The End of God

June 17, 2007
Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3
I initially titled this, “The Death of God, Again,” but realized as I wrote that it is not so much the death of God that presses in upon us these days as it is the end of God.
The cover story on a recent issue of The Nation features a stained-glass window accompanying the bold type proclaiming “the new atheism.” Inside is a thoughtful and provocative essay reviewing a handful of recent books by prominent authors arguing not so much for the death of God as for the rebirth of strident humanism that not only rejects the idea of God but also all efforts to bring faith into the public square.
The proponents of this so-called new atheism are, with a few notable exceptions, steadfastly progressive. That almost goes without saying, considering that the article reviewing their thought was in The Nation. But it’s worth noting precisely because its presence in The Nation – still the nation’s finest weekly journal of progressive thought – underscores the long and continuing disconnect between progressive social and political thought and progressive religion.
That disconnect is nothing new under the sun. I vividly recall a conversation with a friend named Jame, a co-worker at SANE-Freeze – the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy – in 1985 while I was a student at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Jame was a self-described “red diaper baby” whose parents were somewhat dismayed that he had gone so mainstream as to work within the American political system for an organization such as SANE. Soon after we began working together, Jame asked me why a progressive would be a student at a divinity school. Why, he asked, would I have anything to do with religion?
As we talked, it was clear that he had never encountered progressive religious thought nor could he fathom the idea. When I told him that the life and work of Martin Luther King was my theological touchstone he admitted that he never considered King’s work as anything other than political action for a clearly progressive cause. He’d never considered that King’s work might be grounded in faith.
I’ve thought back to that conversation many times over the years, and it’s come back to mind even more of late when I read the “new atheists” or hear echoes of their thinking in public responses of many progressives to the work or words of folks like Jim Wallis at Sojourners or Michael Lerner at Tikkun.
A couple of weeks ago, Rabbi Lerner had a brief essay posted on the Common Dreams web site. If you don’t know of it, Common Dreams is one of the best on-line digests of current progressive political thought. Like many such sites, Common Dreams has a “comments” section, and reading the comments to Lerner’s essay was, in this instance, more instructive than reading the essay itself.
The number of fairly vitriolic comments suggesting that there is no place for faith in politics or that all belief is naïve if not down-right ignorant was a disheartening if not surprising reminder that in the minds of most Americans all religious thought is equated with the worst excesses of the religious loud at the most conservative end of the political spectrum.
Whether or not we like it or agree with it, the name “Christian” is clearly associated in the minds of most Americans with a certain strain of the faith given voice by some of the most divisive figures in the culture. From the late Jerry Falwell to Richard Dobson of Focus on the Family fame to Pat Robertson, the neo-fundamentalists of the conservative evangelical wing of Christianity have become the public face of the faith and their collective image has obliterated all alternative perspectives.
The God they imagine is the God in the cross-hairs of the new atheists. Thus, to a great degree, the new atheists herald the death of an old god.
To that old god I say, goodbye and good riddance.
That god, as Bishop John A.T. Robinson argued in his classic Honest to God, is a god of height, out there in the great beyond acting on history from a distance. That god is the deus ex machina – the god who appeared out of nowhere, often dropped onto the stage of classical theater from so sort of crane device, to save the day kind of like Mighty Mouse but usually older and with a long white beard. That god is Santa Clause without the reindeer; Spider Man without the webs; Super Man impervious to kryptonite. That god is the one we call on from the fox holes we find ourselves in from time to time when we’re waiting for a miracle.
If there is to be a God adequate to our time, Robinson suggested, it will not be this god of foxhole prayers but rather a God of depth more than height, measured within us rather than beyond us, and stirring our souls and thus our history.
The god dismissed by the new atheism should be given last rites by the church and quickly interred. As Robinson wrote some 40 years ago, “Yes, God is dead, genuinely – if we expect him in the old habitations, mental or material. Yet [God] is not dead – if we are open to the signs of [God’s] appearing.”[1]
What was it Waylon Jennings sang about “looking for love in all the wrong places”? Perhaps what we are most guilty of in our time is looking for God in all the wrong places.
If we expect God in all the old mental habitations – the habits of mind that lead us to imagine the God is the one we call on when we’re at the end of our human capacity – then we draw ever tighter, smaller rings around that which is God’s as our human technological capacities expand to ever wider spheres of knowledge, understanding and control over nature and ourselves.
If we expect God in all the old material habitations – those places of formal religious institutional formulations and orthodoxies that may look like medieval cathedrals or postmodern televangelical auditoriums – then we reduce God to that which is under the control of authorized traditions and institutions.
Perhaps it is that we are only now, some 500 years into it, coming to realize the full impact of Reformation thought.
It was Paul’s thought, freshly understood by Luther and his peers, that began that liberation of God and of humanity from the shackles to which we were jointly bound by a tradition that reduced God to dependence upon the crane operators lurking just off stage.
We catch a glimpse of that thought in Paul’s letter to the Galatians to whom he writes, “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
As with so much of Paul’s writing, this is a mouthful in a few brief sentences, but it points toward something of ultimate concern. Indeed, it points toward another end of God – a telos or purpose of God as that which beckons us.
This God of beckoning, of calling, is the God we meet so many places in scripture: the God who calls forth light and life; the God who calls Abraham to go from his home to an unknown land; the God who calls Moses forth to lead the people from bondage to liberation; the God who goes forth before the people as a pillar of fire in the long night of the wilderness.
This God will not be bound back to any religious institution and delights in confounding human orthodoxies. This God will not be reduced to any human economy – especially not an economy of punishment, of unpardonable debt, of domination, division and control.
This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who sits at table with the Pharisees – and thus calls into question that very economy of division by which the world so easily divides itself into us and them, to good and bad, to straight and gay, to American and Iraqi, to atheist and believer. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who offers shalom – wholeness, healing, community – to a woman of the city, a sinner. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who calls us forth – not from some great beyond, but rather from the midst of our present lives – toward a future otherwise.
I would echo the words Bishop Robinson wrote in 1968, and update them only slightly to the present situation:
In our day, I believe, ‘the death of God’ as proclaimed [by the “new atheists”] has as its complement – and corrective – a fresh awareness of [God’s] presence as the One who comes to us ‘from the end,’ that is, from ahead of us in history, beckoning us onward at the moving edges of growth and commitment. ‘He is not here … he is going before you’ (Mark 16:6-7): the angel’s message at the empty tomb recurs as a refrain that runs through the pages of the Bible.[2]
This is the God we meet in scripture read well; moreover, this is the God we meet in our world if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts open to the beating of love that always marks the location of God. God is not dead, for love is alive and God is love. May we – again and again – meet this God of love who calls us forth toward a commonwealth of the beloved, and may we have the unbounded hope to welcome there with love even those who see it otherwise. Amen.




