right after my healing, I used to sleep with the Bible. I used to keep it under my pillow so that, when I would wake in the middle of the night from some nightmare, I could take it up quickly and read the words!) From the depths of the dark abyss and the dreaded emptiness of a nothingness twisted into a threat in a perishing world, the Great I-AM can seem like a long way off from us. But because he had crossed the chasm of that evil dream for us, I could be comforted in the midst of my fear and trembling and tormented times. He is the Lord and God, and in His freedom our Savior. He is the One who is who He is as the King of the universe, the Prophet of the Cosmos, the Priest of its Peoples, the Sage of its Beginning and Ending. Learning to confess him as this Great I-AM He is requires an AMEN that we cannot speak out of ourselves, but one He has spoken for us. What we cannot say, He has said for us. He has spoken for us with the Truth of His Grace and the Grace of His Truth. So we say that we write freely of Him who is free to speak for us. We write with a freedom that belongs to His Freedom. We have to do with time and times whose unimagined ways create a path for our paths in this world, where we are made to learn of His Love for our loves and hates, the Light of His Word as a light for our paths. We do say that we know him who knows us better than we know ourselves. We do say that He is as this Great I-AM the AMEN of the Lord God for us. He is all that truly matters for us with His New Creation. We do say that we hope and pray our readers will catch a glimpse of Him in this way of His Freedom for us.

I will attempt to frame an argument that would witness to the Revelation of the Lord God as His Grace and Truth with us. I will attempt to argue that He is who He claims to be, the Great I-AM of the Bible. As such, He is the Lord of His Covenant with His People among the nations and the God of a world that is His Creation. The movements in this argument have developed over decades of teaching in seminaries and universities. They form my best efforts to understand the One who healed and saved me from the pits of San Francisco. They form what I would call a Biblical Theology. I hope to show my readers that an integrated approach towards reading the Bible and apprehending the Light and Life of the Word of God become flesh in this world takes place at a cognitive interface between His revelations and our reason. I hope to help those who hear to seek that wholeness of being which belongs to the gift of His truth and grace for us. I hope to help people pray for their unbelief. I hope to help people in our weaknesses to hear a power that is not higher than we are, but in fact more near to us than we are to ourselves. I seek to lay hold of within the structures I find in the Biblical World a framework that belongs to the Bible’s witness to His Being who He is in His Revelation to us, a Self-Revelation that occurs in real space and time in a real world we may understand as His Creation. To make this argument has taken me years of healing along a very awesome adventure. I am not satisfied with my articulation of it, but it is the best that I can do now. It is done in any case to honor His gift and I offer it not in my own name but in His. I hope my reader will forgive me, hear its secret, and enjoy the mystery and freedom of this One for us. It is His righteousness with which we all have to do, believe or enjoy it or not.

Yet I find telling strangers that I am a theologian makes me even stranger to them. The strangest people seem to think that I am strange as soon as they know that I am a ‘religious’ man. They seem to think that being a theologian or religious man makes one something that they are not. Mention the Gospel of God and the category of ‘human being’ goes out the window, and perhaps into a black hole nearby somewhere. Even though I would attempt to say as a human being words that tell of our Father, I am a stranger more strange than the strangers I meet. Fathom that! For more than thirty-five years now I have stood astonished before stranger after stranger, watching their faces turn me into something less than a human being whenever I would introduce them to our Lord and God. People look at you as if you were worse than a stranger among them, but an alien, from Mars perhaps, come to invade the world they cherish or not. The kindness of strangers is important in our lives!

It is the stuff upon which the disenchanted depend! Yet are we not in some sense all strangers? We are all mariners on a sea of troubles, sailors who sail a tremendously fearsome world together. We must and we do depend upon the kindness of the strangers we are for one another. We are creatures then falling strangely into the vast void of a dark abyss where screams are heard echoing in the silence of our tormented generations onto the horizons of our existences in this world. No one really wants t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: An Explanation
• Chapter 2: The Great I-AM
• Chapter 3: The ‘Little Credo’ of the Great I-AM
• Chapter 4: The Beginning of the Generations
• Chapter 5: These Are the Words—A People for the Land
• Chapter 6: The Great I-AM of the Kingdom of God
• Chapter 7: The King, His Kingdom,and the Light of the World
• Chapter 8: The Church and the World
• Chapter 9: The Person of God in the World
• Chapter 10: In Our Time
• Addendum