Text: Exodus 3:13-15
About every 500 years or so, Christianity or the Church, seems to undergo what might be termed a gigantic rummage sale, tossing away worn out ideas, organizational patterns, and understandings about the nature of the Christian life. Sometimes the “sale” takes place over a 100 year span of time. We are in the middle of such a 100 year rummage sale now.
The first one transpired roughly at the time of the Constantinian adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Beliefs were codified; the Bible was translated from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate version; institutions of control and governance were established.
Roughly 500 years later, the monastic movement erupted across Europe to bring freshness to what it meant to live the teachings of Jesus. At the same time, of course, the great schism between the Orthodox churches in the East and the Catholic church centered in Rome occurred.
Add another 500 years and you come to the Copernican revolution, Galileo, Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, followed closely by the powerful ideas of the Enlightenment philosophes.
Add another 500 years and you arrive at the 20th century as science makes its revolutionary impact, moving us from horse and buggy to human beings standing on the surface of the moon, from a time when communication over great geographical distances could take months, to our current instantaneous transmission of words, ideas, thoughts streaming continuously into our receptors—be they ears, eyes, or machines.
So here we are in the 21st century. Theology is the study of, or thinking about “theos”, that is God. Although the seeds were planted in the 17th and 18th century, it has been primarily since the publication of a little book called Honest to God about 50 years ago in England by an Anglican bishop, John Robinson, and the subsequent, more substantive theological explorations of the God Is Dead movement in the 1970s, alongside the emergence of liberation from the third world, and feminist theologies, that everyday people have joined Robinson in discovering and thinking for themselves that the old concepts about God will no longer work. Such people are often no longer to be found in churches at all.
Let me hasten to say that if the ideas on the sheet included in your program today that list the primary convictions of what might be called fundamentalist Christianity work for you, then my intention is not to destroy your system of understanding what Christianity is about, but rather to engage with you through questions and alternative ideas to enrich your thinking.
Last Sunday, we talked about rescuing the Bible so that it was not a dead book of prescientific statements about a world view that no longer makes sense, but a living book requiring on-going efforts, using all the gifts and knowledge at our disposal, to discover afresh what is of God, and what is not.
Today, the topic is God-talk, or how do we talk about God, who or what God is, and how this God might be experienced, and with what impact on our lives.
God-talk is problematic for many people today. One critique, leveled a month or so ago in an essay on the Sunday editorial page, argued that God is basically a projection of the human psyche. Freud called belief in God an infantile illusion that our needs be met by an omnipotent parent. For others, traditional ideas of God are called into question by their own experience as victims of prejudice, oppression, and outright evil.
About 5 years ago, a former Transy classmate began to correspond with me, after he saw an article in his Kentucky home-town newspaper about something I had done or said when I was with the Council of Churches. We had not been more than acquaintances in college. He had left Transy, gone into the Peace Corps serving for 2 years in Iran, and then returned to get a PhD in English literature which he has taught ever since at a small college in the south. Over the years of the correspondence, I heard often about his deep hostility to Christianity and religion in general, learned that he is gay (something I was very naïve about in college), and that he has been HIV positive for over 25 years. He is one of religion’s “cultured despisers”—a phrase made famous by Friedrich Schliermacher in about 1893, but something in him keeps the conversation going with me, in unstated hope, I think, that perhaps I might make some sense of religion for him, despite the arbitrary way in which he has felt judged and condemned all his life by religion. He is not unlike millions who have profound questions about where God was or is in events of overwhelming evil, such as the holocaust; as slavery; as genocide; or more private sufferings such as my classmate, and now my friend, has known. He finds statements from people like Pat Robertson that God is judging Disney World for its policies when hurricanes are unleashed upon it, as vile and despicable.
Yet, I know that my classmate has had experiences of numinosity—a word that means “spirit-filled”, or of the sacred—altho’ at this point, I don’t think he would call it that. Like all of us, he has had glimmers of the holiness, the sacred, that can suddenly burst upon our consciousness: nature’s majesty in the Grand Canyon or the mighty Alps; the tender sweetness of a child’s smile or tear; the absorbing overwhelming surrender that can come in listening to a piece of music—whether it be Janis Joplin, the Beatles, or Mahler’s 5th Symphony; the shock of the inexplicable beauty suddenly encountered in turning a corner at the Louvre to face Monet’s water lilies; or, mayhaps— when we are overwhelmed with awe while in the embrace of someone whom we love and who loves us; or in some quiet moment in a chapel; or even in the busy-ness of the sharing of the simple elements of a bit of bread wafer and a sip of the fruit of the vine. Some people have even had profound moments that they call “conversion” experiences, of what they say feels like “being borne anew”, and becoming a totally new and different person. I had such an experience when I was about 16, fairly typical for the emergence from an adolescent identity crisis. Yet, these are all experiences of “transcendence”—of something that transcends ordinary reality, that evokes awe, wonder, joy.