[1] John A.T. Robinson, The End of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) 5.
[2] Ibid.

Liberating Hope

June 10, 2007
Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
The lectionary this week pairs a few miracles – a resurrection story in Luke and another, which we did not read, from the chronicles of the kings in which the prophet Elijah raises a child from the dead. In this post-Easter season, these stories serve to remind us yet again that resurrection, for the writers of scripture, was unusual, yes, but not unheard of. If not quite the order of things, then certainly at least the order of hope.
For post-Enlightenment eyes and ears, these stories have long presented the challenge of drawing meaning from the miraculous after the “age of miracles.” Our own time presents a distinct and more difficult challenge: how do we hold on to hope in an age of despair?
Interestingly, in almost all of these stories of resurrection in scripture the reaction of ordinary people to the miraculous is the same: fear.
In the Elijah story, the prophet comes and brings food in the midst of famine, but people are suspicious. When a child dies, the accusations fly: “What have you against me, O man of God?”
When Jesus raises a young man from his funeral bier, “fear seized” everyone who saw it.
Just as surely, when Paul, who had breathed threats and death upon the early church, has his own experience of resurrection, the people of the way are fearful and suspicious.
I think I understand how they must have felt. The phrase, “if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t” comes to mind. Paul offering to preach the good news of the gospel must have sounded, at first blush, like Pat Robertson offering to officiate at a gay wedding or Dick Cheney embracing Gandhian nonviolence. Inconceivable.
Something that unusual is surely not to be believed. Someone acting so counter to our expectation is surely not to be trusted. Someone we do not trust is someone to fear. And all the more so someone about whom we have no clear expectations.
How many times, when you meet a stranger along the way, is your first reaction mistrust mixed with fear? I have been recognized by strangers on the street a few times – people who have read about Clarendon or seen me at some public event. Often, my first response when someone I don’t know calls after me, is suspicion. “What does this person want from me?” “Am I going to have to defend myself?”
In other words, I am seized by fear. I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. Many of us react to the unfamiliar with fear: not some knee-shaking terror, but a constant fearfulness out of which arises a certain undefineable distance between us that stifles relationship and bars the way to community.
Now don’t get me wrong here. There is a place for intelligent caution in a world filled not only with brokenness that sometimes turns violent and also with people who have embraced domination and violence as their way in the world. Nevertheless, when we approach the world with cynical despair we are enslaved to our own fear.
A while back a friend said to me, “I’m sick and tire of leaders talking about ‘hope.’ I want to hear about action.”
Surely, in a broken world, action for healing and wholeness is necessary, but such action, scripture tells us, happens precisely where there is hope.
The hope that scripture speaks of is born in the midst of the brokenness of the world. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”
Hope begins in brokenness because compassion is not possible in the absence of passion – where there is no suffering there can be no suffering with. Where there is no such compassion there is no healing.
In the gospel story for this morning Jesus sees the grieving mother – a widow who has lost her only son – and he is moved deeply. The Greek in this text is instructive. Where the English reads, “he had compassion for her,” the Greek word is Splagchnizomai. It means literally to be moved in one’s bowels. In other words, Jesus reacts at a gut-level. He finds the situation gut-wrenching.
In the New Testament this verb is only used ten times, and aside from three uses in parables, it is only used in reference to Jesus. He is the one who is moved deeply to compassion.
