Epiphany 4 January 31, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘God’?”
1
Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues
of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging
cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove
mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away
all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do
not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient;
love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant5or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;6it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends.
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will
cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know
only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the
complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a
child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child;
when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For
now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I
know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully
known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and
the greatest of these is love.
This summer we’re
bringing two guest speakers from England for our annual conference, The Rev.
John Churcher, and The Rev. Mo Wills. Together, we are going to try to take an
in-depth look at the historical evolution of what people have meant when we say
“God.” We are using the nearly encyclopedic work of Karen Armstrong’s History of God in our preparations but
the final point is not to just look at what others have meant in the past but
to try to find a meaningful and clear way to articulate what we, in the
progressive movement, mean when we say “God.”
Those of you watching us
on-line, let me tell you that the registration fee for our event here on August
5-7 is nominal. The three of us will give an abbreviated presentation on Monday
evening, August 8, at the Immanuel United Church of Christ in Ferguson, MO, and
then we travel to Columbia, SC where we will present the entire weekend
conference again at the Unitarian Universalist Church on August 12-14.
I wrote a chapter in my
2014 book, Progressive Faith and Practice,
on this topic but I have been repeatedly made aware that my brief chapter
doesn’t really do more than open a theological door without providing any
satisfactory conclusions.
Shortly after we
announced that this conference was going to happen, our good friend, Bishop
John Shelby Spong, started publishing a series of essays in which he is
publically grappling with exactly the same topic. I called and asked him if this was material
he was planning to use in the conference we are doing together in Sarasota, FL
in a couple of weeks and he said, “no,” that this is material he is developing
to use for his 2017 lecture tour.
I can’t believe that an 85-year-old
“retired” bishop is already writing material for his 2017 lecture tour but all
of us who are much younger and much less productive than Bishop Spong is should
take a moment to just ponder that indicting fact. So, I’m trying to work out my
August material here in January and that’s about as far ahead as I ever even
tried to prepare!
I want to try something
different today and begin with my conclusion. That way we all know where we are
headed from the beginning. I will even
give it to you in a Bible verse, I John 4:8 “…God is love.” And for good
measure, because scripture is not enough for a lot of us, let me quote the
Great Dane himself, Soren Kierkegaard: "This
is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been
mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love."
We
have often used the Ziggy Marley song in our services here that announces,
“Love is My Religion,” and the Beatles’ hit, “All You Need is Love.” So, that’s
my premise, my conclusion, my ultimate point, and you might think, “Why take a
weekend to say that?” but the fact that poets, musicians, philosophers, and saints
have been saying this for thousands of years makes it inescapable that
understanding what this means is evidently darn near impossible.
Of
course, much of the problem resides in the fact that the word “love” is so
over-worked. We say that we love Adel’s new cd, I love sushi, I love scuba
diving, and often even when we say to another person, “I love you,” we say it
with such a large “I” and such a small “you” that it cannot always be seen as
anything remotely holy.
In
saying that “God is love,” we are, or at least most of us are, starting to
remove our understanding of God from the more primitive view of God as a
person, or three persons, or lots of persons.
Most of traditional religion, has at least been expressed in terms of
supernatural theism.
When
I was a young grad student, there was a huge battle raging in seminaries about
referring to God as “Father” or any male pronoun. Masculine references had been
the rule but when you think about what makes a person either male or female, it
comes down to body parts and that conversation is a real show stopper. No one
that I have ever known wanted to defend the idea of God having a body or being
in any particular place in the way that the ancients believed that their gods
looked like humans and lived on mountain tops or in kingdoms in the clouds
above the earth.
But
even when you let go of believing in an imaginary friend who lives in the
clouds, it is still difficult to give up on a notion of god as a person. A person who might favor the Broncos over the
Panthers, or the armies of the USA over the armies of Isis. You would not get
trapped in a theological argument over whether God prefers blue over green, or
Chinese food over Mexican food, but it is harder to give up on the idea that
God is somehow still a causative agent in the world.
Much
has been made over the implied theology that we see in scifi moves, especially
in Star Wars where people talk about the force. In the very first movie, Obi
Wan Kenobi explains to Luke, “the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an
energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us.
It binds the galaxy together.” There is
a dualism in the dark and light sides of the Force in Star Wars… a good and an
evil side….Nerds then burn the midnight oil arguing whether George Lukas was
influenced by Zoroastrianism, Taoism, or Buddhism.
It
is an interesting thought but, of course, Lucas doesn’t remain consistent with
whatever religious influences he may have tried to clone into his movies. The
Force quickly becomes little more than the energy drink between good and evil
guys fighting with light sabers and whatever meaningful and helpful
non-theistic conception of God there might have been becomes silly.
