It seems like a lifetime since it mattered whether comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her on-screen alter-ego were or were not lesbian, would or would not come out on her sitcom, “Ellen,†or in real life. Of course, it’s been almost twenty years since Oprah played a role in both the character and the performer coming out. Today, at least for the majority of Americans, whether a performer or character is LGBTQ is a non-issue. Who cares?
Personally, I never watched the show. Ellen’s subsequent talk show has been successful and a great platform for new talent, but I’ve always had a day job, so daytime television really doesn’t get on my radar much either. I do, however, absolutely love Ellen’s character in Disney-Pixar’s 2003 animated hit “Finding Nemo,†a role she reprised in the recent sequel, “Finding Dory.â€
Dory is at once both an animated blue tang, a small fish, and so much more than that, a main character with a cognitive disability, specifically, short-term memory loss, in a film that is intended, at least on one level, for children. While the disability is played for laughs, it is gentle, and not at Dory’s expense, rather at the expense of Marlin, the single-parent clownfish looking for his lost son, who has trouble accepting Dory, who is impatient. But it is Dory, not Marlin, who remembers the vital clue in finding Nemo, the address of P. Sherman, which as any real fan will know, is 42 Wallaby Way in Sydney.
At a key moment in the film, having survived near-death in a school of luminescent jellyfish then transport by way of totally rad sea turtles on the East Australian Current, Dory and Marlin are suddenly swallowed by an immense whale. Duuuuuuuude.
Fortunately, it turns out that Dory speaks whale, or at least she thinks she does. Dory’s version of whale is simply really deep and really drawn out speech. “Helllllllllllooooooooo.†Dory is every American who has ever spoken slowly and loudly, with many hand gestures, to the poor waiter who speaks three languages, just none of them english. “Does… it… have… mustard?†We are meant to chuckle, for we’ve all known blowhards who think they know what they don’t really know. We may even have elected a few on occasion. Still, maybe Dory, in her own bumbling way, knows more than even she realizes, for the whale itself blows hard at just the right moment, expelling Marlin and Dory from his blowhole into Sydney Harbour, just a few hungry seagulls and a swim from 42 Wallaby Way.
Dory and Marlin have to cross a dangerous ocean to find Nemo. Amos only had to cross a border.
In the Book of the Prophet Amos, we are back near the beginning of what is traditionally considered the prophetic age. The two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, still exist, each with a powerful monarchy and a powerful priesthood. The north has a good king and is experiencing prosperity. If it were written today, you might say that unemployment was low and the economy was hot. Then comes this guy from across the border, no credentials, a farmer really, with all sorts of alarming warnings. He is a total crackpot. He suggests that the economy isn’t really doing well if it is only benefitting some people. He has the gall to suggest that Israel’s political and religious leaders consider the impact of their policies on Israel’s poor, when Amos himself isn’t even from Israel. He’s a Judahite.
And I’m just going to park that right there, for this isn’t a sermon about an ancient economy or even a Christian economy. As far as I can tell, these days a Christian economy would look a whole lot like Ayn Rand’s self-righteous social Darwinism. I am more interested in the oft-quoted text from today’s reading, near the end of the work, a text that resonates with the words of St. Oscar Romero, even if the martyred archbishop does touch on economic justice. What I am interested in is the Hebrew prophet’s disclosure that God does not want what we think God wants, does not, as Romero states clearly, think like we think.
Even though the Northern Kingdom does not have the great Temple built by Solomon, which sits at the heart of the Southern Kingdom, they still have elaborate and showy worship, holidays that Amos describes as festivals and solemn assemblies. This is still the age of animal sacrifice, so he mentions the fatted animals offered on the altar, but we’d be wrong to read this through the lens of later centuries when blood sacrifice is a thing of the past. Amos is not a Christian, and even the first Temple has not yet been destroyed. In a move that is sure to make many of us squirm, Amos even takes aim at worship music, at harps and songs.
Amos tells us that God could care less about this showy ritual and expensive acting out of faith if that faith is not lived in the every day. It does not matter what you do on the sabbath to convince God of your piety. What matters is how you treat one another when the sabbath is over. Amos calls for righteousness and justice, rolling down, everflowing.
Amos was not the first nor the last to claim to speak for God. If we are to believe history, God has authorized all sorts of things, from monarchies to massacres. God belongs to my political party, my nation, my race, “mine, mine, mine,†to quote the seagulls in “Finding Nemo.†That God is no more than a pocket-God to quote Romero quoting a folk song, a God as my employee to further what I already want, reinforcing everything that is small in me.