And in the story in front of us, he is moved to such compassion not for someone who is a member of his family or tribe or town, but for a stranger. Indeed, Jesus feels this gut-wrenching compassion for the outsiders, the marginalized, the sick and the crowds. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus feels this deep turning in response to two blind men (20:35). According to Mark’s account, Jesus feels it for a leper (1:41) and a demoniac (9:23). Both Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus felt this deep and transformative compassion for the crowds that followed him.
Since I’ve already dragged you into a bit of New Testament Greek, I’m going to drag you through a bit more. There’s a pattern in scripture throughout that is captured in this series of Greek words that share a common suffix: paranoia, metanoia, koinonia. The first one you probably recognize – it has to do with fear. The second, metanoia, is most often translated by repent, to turn from an old way to a new one. The final word in the series, koinania, means community. The pattern in scripture captured in these words is this: from fear we turn to community. It’s what happens in the miracle stories when Jesus is moved to action and the sufferers are restored to community.
When Jesus feels so deeply moved he moves to action – healing, feeding, bringing new life to situations fraught with fear where death seems to have triumphed and despair holds sway.
Precisely in these places where Jesus feels so moved we are called to follow, to go and do likewise, to be compassionate as God is compassionate, as Jesus instructed his followers.
Yet such places are the ones where we most often most fear to go: to the hovels of the poor where our own economic status burdens us; to places torn by violence where our own security might be at stake; to the bedside of the dying where our own mortality feels threatened; to the public square were for too long our silence has underscored our complicity in an unjust status quo.
But when our guts are moved that status quo shifts. That’s when we find ourselves walking in the Pride parade listening again to the stories of friends whose coming out cost them jobs and friends and family. That’s when we find ourselves serving meals at a soup kitchen and listening again to the stories of folks who live on the city’s streets. That’s when we find ourselves down on the Gulf Coast sweltering alongside a man who’s playing a blues riff on the guitar he just picked up and dumped flood water out of in the back room of his mother’s condemned house. That’s when we find ourselves considering again our deepest sense of call to lives of compassion, of suffering with.
And precisely there, with blues echoing out of a water-damaged old guitar, we find liberating hope. For when we stand in solidarity with one another, sharing each other’s burdens, binding one another up, feeling our hearts turned in compassion, we experience the transformative power of hope.
That guy with the guitar? That’s one of my own experiences that came back to me this week as I thought about the liberating power of hope. I cannot recall the man’s name any longer, but I do remember laughing out loud with him as he picked up the ruined instrument and dumped a gallon of fetid flood water from it. As he started strumming it, and making up a ridiculous blues song, he said that the time for tears had passed. They’d cried a few rivers into those rising storm tides, but the river of compassion embodied by the thousands of people who came to help had, indeed, turned their mourning into, if not quite dancing, then at least into laughter and song – into hope.
From that hope comes the power to free us from fear and the strength to rebuild shattered lives. From that hope comes new life. Out of places of deep fearfulness, through the transformation of hope comes recreation and new community.
May our lives conform to this pattern and may we follow the way of the compassionate Christ. Amen.

Focusing the Light

A Sermon for More Light Sunday

June 3, 2007

John D. Green

“More light, more light,” cried the great poet Goethe from his deathbed. Sadly, we don’t know whether he meant that he wanted more light because his sight was failing, or that he was seeing more light than he had ever beheld. But light and its cousins are words that have long served our languages as metaphors for knowledge, understanding, guidance, goodness and happiness. If we’re pleased with a child’s grades, we say she is bright. If not, we say he’s dim. “Light” stands enshrined in the name of the watershed era of Western intellectual history, The Enlightenment. Surely our current decade will soon be known as The Endarkenment.

