Roger Ray, pastor
January 8, 2012 Epiphany 1
Genesis 1:1-5
When the German Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, was getting into very hot water with the Vatican, his friend and my Old Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. Doug Knight, invited him to come to Nashville for a series of lectures where he was greeted by both Vanderbilt's student body and the American press as a hero.
It was a fabulous opportunity for me, as a young student, to sit in a room and listen to talks that were, frankly, not only obscured by a thick German accent but were a bit past my academic reach as a new seminary student.
But what I remember, even across the span of more than 30 years now, is the passionate way in which Kung was imploring us to break out of our old ways of thinking about God and to emerge into a new and more vital kind of faith. He talked about the genesis of religion being a belief in what he called "a God of the gaps." That is, whatever we didn't understand, we said it was God... or gods.
In the primitive world, everything was thought to be spiritual... the weather, the growing season, a successful hunt or a drought. Before modern medicines, demonic or divine attribution was given to every illness and every turn of fate. Even the realizations of such things as the fact that the world is not flat and that the earth is not the center of the universe, flew in the face of early religious assumptions.
But in the scientific age, in the era of growing understandings of botany, medicine, astronomy, there was always still the edge of knowledge and it has been our habit to walk up to that edge of what we could not explain and call that edge of darkness, the mystery of God. There was a time when we did not know how the moon stayed up their circling the earth or why the earth never just fell into the sun and we said that God held the stars and planets in their orbits.
When your faith is in a "god of the gaps" then every time there is a scientific explanation for why things are the way they are, then we need God a little bit less and the whole business of faith looks a little more primitive, a little more embarrassing. When famous atheists make a summary dismissal of religion, inevitably, what they are dismissing is the religion that is based on this idea of "the god of the gaps" in our knowledge and, since we see ourselves as being terribly clever and enlightened, then we have no need for that god any longer.... We just need to do more research so that we can answer any unresolved questions for ourselves.
Rarely a day goes by that I don't get a message from one of our YouTube or iTunes listeners who tell me that they have considered themselves to be an atheist but they have found some appreciation for the spirituality of our emerging church community. And I generally tell them, "The god you don't believe in is the god we don't believe in either."
The god-of-the-gaps, that creation of superstition and magic, that combination of pre-science simplicity, is not what draws us here.
We're not trying to get in touch with the god who helps us to find a parking place at the mall or make it rain on our vegetable garden. And yet, people are terribly afraid to give up on the institutional religious packaging that first introduced us to the god-of-the-gaps.
And I want to be quick to say that I am in no way dismissing our traditional faith heritage as being either worthless or bad. It is impossible to speak accurately about that which is beyond human comprehension and certainly far beyond human language and so we try to "eff" the ineffable.
When you were in middle school, your science teacher began to teach you about the building blocks of the universe. You were shown a model of an atom. There are 118 known elements, the most simple being the hydrogen atom with one proton and one electron. The periodic table takes you through various levels of complexity of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons with electrons orbiting the atom's core in varying levels of electron shells.
You work with those models, those drawings, for so long that you can come to assume that an atom actually looks like little different colored balls with rapidly spinning bright electrons circling around them.... Which is, of course, totally absurd. No one can see an atom and if you could see it you would not recognize what you were seeing from the model. The model just helps you to think about atoms, elements, and the construction of the universe. As such, the models are immensely helpful. The models are not the absolute truth but they help us to start understanding certain truths.
The problem would be if scientists started to behave like fundamentalists who insist that everyone believe in the literal interpretation of the model of the atom and anyone who deviated from that belief was not a scientist but a dangerous heretic. You see where I'm going with this.
Your middle school science teacher was not a liar or an idiot. You were being introduced to concepts that were impossible to grasp and so you were being brought into the conversation through models and images to help you to understand.... It's just that your introduction should not be considered to be the sum total of what can be known.
All of the world's religions have tried, through the centuries, to find a way to put into words what we have experienced of God. Sometimes their efforts are brilliant and helpful and, honestly, sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes they create a model that is helpful to them to solve a problem in their understanding at that time, within that culture but the model doesn't translate well through the centuries and across the continents.
