This sermon is the first in a series designed to introduce some basic concepts of a theology that is progressive, postmodern and Protestant.
So first you go to the store… Home Depot maybe, or Father Nature, or some other nursery, and you buy the various things you need for the garden that season, lime and mulch and seeds, and in some cases flats of plants that have already been started. This was my first year gardening on my own, but I’ve seen my parents do this year after year, so I’m pretty confident about what happens next. For, you see, as you start putting in the plants, you realize you have more than you need, and some of the little tags that identify the plants have probably come out, and when it is all said and done, you have a handful of plants left over that may or may not be a mystery.
So it was that I came into the possession of some donated plants at the beginning of the summer, some tomatoes and a zucchini plant. And I was grateful to the church member that got me started, in fact, I am still being blessed with vegetables, some of you have also benefited from this gift, Now, I’m not a big fan of either vegetable, raw tomato or zucchini in any form, but I’m stretching myself, learning to eat new things, and I can always find a recipe I can stand, so I took them with thanks, and planted them.
It was the strangest zucchini I had ever seen, but they were long and green, as zucchini should be, so I dug up a recipe, prepared all the ingredients, and went out to the garden to harvest. And as I began to peel my zucchini, I realized that what I was looking at was a now over-ripe European-style cucumber.
A more experienced gardener might have noticed this earlier, but I’m not an experienced gardener, so there I was, with all the fixings for a zucchini loaf, and a cucumber. I did what I always do in these situations. I called Ruth.
Ruth is my best friend of many years, a straight-shooting church professional with ample wisdom in many other areas… not gardening, alas, but she knows plenty about baking and cooking. Her answer was short and to the point. You cannot make a cucumber loaf, It won’t work.
This experience demonstrates what scholars would call a category error. I attempted to fit a cucumber into the zucchini category, and if my wise friend had not intervened, it would have been a disaster. Who knew, when I started my garden in June, that I would end up harvesting a theology of God?
You see, just as I made a category mistake with my magical zucchini cucumber, so we humans make category mistakes with our notion of God. And just as a cucumber loaf would have been a total disaster, the theologies that have arisen from theological category errors have been disastrous. And so, this morning we’ll examine what we cannot say about God, and then explore what we might provisionally be able to say about God, at least for functional purposes.
But before we get too far down the road in destabilizing the image of God as giant white male puppet-master in the sky, aptly described by some as a fairly tale, let’s begin by admitting that if there was no God, humans would have to make one up, and have been doing so for as long as we have recorded history. The fact that humans need a God does not mean that God does not exist, in fact, I rather think the opposite is the case, that however trite it may seem, there is some merit in the idea that we are born with a God-shaped hole in our being. The fact that humans keep arriving at the same conclusion, despite vast cultural and contextual differences, that there must be some transcendent divine other we call God, rather speaks to a universe that is ordered around that notion. Those atheist fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins, in their unsubstantiated faith in the absence of a divine, are no more sane than those of us who choose to believe there is. As much as we like to pretend we make our decisions based on cold hard facts, the seismic shift in consciousness known as post-modernism demonstrated, through Einstein, Gödel and countless others, that our observations are all relative to our position, a position within the system. Which could lead me to entire theological stand about something called panentheism, not to be confused with pantheism, but that would just be a bridge-too-far. So let us stick with saying that those of us who choose to believe in a God see a God-filled world, that in this case as in all cases, believing is seeing. You can choose either position, that there is absolutely no God, or that there absolutely is a God, and you can’t prove either. It is a choice, a leap into the unknown that will have a substantial impact on how you experience the world and how you live your life.
We, as Christians, see the world as God-filled, but can say almost nothing sensible about God, for if God meets our definitions, then God is beyond our definitions. Notice how neatly nonsensical that statement is. We create a category called God that fits within our ability to conceive of God, then immediately assign God traits that must go beyond our ability to conceive. For example, we say God is infinite. But the definition of infinite, (notice that definition contains the same root, finite!) the definition of infinite is that it never ends, and is therefore outside of the bounds of conception.
Even things which seem really basic and logical can lead us up a dead end of contradiction and idiocy. For example, it makes sense that God knows everything that can be known. So God must know the future. So God must know who is going to know life in full through Christ. And if God already knows who will thrive and who will suffer, and God is all-powerful, then we are predestined to whichever end we are heading towards, God’s promised salvation or death. Therefore, God must create some humans for the sole purpose of suffering. Now I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t worship that God, so I reject predestination, and while I’m at it blood atonement. I choose to believe that we are in trouble the minute we attempt to assign any trait to God. When we turn down the blind alley that leads to a theology of predestination, we do so because we have assumed God has consciousness in the same way we have consciousness, that knowing and acting and even time itself is the same for God as for us. But what if God does not have agency or knowledge or being in time in a way we can conceptualize?