Amos had nothing to gain by crossing that border and telling a bunch of strangers with wealth and power that they needed to stop oppressing the poor, for those elaborate festivals and rituals came at the expense of the people. In the 4th chapter, he gives us the original “ladies who lunch†when he refers to the rich “cows of Bashan†who cry out “Bring something to drink!†He has nothing to gain by calling out the corruption of judges and officials in Israel, as he does early in the 5th chapter. He has nothing to gain, and is indeed sent away by the royal priest Amaziah and we never hear from him again. Presumably he tells his story for someone writes it down.
This is not a prophet who is speaking for God in order to get a new $54 million private jet or to justify what he wants. He is, as he asserts, a herdsman and an arborist from Tekoa, a small town ten miles south of Jerusalem.
Amos is a little blue tang in an immense ocean speaking nonsense whale to a powerful kingdom. But maybe he is really speaking whale after all.
We are so certain about what God wants, but God, as a title and as a container for all that is the source and mystery and transcendent pull of the universe and life, for entanglement and ooze and orchids, that God is never going to fit in our heads. Any God that we could comfortably conceive would be no more than a pocket God. God is a whale and we are Dory, babbling our God-speak and hoping that what is God can understand us. And like Dory, we all too often forget that we are speaking with God and of God right in the middle of the conversation, forget this immensity, even as we arc out of the blowhole, a blue streak returning to the blue. When it comes to God, we have short-term memory issues.
We cannot speak coherently about what God wants. There is no evidence that God who spoke creation into existence with words beyond our knowing cares even the slightest about candles and pulpit chairs and hymnals. Every statement about God must come with an asterisk, even the most basic and universally accepted, even Amos’ statement about justice, for as we will learn in the teachings of Jesus, the justice of God is exponentially more loving and grace-filled than anything we could ever come up with on our own, so the justice that we are to let roll down must exceed what we are inclined to offer.
If we cannot speak coherently of God, if God must always come with an asterisk, then at least we can speak of Jesus, for we understand him as an encounter with God, and though I may be the world’s worst Trinitarian, even I can accept that in some way the veil wore thin and Jesus was an embodied thin place, a perfect Christ-consciousness in the words of Friedrich Schleiermacher. But even so, Jesus was a man in a context, a time and a space and a culture, and he tells us himself that he does not know all that God knows.
It would make us a whole lot more comfortable is we spoke fluent pocket-God, know that we could contain God, could put God away. But that God would be too small for this creation. That God would be too small for me. That God is an idol.
And so we hover in this liminal space, longing to speak of God for whom we must not speak, seeking that sense of alignment, that right ordering of our lives. What are we to do with the prophets? What are we to do with televangelists and politicians who tell us what God wants? What are we to do with pastors in small churches in places like Blue Hill? How are we to judge? How are we to live our lives?
Maybe it is just me, maybe it is just my restless spirit, my hunger for the beauty I see in the eyes of happy people, but I can never worship a God that tells me it is okay when so many people are hurt and broken. When brown-skinned children are ripped from their parents just as they were two centuries ago, and, if what has been reported is true, transported in train cars and kept in cages. I could never worship a God who would tell us everything is okay when the suicides in the news are nothing compared to the suicides that do not make the news, nearly 45,000 in 2016, the last year for which we have statistics.
I am okay with a God that promises me comfort and a banquet table and who encourages me to take sabbath and who promises me that there is more than just this, but right now I am deep in the valley of the shadow of death, and I need a God who gives me the courage to keep walking, who tells me to look past the bodies swinging in the trees and see what might be, justice and righteousness and love.
Our Christian tradition speaks powerfully down the generations about justification and grace. We do not justify ourselves, do not give ourselves grace, anymore than we called ourselves into being. These things are gifts from that divine mystery we name as God that call us beyond ourselves. If I think God is telling me what I want to hear, the hair on the back of my neck should be standing up. If there is a Satan in this world, it is a school of bright and shiny jellyfish that lulls us into complacency.
If what God says is as small as me, it does me no good. I need a God bigger than that. I need a God that knows oceans further and deeper than I will ever know, that can carry me even when I don’t want to be carried, that can blow me out into Sydney Harbour, a little closer to 42 Wallaby Way.
I speak God like Dory speaks whale. But maybe that is okay. Hellllllllloooooooo.
May you surf like a sea turtle in the current of the transcendent. May you be troubled and comforted and burdened by a bag of asterisks and may you be loved by a God that is way too big. Hellllllllooooooooo.