The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28), November 16, 2025

The Power of Our Images of God

St. Clare of Assisi once observed that “we become what we love, and who we love shapes what we become.” Bernard of Clairvaux put it another way: “What we love we shall grow to resemble.” Richard Rohr echoes this idea when he says, “Our image of God creates us.”

Our theology influences who we are and how we, in turn, are shaping the world we live in. Our images of God directly inform our actions in the world.

Our text from Isaiah 65 speaks to a post-exilic Judah traumatized by exile and disillusioned by the world they’ve returned to. Isaiah’s promise of “new heavens and a new earth” reconfigures everything that Judah had known about its life and its identity—and God’s nature and character. Isaiah’s oracle invites his audience to focus not on the world as it is, but as it should be. The God who speaks through the oracle is a God of deep tenderness, empathy, and compassion who invites us to imagine what a land ruled by tenderness and empathy would look like for us: a land without violence and vengeance where the wolf and lamb, the lion and ox, will live peacefully together.  

Whitehead’s Critique of Imperial Christianity

Alfred North Whitehead critiqued Christendom’s of fashioning God in the image of imperial rulers and giving unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. Centuries of embracing a Cosmic Caesar—an all-powerful, coercive, immutable, and ruthless moralist—has silenced the tender Galilean vision at Christianity’s core—a God who, in Whitehead’s words, “slowly and in quietness operates by love,” and whose purposes unfold in “the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world” (Process and Reality).

Worshipping an imperial God has created imperial people who conflate Christian devotion with unquestioned allegiance to earthly kingdoms rooted in violence and vengeance. Many Christians today have become what they have loved and worshipped: acolytes of a Cosmic Caesar intent on conquering a world now teetering on the edge of ecological disaster and social collapse.

Isaiah’s oracle is an invitation to reclaim the image of a God whose nature and character are defined not by unilateral power, control, or sovereignty, but by responsive love, persuasion, mutuality, and collaboration in the immediate present of a kingdom not of this world—a reign marked by the flourishing of all creation. Many process thinkers refer to such flourishing as “wholeness” or “wellbeing.” Marjorie Suchocki’s notion of “inclusive wellbeing,” which I have always found helpful, points to the experiences of love, peace, justice, abundance, and mutually supportive relations among all created entities.

The Radical Vision of Shalom

But our passage from Isaiah 65 proposes a concept even more radical than “inclusive wellbeing”—namely, shalom. While wellbeing gestures toward peace, love, and justice, it doesn’t quite capture the radical, counter-intuitive, and deeply vulnerable quality of shalom advocated by many of the Hebrew prophets and described here with poetic detail in Isaiah 65, which echoes what is commonly referred to as “The Peaceable Kingdom” narrative found in Isaiah 11.

The prophet here offers a compelling vision not simply of peace and co-existence among creaturely relations, but of “new heavens and a new earth” where “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Is. 65:17). In this new reality, there is no weeping or distress (v. 19); both the young and the aged live full lives (v. 20); joy and abundance abound (vss. 20-22); and fearless mutuality and unconditional trust are so evident among even seeming natural enemies that “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox (v. 25).

Understanding True Shalom

The Hebrew concept of shalom alludes to peace. But peace is an incomplete and inadequate translation. While we often associate peace as the absence of conflict, the ancient Hebrew vision of shalom in the prophetic tradition is far more radical than this. Shalom is an experience of completeness, contentment, and novelty that can only be achieved as the result of the joining together of seemingly irreconcilable or opposite things, even ostensibly opposing things—like wolves and lambs, donkeys and elephants, liberals and conservatives, Israelis and Palestinians, Oath Keepers and pacifists, and even the assumed binaries of body and soul, mind and spirit, the false self and the true self, grief and joy, doubt and faith.

True shalom is wholeness—contentment born not from safety, but from reconciled difference—and the kingdom that is not of this world, or as Isaiah calls it, “new heavens and a new earth,” is the eschatological fulfillment of shalom. It necessarily includes natural enemies, presumed opposites, even former predators and prey and those with seemingly irreconcilable differences, transformed by love in mutually life-giving relations.

A Preaching Invitation: Toward Radical Shalom

Perhaps this passage offers the preacher an opportunity to issue, from a process perspective, a persuasive invitation toward radical shalom. Could there be a more urgent and compelling invitation for such a time as this? Such an invitation might acknowledge that none of us are well until all of us are well, and that there is no wellbeing or wholeness—personally, societally, ecologically, globally—apart from the whole.

It affirms Whitehead’s assertion that “the kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil…” but “the overcoming of evil by good” (Religion in the Making). It makes possible the transmutation of evil into good which, as Whitehead noted, “enters into the actual world by reason of the inclusion of the nature of God, which includes the ideal vision of each actual evil so met with a novel consequent as to issue in the restoration of goodness” (RIM).

In this way, not only do we see how our image of God creates us, but how it holds the very possibilities for creating and restoring the kind of congregations and communities we long to find in a world torn apart by division, polarization, and violence.

---

Mark Feldmeir is Sr. Pastor at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, CO, and the author of five books, including A House Divided: Engaging the Issues through the Politics of Compassion (Chalice Press, 2020) and his latest, Life After God: Finding Faith When You Can’t Believe Anymore (Westminster John Knox, 2023). Learn more about Mark at www.markfeldmeir.com.