For cultures in which animal sacrifice to appease angry gods and demons was a fresh memory, the notion that Jesus had to die in substitution for our sins made a certain amount of sense. But shortly after that notion of atonement was articulated, animal sacrifice began to make less and less sense and then the only way they could force someone to believe in the atonement was to tell them that they were going to burn in hell forever if they didn't believe it.
First God demands the blood of his own son for something he didn't do and he'll do even worse to you if you don't act like you appreciate that bloody gesture.... I think God needed a better publicist.
What people had experienced was that the words, the teachings, the example of Jesus had brought them closer to God. Then they tried to answer the difficult question, "Why did he have to die?" and from that point on they started to make less and less sense. The atonement led to the development of the model of the Trinity which, in philosophical terms, solved a problem among third and fourth century thinkers but doesn't really stand up to analysis..... so, we go back to the first technique..... you will burn in hell if you don't act like you believe this.
The atom is too complex to be entirely explained in a middle school drawing. God is too big for any creed, dogma or religion to fully or accurately explain. That is why there are so many isms.... Monotheism, polytheism, humanism, pantheism, panentheism.... But it comes down to asking, "Which song is right?" You can love music. Your life can be changed by music. You can even have a favorite song.... But you would have to be crazy to say that your favorite song is the only song that anyone should ever sing.... And yet, in the world of religion, we are often just that crazy.
In an interview about one of her biographies, Karen Armstrong tells the story of when she was a young nun being educated in theology. She was asked to write a paper on the incarnation.
The mother superior of the convent congratulated her on a well written paper and assured her that she would do well in the order. But Armstrong couldn't leave it alone, she replied: But, honestly, none of it is true is it, Mother Superior? And the older nun leaned down and whispered, "No, of course it isn't, but don't tell the others."
The problem, of course, is in trying to nail down a definition of God in the first place. I am deeply indebted to the work of Marcus Borg who has given a lot of us permission to be enthusiastic people of faith without having to feel tied to dogma.
In one of his most beautiful lectures, delivered at the Chautauqua Institute a few years ago, he was talking about the Apostolic Creed. The first line of the creed in Latin says: Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem which we translate as saying "I believe in God, the Father, almighty." But obviously, we get the word "creed" from the first word in the Latin version of the creed "credo." Borg says that we moderns, who tend to see "I believe" in a very fact literal way, should try to hear it in the more fluid and poetic sense of the ancients. He asks us to translate it, not as "I believe" but as "I belove." That is, "I love the tradition that is expressed in Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
I love the Christian tradition of incarnation, atonement, resurrection, sacraments and scripture because that is the heritage through which I was introduce to God. I don't have to pour concrete about those early models and doctrines and say that I have to understand my relationship with God in just that way throughout all time.... Frankly, that would be silly.... But it would be just as silly to let ourselves despise our own roots.
You do not have to despise your middle school science teacher to begin to study sub atomic particles because you would never grasp quarks, bosons and mesons without first drawing models of protons, neutrons and electrons.
What is inescapable is that we have an experience of the divine "other" that even though we cannot fully or accurately describe the divine, we know that we would be nuts to not try. The universe is not God.... Though we experience God in every part of the universe. By faith, we reason that God is something more than the sum total of all of the universe's parts because if we experience God as having a kind of moral force.... That is that we experience the good in peace over war, in love over hate, in kindness over violence, in generosity over greed.
And we know, if only because we experience it, that we can live in a way that draws us into closer communion with God or we can live in a way that alienates us from God. And, after many centuries and a number of very embarrassing religious wars, inquisitions and excommunications, that we need to stop trying to regulate how anyone tries to express what and who God is or isn't.
We can love the tradition that brought us here but we can also let go of all claims of being in possession of the absolute truth. If love is our religion, then no one has to ever go to hell again. No one ever has to be afraid of God or demons. No one can tell you what you have to believe.
But we know that together, we can change the world if we let our faith grow in love, kindness, mercy, forgiveness and compassion. So love is my religion and I'll try to get you some more details when we have more time.
