Sermons

May 8/05

The God We Don’t Believe In

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

John 14:15-21

I want to share a letter I received just last week. It says:

"Dear Reverend Cheri DiNovo,
I had the pleasure of hearing you on the CBC radio program, "Tapestry" on March 6/05. I appreciated your talk very much. I have only one question: Who are you speaking of when you say God? What image represents this word in your mind? How can you talk and pray to this image? A figure of some kind? Thank you so much for your reply. This question has been on my mind for a long time. I appreciate the Zen Buddhist approach.
Sincerely
Danushe Stary
PS: Forgive my handwriting. I am 80 years old and do not have a computer."

What a beautiful letter! First of all, I recognize that I am snail mail challenged. God, how do you write a letter and where do you buy a stamp, stuff like that. I thought it would be a wonderful jumping off point for a sermon and hence I titled it, "The God We Don’t Believe in" because my suspicion is that that is the God she doesn’t believe in either.

The other thing I wanted to share with you is an article from Harper’s magazine this month and by the way, it’s an excellent issue about the variety of Christianity being practiced in the United States today and it is absolutely terrifying but it starts off with an academic atheist talking about the God he doesn’t believe in.

"As an unbaptised child raised in a family that went to Church only for weddings and funerals, I didn’t encounter the problem of religious belief until I reached Yale College in the 1950’s where I was informed by the liberal arts faculty that it wasn’t pressing because God was dead. What remained to be discussed was the autopsy reports: apparently there was still some confusion about the cause and time of death, and the undergraduate surveys of Western civilization offered a wide range of options – God disemboweled by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, assassinated in eighteenth century Paris by agents of the French Enlightenment, lost at sea in 1834 while on a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, blown to pieces by German artillery at Verdun, garroted by Friedrich Nietzsche on a Swiss Alp, and the body laid to rest in the consulting rooms of Sigmund Freud. On the evidence presented in the history books, the exit strategy wasn’t as important as the good news that the Great Man was well and truly gone." (Harper’s/May/05)

We don’t believe in that God. Here’s another God we don’t believe in.

Again the same writer:
"The guarantee of terrible punishment for God’s enemies, combined with the assurance of an ending both happy and profitable for God’s business associates, provides the plot for the Left Behind series of neo-Christian fables ( 62 million copies sold) that have risen in popularity over the last ten years in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs … and the twelfth book in the series delight in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon: "Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ." (Harper’s/May/05)

We don’t believe in that God either. Which raises the issue, how to come by a belief in God when you’ve been raised with that kind of information surrounding you. First of all, you know that picture on the Sistine Chapel? I tried to research what really inspired Michelangelo to do that work. It’s most people’s image of the biblical God. It’s an old white man with a long white beard. The closest I could figure out is that it’s really a portrait of Zeus, the Olympian God, certainly a God of power and might, a very male, patriarchal, overbearing figure. That’s where the inspiration comes from. It comes from the Greeks. There is nothing, and I repeat nothing, biblical about it.

Now you might read the bible and say "You don’t know what you’re talking about here because the God I’m reading about loves blood. He’s always overseeing wars and always meting out justice and judgment in a way very, very similar to an overbearing, in this case, white, patriarchal leader." But really even in the Hebrew scriptures the God of the Bible is much different. They talk about the ‘cloud of presence’, God as a cloud, God as Shekina, Sophia, the source of all wisdom. This is God.

What I’m going to tell this wonderful eighty year old lady without a computer is that all we really need to know when we approach God is that we don’t have all the answers. I would love to have a conversation with the professor who penned the Harper’s article because it sounds as if he does! Science thinks that it has the answers or at least some of them. When we look at the history of human achievement we look at amazing works and ideas but we also look at a history of astounding arrogance and colossal mistakes, like the entire 21st century of bloodshed. How did they get those weapons? We invented them.

So all you really need to do when you speak to someone about God is to clarify what they are speaking about and then point out that you don’t believe in that God either and then start the conversation in a different place. Thomas Pynchon once said that if they can get you to ask the wrong questions then the answers don’t matter. We have been asking the wrong questions about God for a long, long time. All you really need to know is that I don’t have all the answers, humans will never have all the answers. That is the first article of faith.

I heard a story last week. A Rabbi, rapt in High Holy Day services cried out, "Oh Lord my God, You are master of the universe and I, I am nothing!" Whereupon the Cantor similarly excited by the service and its spirituality also said, "And I Lord, I too, am nothing!" Then in the back row, the caretaker of the synagogue piped up and said,
"And I Lord, I am also nothing!" At this point the Rabbi turned to the Cantor and said, "Look who thinks he’s nothing!"

