Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Life’s Toughest Questions: Is There a God/Does God Care?

Transcribed from the sermon preached April 11, 2010

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Exodus 3:1-14, John 10:1-15

Is There a God? Does God care? These are the first two questions I will try to answer in this series of sermons on life’s biggest questions. Is there a God? Do I believe in God? Our first problem in our attempt to answer this question is, what is our definition of God? I think that most of the people who say they don’t believe in God, hold a definition of God, which is quite easy not to believe in. It is the image of the all powerful, all-knowing, big dude Patriarch in the sky who created the world in seven days and somehow manages to help some people some of the time, while at the same time throws down lightning bolts, earthquakes, hurricanes and cancer, among other things, irregardless to prayers of the faithful, to make our lives difficult and short. This may or may not be the same God who resembles a medieval Lord whose honor had been disrespected by human sin. And to restore honor and redeem humanity, recompense was due, not just from a lowly human but from someone of equal stature as God, and therefore, God sent his son to be human so that God could then murder his son, or commit suicide, in sacrifice for us so that God could restore his own honor to himself. I don’t believe in those ideas of God either. In fact, if this god existed, and personally came and asked for my allegiance, I would hope that I would have the courage not to give it…to say, I do not believe in you.

And that leads to another issue with our question: what is belief or faith? For it is possible to know empirically that something or someone exists and to still not believe or trust in them. This understanding of belief or faith brings an element of moral judgment and relationship into the equation. Is this god worthy of belief? Or the bigger question, what or who is worthy of belief or allegiance?

So in our attempt to define and package gods into something that makes sense to us and helps us make sense of our world, the first thing we have to confess is that we have messed it up royally. The Hebrews don’t even pronounce the name for God. It is too holy. Just in our announcing it we mess it up. So when Moses asked God, Whom shall I say sent me? God says, “I am who I am.” Tell them “I Am has sent me to you.”

Buddhists share this sense that talk about and naming God only obscures the truth of God. Using words to describe the divine nature is like looking out a window at a garden. And in an attempt to point out different truths we mark an outline on the window. At first the marks may help our eyes pinpoint something remarkable. But the more we mark the window the less we actually see of the garden. An artist may paint a beautiful rose, but it is still not the actual rose. And too often the painting isn’t that great. Reality TV isn’t real.

Religious doctrine, theology and bureaucracy too often are like the markings on the window. Too often the sacredness of the drawings on the window become confused with what the drawing originally intended to point out. Then, as different groups of people looking out different widows create different sacred drawings, they fight over which drawing is the true god, or just “the truth”? Meanwhile, the same truth is obscured behind them all. So mystics tell us that to answer our question, is there a God, we need to go beyond doctrine, to stop rationalizing and talking, take off our shoes and listen to the burning bush.

And yet humans use symbols and connections, we use markings to connect and make sense of the world. We cannot simply do away with thought and symbol. While we may say our thought and symbol of God and truth are not God and truth, they are human tools; they are part of human truth. We may understand a truth from quantum physics that the one measuring changes what he or she is measuring, but that doesn’t mean it is not useful to measure.

It is helpful to keep in mind the Taoist idea of Yin/ Yang, or our prophet Ecclesiastes who says, for every time there is a season. In truth and life there is a balance and interconnection of opposites. John the Baptist called out:

Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways shall be made smooth;
[6] and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

As a wave moves through water there are a crest and a corresponding trough, and these high and low points will radiate outward until the energy dissipates and the water is calm once again. “Yin–yang, thus, are always opposite and equal qualities. Further, whenever one quality reaches its peak it will naturally begin to transform into the opposite quality: grain that reaches its full height in summer (fully yang) will produce seeds and die back in winter (fully yin) in an endless cycle.“ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

So while language and symbol may get in the way of truth and our concept of God, they are tools that we need and use. What we seek is balance. In our search for God, not just mysticism alone or theology alone but a balance; not just the priest and the law written in stone, but neither grace without justice or authority, not community with a sacrifice of individuality, but neither radical individualism without connection or community. Truth and God are found in the balance.