How we think and talk about God matters. It matters because God will be either increasingly incredible and unbelievable to us, or plausible, real, something to which we “give our hearts”—as I have said the word “credo”, I believe, really means. It matters because Christianity will not long survive, unless we find alternative, and believable ways of talking about who God is and what God means for our lives. It matters, because if and when you run into the deep waters of chaos, and you will, — if your idea about God no longer fits, you’ll have a tough time getting through those deep waters.
The older way of thinking about God, and perhaps the still the majority view, from which I would like to rescue God for those who find this view unbelievable as do I, is that God is a supernatural being, a heavenly person “out there”, “up in heaven”, separate from the world, who created the world, and who, from time to time intervenes in human history—at least according to the Bible; who, like Santa Claus, knows if we have been naughty or nice, and who—as the absolute arbiter and judge, who requires that due punishment be delivered for breaking the law, and decides where we will spend eternity after we die. This way of thinking is a natural inference from many verses of the Bible, and from the language of worship and devotion—such as the language of our hymns. The images that go with this concept are primarily all masculine, and include such words as King, Lord, Master, Judge, God most High, Father—as in the somewhat distant patriarchal father who rules a clan.
Most of these images were planted in our minds in our childhoods, either from Sunday School, from the words of parents, or from the culture at large. Christianity, for many, is a religion of meeting requirements for the sake of eternal rewards later. God is a supernatural male person, who is out there, that is not here, and belief in him (and I use the pronoun intentionally), and being a Christian, are necessary to be saved, not so much for now, but for eternal life. For many people, faith means you have to suspend your normal faculties of reason, your knowledge of science, and “leap” to believe the improbable: that if you pray hard enough, God will intervene and answer your prayers; that if you repent of all your failures, God will take care of you. That because you deserve punishment, someone had to pay the price, so God—a loving Judge—sends Jesus and condemns him to suffer and die an outrageous death to pay the price for our sin, which is the breaking of the law.
The problem comes, as I have noted, when prayers do not seem to be answered, and terrible evils and tragedies befall you. Where is God? And if God isn’t there, perhaps we have misunderstood God in the first place. Like my college classmate, I too would call myself an atheist if God is only to be understood as this great, absent, supernatural being, arbitrarily intervening in some situations, but ignoring willfully hateful evil.
Thankfully, there are other ways of understanding God, and the Christian story.
Marcus Borg, in his very readable book, The God We Never Knew, suggests that we can think of God not so much as a “heavenly eternal person, creator and judge of the universe” as that “transcendent sense of the sacred”, or the innate intuition that at the heart of all being there is something sacred and holy. God in this way of thinking is both transcendent—other than normal reality—but also present within everything.
Borg points to the concept in both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian testament that speak of the “glory of God.” The Hebrew word for glory is “shekinah”, which means the “in-dwelling of God”. Not God out there, but God in here. In Exodus 3, the verses that I read earlier, “…Moses asks God: ‘What is your name?’ In Hebrew, God’s response is ehyey asher ehyeh, a difficult phrase that is most commonly translated into English as ‘I am who I am.’ But,” Borg writes, “Martin Buber, the best known Jewish religious scholar of [the past] century, argues persuasively that the Hebrew verb ehyeh means ‘being there, being present’ and that the phrase as a whole should be translated ‘I will be present as I will be present.’ “ Marcus Borg then says: “God’s name suggests that God is the presence ‘who is present in every now and every here.’” [Borg. The God We Never Knew, 1997. p. 35]
We find this point of view also in the birth narrative of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, where Joseph is told to name the child “Immanuel”, meaning God with us.
Whereas the older image of God as King, judge, law-giver, implies that Christian life is about behaving according to a legal code, from which we always fall away into sinning, and thus deserve punishment to be “saved”, so a price has to be paid somehow, so Jesus is sent to pay the price. We must repent, give our lives to Jesus, behave righteously and believe correctly, and then we will receive eternal life.
But thinking about God as the sacred, or the holy permeating the very fibers, even the genetic code of being, means that Christian life is not about judgment, sin, failure, punishment and eternal reward, but rather is about relationship, our periodic estrangement from that deep sacred image of God within us all and one another—even the stranger, redemption is not about somebody paying a price but about reconciliation, reunion, and relationship with others and the world in new ways that lead us to act with compassion and justice. Jesus taught: The kingdom of heaven is near (which means, within our grasp). He says: The Kingdom of God is within you.”
This is a God that I can worship—find worthy (which is the root meaning of worship) of my deepest love, my commitments, my reason. I have experiences of this God. The transcendent God is always mysterious and ineffable. The immanent God—the God of here and now whom I meet in accidental and intentional ways and places—is plausible and credible, (a word whose root is credo). Maybe it is most beautifully captured in these few lines from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush alive with God.
Only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
So may you find the God who calls to your heart and mind. Amen
