God: too big or too small?

It is really tough to cover the expanse of the topic of "God" in one chapter. Surely it is a daunting task in how and what to emphasize if we are to understand the enormity of the One we call God.

Yes, the creeds are an excellent foundation for us all. Yet we often want more. Early in my career I used the classic book by J.B. Phillips entitled Your God is Too Small to teach a class on God. I pointed out, along with the book, a few things about how we approach the topic of God.

It seems that in our current generation there is a prominent focus on God's bigness. Worship that seems to move many Christians tends to focus on God's transcendence and "awesomeness." 

This focus on God's bigness is often used in worship to create an acute sense of our smallness in relation. Ecstatic (emotional, transcendent) worship is often triggered by a felt sense of God's power, size, and greatness. My sense is that a lot of contemporary worship is explicitly aimed at trying to create this experience. And that makes sense. Worship means "to bow down." Thus, to worship God means to "bow down" before God's power and size.

And yet I wonder about all this. Particularly from a practical perspective. I struggle with how the felt sense of smallness experienced in this type of worship is supposed to transition into Christian witness. I do see how an acute sense of our smallness works as a trigger for ecstatic worship, but I find it hard to see how that sense of smallness helps Christians learn to eat with tax collectors and sinners.

How does an experience of God's awesomeness help you learn that God is love? It can be an effective critique of human pride, to experience God's greatness. But how does this sort of ecstatic worship transition into missional living? Perhaps, at times, our God can be too big, conveniently big and far away.

Maybe too much focus on God's greatness leaves us ill-equipped to see God's smallness in the world. Perhaps we'd be better able to transition from worship to mission if we started focusing on God's smallness rather than on God's bigness. Isn't it one of the purposes of worship and Lent to help us see aright? To see God more clearly? 

Can we see the smallness of God in this famous section of Night, Elie Wiesel's memoir of the Holocaust:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

The three victims mounted together onto the stairs.

The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!" cried the two adults.

But the child was silent. "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked...

"Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He? He is--He is hanging here on this gallows..."

This is a powerful story with a particular punch for Christians, a people who worship a God who hangs dead on the gallows. When we read stories like Wiesel's are we able to see God in the figure of that little boy?

In Lent I wonder: how can we learn to see God's greatness in small ways? To see and find God in each other, in our world, even in our every day busyness?