There are those who would like to believe that there is no spirit, that all truth is simply explainable with reason, and that if we cannot arrive at a conclusion by reason then it cannot be true. The only truth is that which is empirically verifiable. There are a whole slew of ministers and theologians who have accepted this basic enlightenment notion and then dedicated their lives to proving the claims of the Bible are true in a literal sense. The earth and all species were created in seven days, God flooded the world and killed everybody but Noah and the animals Noah brought with him on the boat, Jonah was in the belly of a whale for three days, God literally told Israel to slaughter every last inhabitant in the land, Mary was literally impregnated by God, etc… And if one thing proves to be false, the whole deck of cards crumbles. As William Sloan Coffin says, “They talk of standing on the rock of ages but act as if they are hanging onto the last piece of driftwood.”

My problem with these literalists is not just the scientific objection. My biggest problem is they have accepted a very narrow definition of truth, and they try to cram God into that little box. If God fits in their little box, I don’t want to believe in God either.

Science is just another tool, the masculine thrusting controlling thought, yang to earth’s feminine, mystical, intuitive receiving yin. To affirm man, must we deny woman? Fair, if I am going down the masculine, feminine road, we must confess that the church has worked long and hard to deny and crucify the feminine, to supercede mother. Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I wish to comfort and protect as a mother hen gathers chicks under her wings. Still the science as yang and the spirit as yin works. Then science is a system of symbols that helps us describe, in a particular way, the material that is outside the window. For instance:

Domestic sheep (Ovis aries) are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name "sheep" applies to many species, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries. Numbering a little over 1 billion, domestic sheep are the most numerous species in their genus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep

Science is a tool that has greatly enriched human vision and health, yet how flat and plain a world it would be if science were our only eyes, our only truth.

Albert Schweitzer, one of the great twentieth Century scholars and theologians had a difficult time with traditional theism, but felt that everything is in the grasp of a mysterious life-force, an “infinite, forward-urging will in which all Being is grounded.” Through this spirit humanity seeks to become united with the Cosmic Will, and thus strives to overcome the estrangement which mysteriously and painfully exists between the blind, groping, truculent forms of energy in the world at large and the purposive, morally concerned form, or will-to-love, which humanity discovers in itself. (Jackson Lee Ice. Did Schweitzer Believe in God?)

Meister Eckhart said that “Divinity is an Underground river that no one can stop and no one can damn up.” There are many wells but one river. Or as Matthew Fox writes, God is the womb from which all things spring and at the same time, the ‘cave within the heart,’ the secret place where man enters into communion with the ultimate mystery.” (Matthew Fox. “One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from World Faiths”)

From this perspective, what we may call panentheism, God is transcendent, that is, more than everything, beyond everything, cannot be systematized or named or captured – the great I Am, and also immanent, in everything, the gate and the shepherd and even the sheep. God is right here, around us, in us, the great will- to- love.

Now all of this is light and fluffy thought, ironic, paradoxical, rationalized mysticism, theology of those who have time and comfort for abstract thinking. We never get to be sure, and yet we are called not just to thought but to action, to live into that divine spark within, to follow the shepherd, to be the shepherd and sheep. Like Moses, God calls us to action: to follow and to lead.

This God is not mere ether, abstract idea out there, or a generally neutral passive poet with fluffy feeling for all things great and beautiful, not just a Deity who creates and stands back, but one who becomes human and loves in the concrete here and now. Dan Migliore from Princeton writes that “The love of God the Creator and provider is at work not only where life is sustained and enhanced, but also where all that jeopardizes life and its fulfillment is resisted and set under judgment…It works both in our patience and our impatience and courageous resistance to evil. The LORD said, "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, [8] and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…

Jose Maria Arguadas poses the question: “Is not what we know far less that the great hope we feel?” Gustavo Guttierez writes that God is “first contemplated when we do God’s will and allow God to reign; only after that do we think about God. Contemplation and practice make up the first act; theologizing is the second act.” (Guttierrez, Gustavo. On Job: God Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent) From this perspective, when the poor and oppressed cry out for justice and redemption, when we cry out in need of healing or liberation, or seek to answer such a cry, it is God doing the crying and the answering. God is incarnate, both as the sheep and the Shepherd, and the sheep’s cry and the shepherd response is the proof of God. From this perspective the question of theodicy, “if there is a God why is there so much suffering?”, is restated: the recognition of suffering and injustice, the act of love even in the face of horrible consequences is proof that, despite everything, the Spirit of God is alive. Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me? Yes, said Peter. “Then feed my sheep.”