My God is the God of Emptiness

You emptied your very Godself, and made room for creation and humanity. Like a mother making space in her womb, you found a space for us.

You then told Noah to build an empty ark, and filled an empty sky with rain, and when the world was empty you filled that emptiness with your promise; a rainbow.

You put Samuel in Hannah’s empty womb and Eli’s empty Temple.

You worked with Moses’ empty mouth–giving him a staff and Aaron to assist him upon the way, then you emptied the Red Sea for the Hebrews to cross, and finally put a song on Miriam’s lips to fill the moment.

You emptied Rahab’s house so she could hide the spies, and knocked down the walls of Jericho so that they no longer filled the space.

You told Elijah to build an empty pit, and to splash the pit with water, and then you filled that pit with light.

You sent Elisha to an empty widow, with a practically empty lamp and pantry–and somehow filled that space with hope.

Then you saw that humanity still felt empty, so you emptied yourself into a human baby, and named him Jesus.

Then you entered an humble–emptied–servant Mary, and you promised to empty the thrones, to empty out power, and to empty out pride, and to empty out the rich.

Jesus preached to the emptiness–starting in the desert, then to empty fields, houses and lakes.

Eventually he prayed in the empty garden of Gethsemane.

And then this, my God of emptiness, emptied himself on the cross.

And to prove the power of emptiness, God came to an empty tomb, to his empty disciples.

First to the women in the empty garden, who’s mouths hung empty of words in astonishment and fright,

(Then to two more on the empty road to Emmaus.

And then he showed them who he was by the breaking of bread and emptying the cup.)

I am not afraid of emptiness, for my God is the God of emptiness.

And as he empties out the churches and the organizations and the streets. As God empties out time itself, I trust that God is big enough to work with it.

My God is the God of emptiness.

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Short meditation from years ago https://katyandtheword.wordpress.com/tag/empty-churches/

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times. View all posts by katyandtheword

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