But
I don’t fault Lucas for that. This is not an easy concept to talk about
meaningfully. The words “force” or
“energy” may have roles to play in how we talk about God as love and not as a
person who will place bets on the Super Bowl.
In
my chapter in Progressive Faith and
Practice in which I talk about this, I employ a phrase that I must come
back to now. Anytime you try to get to specific in talking about who or what
God is, you language starts to become like trying to nail smoke to the wall. As
much as it pains those of us who want to express everything in concrete
language, the biggest part of this issue is shrouded in mystery.
Albert
Einstein is often referred to as having been an atheist but he would not have
described himself in that way. It is just that what he did believe was so
nuanced, so obscure, that it sounded to traditional Christians like
atheism. He said:
We are in the position of a little child entering a
huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows
someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not
understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a
mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being
toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranges and obeying certain laws,
but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the
mysterious force that moves the constellations.
Einstein concludes:
There
remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this
force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.
This the point where
Buddhist monks start to sound like astrophysicists and scientists start to
sound like religious mystics. Both of them insist that at the core of all
existence is the inescapable truth that we are all connected. We are all connected to one another
biologically, to the earth itself chemically, and to the rest of the universe
atomically.
That mystery, that
connection, that force, or energy, we sometimes sense as awe, the great Thou
that seems to meet us in our deepest core… all of the world’s religions have
tried to describe this, to codify it, to teach it through holy writ, rituals,
hymns, art, and architecture and never quite get it right.
Almost in exhaustion,
prophets, saints, sages, scientists, and philosophers finally boil it down to
just this. . . love. It is my loving others that we encounter the Divine, that
is our true worship, our real sacrament, the only scripture that we ever
need.
The Dalai Lama said
“Our only purpose in life is to love one
another.... and if you cannot do that, try not to hurt anyone.” Which is,
in a way, to acknowledge that there is a dark side of the force… there is an
opposite to loving… and the Zoroastrians may not have been entirely wrong is
saying that the two sides of the force are of approximately equal strength.
There is the love that
brings us together, that creates not only marriage, but friendship, and
community, and civilization. And there is the darkness of narcissism, greed,
self-righteousness that divides us, that pulls us apart, that defeats
civilization, destroys the peace, alienates lovers and makes community
impossible.
Far too often, the
religious impulses that should help us to find a spiritual path into a loving
connection with others has become the dark and dividing force that makes real
spirituality nearly impossible. Bishop Spong has called for a new reformation,
one that allows us to strip away the magic and superstition to reveal a kind of
spirituality that is rooted in reality and not in myth and imagination. And I
think that we are seeing it happen in important ways.
In our never ending
Presidential campaign, we see nearly every candidate trying to polish their
religious bona-fides… Donald Trump
was seen in a Presbyterian Church and carries a family bible to events in Iowa
and still doesn’t know how to say the names of the books of the New Testament
and clearly is a stranger to the inside of a church. Attack ads have called out
other candidates for pretending to be right wing evangelicals even though they
neither attend nor support the churches they claim.
But for the first time in
modern memory, we have a political candidate this year who claims no
affiliation with organized religion. Now, please forgive me, I don’t want this
to sound like a stump speech because I do personally like Bernie Sanders a lot
but perfectly sane, intelligent, and well-meaning people support other
candidates….or maybe, an other candidate.
I had been saying that if
Bernie were elected that he would be America’s first Jewish president but when
he has recently been pressed on this issue, even though he grew up Jewish, he
was bar mitzvahed and went to Hebrew school, and even lived for a brief time in
a Kibbutz in Israel, but now he says that he is not actively involved in any
organized religion.
He said, “I think
everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he continued... “To me, it means
that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all
tied together.”…which is precisely what we have been trying to say.
The unique thing, for me,
is that a popular presidential candidate can publically say that he doesn’t
practice any organized religion and the country doesn’t come to a sudden halt
in shock. What he is saying is not offensive to us, it is not foreign to our
ears and, truth be told, it is probably what most of the candidates and public
figures actually believe… the only difference is that he was willing to say it.
The façade of false
ancient religions is being drawn away from our society. The echoes of ancient
religious teachings, married to the mystery and wonder of modern science lead
us, not to become atheists, but simply to acknowledge that while we believe in
God all we really know about God is our experience of awe and of love and the
only path to drawing nearer to God is by getting better at loving one another.
This is both liberating and immensely challenging…once freed from the
constraints of ancient creeds and religious manipulation, our first impulse is
not always to draw one another closer in love but to flee into much more
narcissistic endeavors.
We still have a lot of
work to do if we want to grow spiritually and I hope we do… I know that I do
and I hope that I am not alone. I may
have been wrong about a lot of things through the years but I am not wrong
about this: God is love and the only way
to know God is through loving one another.