This is called the problem of predication. A predicate is a part of speech that describes something else. At its simplest, I can say “the ball is red.†Red is the predicate, it describes the ball. Yet when we assign predicates to God, we are projecting onto God our own categories. Even a statement like “God is love,†a basic tenet of Christian theology, fails under close scrutiny. The acknowledgment that God is beyond predication, that any statement about God is automatically false, is called a negative theology, or apophatic theology.
Now, if this is where we ended, we could all leave after the end of this service, mail in our votes on how to distribute the church’s assets, and sleep in on Sunday morning. After all, how can a God beyond our conceptions, completely inaccessible, have any impact on our lives? Must we fall into grave error by fitting God into our false categories or give up God all together?
The answer is no. We can have God and admit that we will never really know God. To do this, we must admit that we have been involved in creating an understanding of God that stretches back at least as far as Moses’ encounter with the Midianite deity “YWH.†Which morphed into “YHWH†which came to be pronounced Yahweh, and which became the tribal deity of the Hebrews, in one kingdom viewed as a super-sized human-like being and in the other as a personalized primal force, which came to be viewed as an ethical, just and universal God, which came to be viewed in the Christian tradition as existing in relationship as Trinity, and all of this, from Moses to me, has been a vast constructive enterprise aimed at creating a conception of God that could ground human existence, that could help us be more human. That is not to say that there isn’t an objective God out there, it is simply to say that our definitions of God are limited and change. And sometimes our definitions become dangerous, sometimes toxic. For we often assign to God our own feelings, often decide that God hates who we hate, values what we value.
This is the worst form of idolatry, and it has been done again and again. When the ancient Israelites engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide, it was because it was God’s will. When blood is spilled in Crusades, in colonialist expansion, when planes fly into towers, it is always because it is God’s will. But if we are rigorous and honest in our thinking, we’ll admit that the God who simply justifies our desires is a false God. The God that leaves us comfortable isn’t God. We are simply showing our home movies, playing out our own petty dramas, against a heavenly backdrop.
You know that you are encountering the divine, that you have received from others or constructed for yourself a relevant conception of God, when God refuses to do what you want, to desire what you desire. Like the mystics, like Theresa and John and countless others, you must encounter the divine as deeply disturbing, unsettling, as mystery.
That God, with us, Emmanuel, and yet beyond us, always beyond, encountered and seen daily, yet mysterious and unnamed, that God doesn’t provide us with cheap grace, ease and comfort. But that God does provide us with miracle after miracle, a creation and existence that bends to beauty and creation and expansion and love, the spurs us to transcendence ourselves, to move beyond ourselves in love, in the flight of a symphony, in our collective being as a people celebrating, or grieving, or gathered around a table with a simple loaf and a simple cup of wine.
God, the God that I believe in, and so see in every moment of existence, is just as I understand justice, is love as I understand love, provides comfort as I understand comfort, has promised through Jesus that I can have life right now in God’s realm, right now, if I make that choice. And I do. A God who is not human makes me more human.
The experience of God in your daily life, the practice of “believing is seeing,†is a quickening of existence, a constant re-birth.
This is not the puppet-master God of Rick Warren, is not the homo-hating God of Fred Phelps. It is so much more. And the best part is, we’re not inventing something new that is convenient to us. The theologies I have described have been embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition at least since the time of the prophets, the God beyond, the transformational God.
God beyond, a God we let be God, requires that we re-examine everything, that we problematize, there’s a good Harvard word for you, that we problematize our easy answers and quick assumptions about God. In the coming weeks we will examine how we can understand Jesus as God-with-us in light of a God-God, a divine Godness that is beyond. We’ll look at other core beliefs, and we will come to grips with the fact that Christian is not something you are, it is something you do.
Here in this community we have wrestled a bit with that ancient prayer called the Lord’s Prayer… Father, Mother, Creator? We’re all ready to problematize the gender of God. And many of us are willing to challenge the 17th century Jacobin translation that gives us forgiveness of our debts, for not only has the meaning of the word debt changed, it was never a good translation in the first place. Many of us use transgressions, others use sins, though in truth the word represents a broad category of meanings that includes obligations and mistakes, sins and goof-ups.
Maybe we should consider another change to the Lord’s Prayer. For many contemporary Protestants the wording might better be “my will, not thine, be done.†We want every thing to go our way all the time. It might be a category mistake when we attribute human values, a human system of agency and will, to the divine, but one thing is for sure, you are not God, and I am not God, and if we mean it when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, if we mean “thy will, not mine, be done,†then we can’t insist on getting our way all the time. This can be a healthy church that changes lives and that lives God’s mission out into the world if we let God be God.
I invite you to believe God is, for believing is seeing. I invite you to let God be God. Your life will be better for it, more joyful, more content, more human and more alive. I invite you to see God. Amen.