Look who thinks she’s nothing! We are the ones who are nothing. That’s all we humans need to know about God is that we don’t know about God and also that there is something greater than our brain in the universe. That’s a pretty small step to take, That there is something far more enduring than our minds, our faith, our compassion, our institutions, our history. That there is something far more enduing than that. That’s all we need to buy into to speak of the biblical God of redemption and of creation. There is reason but it’s greater than our reason. Speaking about God is very much like ants speaking about humans. That’s what it’s like. How much do we expect an ant to know about human beings? That’s what we know about God.

We’re a Trinitarian Church and the second aspect of God that you heard Jesus talking about was the gifting of the Holy Spirit, the advocate, the wonderful counselor, the paraclete. I like to look at the Holy Spirit in the same way we look at air. The Holy Spirit is both around us and inside of us. In a sense, we breathe it in and out. We could not live without it. In other traditions they call it ‘prana’ or ‘chi’ energy, this spiritual energy that surrounds us that we all tap into that is what is called the soul except that it doesn’t just reside in our bodies but resides outside of our bodies too. We are really bodies in a soul as much as souls in a body. It is essential to our life as air. We can hold our breath. We can deny it. We’ll die eventually if we do. It’s a gift from God, through Christ, to us.

Now I had a professor at Emmanuel who said that the Trinity seemed to her like two men and a bird. No, it’s not a bird although depicted as such many times. Here’s how I see the Holy Spirit aside from the metaphor of air. You know when you suffer, you know when you’re angry, you know when you’re ‘in’ passion of some sort, you know those moments? There’s something within you that isn’t suffering, isn’t angry, isn’t in passion. There is something else inside you that is simply aware of what it is that you are doing. There is another part of you, this awareness and that awareness is judgment free, all forgiving, compassionate, watching us as we go through things in life. Sometimes that still small voice comments on what we do as we go through things in life. It is separate from all the sturn und drang of day to day existence. The awareness if we are but still and pray or meditate has once been described as a shy animal because the closer you get to it, the quicker it hides, like a house of mirrors. You can however catch a glimpse. That it is difficult to observe the observer does not mean that the observer is not there. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit. One metaphor is a defense attorney because this is the one that always defends us against ourselves and it is what we share with everyone else in the entire world. It is our continuity as a people of faith.

And then there’s Jesus! One of the problems we encounter as Christians, the whether he’s human or divine or whether he’s both question, is that we don’t understand what we mean by the terms. In the same way that we don’t mean an old man with a white beard when we talk about God, we don’t understand the Christian affirmation that Christ is both God and human. One of my theology profs once said that the problem is that we ‘think’ God and then try to squeeze our conception of God into a first century Jew called Jesus and in fact what we should be doing is thinking about it the other way around. This is where we share such wonderful camaraderie with our Buddhist neighbours. What we should be doing is looking at the figure of Jesus Christ and thinking God from him!

So what is God like? We look at Christ and say God is compassionate. God is healing. God is forgiving. God is loving. God is long suffering. God will give everything for us. How do we know that God is like that? We have this figure that walked among us. Not only walked among us but walks among us still. For sure Christ is with us today. For sure Christ sits among us in the pews somewhere. For sure we are a community that waits for Christ to come back. For sure wherever two or three are gathered in is name there he will be. So that is Christ present right now and Christ, historical Jesus who modeled for us what God is really like, our Rabbi, Christ.

So who are we in this midst of God? We are the Christian family and this is Christian family Sunday and what that means is what that says. We are all family here. In our baptism promises we all agree to look after each other as if we were blood relatives, for most of us, better than we look after our blood relatives and they look after us. We are called after each other, to love each other and to gather every Sunday and throughout the week waiting for Christ to manifest. We gather waiting for the one outside the Church to enter.

It’s amazing to read scriptural passages with new eyes. Remember that passage where Jesus talks about the peace that passes all understanding. We didn’t really hear it that way so let’s hear it again. " The peace that passes all understanding". The peace that we will never ever understand. The peace that we will never fit into our little, reasonable boxes. We will never quantify it. We will never measure it. We will never draw a picture of it. We will never in any way solidify that which we call God. The closest we can come is the trinity and they are still a mystery, all three. "The peace that passes all understanding." Don’t we feel it however? Haven’t we always known it? Haven’t we always known here and there in all areas of our lives exactly what that peace feels like and looks like and tastes like and smells like, walks like and talks like? "This peace", says Jesus, "I leave with you, not as the world leaves but as I leave it."

Amen