We human folk are blinded by pure light. A pure white page or canvas we call blank because it has no rational or artistic content. We require lines and shadows to understand what we see. It is only when ink or paint is applied that the page or canvas becomes legible or beautiful. As the French poet Louis Aragon put it, “Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness.”

The first letter of John assures us that “God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.” I believe this is true, and I believe that our doctrines and systematic theologies and confessions and affirmations about God and Jesus and Holy Spirit are attempts to apply depth and dimension to God’s pure light, the better to understand God, talk about God, talk to God. We cannot comprehend pure light, we require lines and shadows in order to see God’s form and shape, behold God’s majesty and grace. But make no mistake, the lines and shadows we apply to God’s pure light are not only expressions of wisdom and insight won over centuries of faithful study and prayerful seeking. They are also expressions of ignorance and misapprehension.

In what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I have much more to tell you, but you wouldn’t be able to understand it now.” Leave-taking is almost always difficult, both for the ones going and the ones staying behind. There is always a rush to make sure we’ve said everything we want to say, passed along all the important information and assurances each wants the others to receive, understand and share. In the conclusion of what must rank as one of the wordiest farewells ever, Jesus promises his followers that they will continue to learn, to understand, to grasp what is real, truthful, eternal. And the things that they will learn, the things we will learn, come from God, because everything that Jesus is, God is, and everything Jesus is, the Spirit is as well.

Today’s Gospel was in fact placed in the lectionary because it is Trinity Sunday, the day when the church celebrates its most unwieldy and challenging mystery, the declaration that God exists in three divine Persons: Father, Son and Spirit. Believe me, I know this part pretty well. In a previous parish associate relationship, the two times I could always count on being called on to preach were the Sunday after Easter and Trinity Sunday.

Today we celebrate More Light, because we are a More Light Presbyterian Church. We affirm that the biblical record does not contain all that we must know about our sexual selves, any more than it contains all that we must know about geography or the weather. When the Hebrew scriptures were written, the Earth was flat, astronomy was still astrology, and the overriding religious dynamic was the separation and survival of the Hebrew people. Anything that one of their enemies revered must be condemned as an abomination. So too in the Greek scriptures, the people who wrote them and first read them knew only homosexual behavior that was exploitive and abusive. The idea of mutual, nurturing sexual relationships among men and among women was unknown. And if those were unknown, you can imagine how far off the chart bisexual, polyamory and transgender would be.

Today we’ve finally learned not to fear people with different sexuality, but to accept them as equally valuable parts of the crazy quilt that is the human family. It is clear that the numbers of primarily homosexual men and women are relatively constant across cultures and eras. We are well on our way, we think, to righting a wrong that has needed More Light for centuries. Well and good.

But when we turn on the lights in the church, we begin to see a great many more things than grave errors about sexual orientation. More Light Presbyterians are concerned with one particular thesis, that sexual orientation is both a given and a gift, an unchangeable part of us that is as important and unique as our capacity to think, to act, and to sacrifice. But we on the vanguard of the Second Reformation must not forget that Martin Luther did not nail just one thesis on the door of the church in Wittenberg, he nailed 95 theses there. So too for us, there are many more issues that must be engaged, settled quickly and well, if the church of honest, loving people is to survive and thrive in the third millennium. But we are in grave danger, the church is in grave danger, from dark forces that seek to diminish the church by making it powerful, rich and fundamentalist. And we need no more vivid example than the Middle Ages to see the ruination that power, wealth and dogma can bring down upon the church.

We live in an era unlike almost any other in human history. Of all times and places for gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people, 21^st-century America is arguably one of the best. That is not to say that there is not much progress still to be made, nor that other parts of the world offer even more accepting and supportive options. But for the most part, middle-class urban people enjoy greater freedom and safety than GLBT people have ever had.

But make no mistake. As Dickens observed of another time and place, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Even though things are good for most GLBT folk in metropolitan areas, our nation and many other parts of the world remain deeply prejudiced against GLBT people, and all the more perilous because we ourselves are often unaware. Recently one of the fundamentalist homophobic preachers proposed that when scientists identify the precise genetic and biological mechanisms that lead to same-sex orientation in an adult, prospective parents will be able to determine whether a fetus will grow to be heterosexual or homosexual, and to correct one that is destined to have the wrong orientation. Interestingly enough, other fundamentalist homophobes attacked the notion immediately, not because it amounts to eugenics worthy of the Nazi regime but because it implicitly acknowledged that sexual orientation is a genetic and biological reality, not a matter of moral choice or suasion.

In fact the lights have been coming on for decades: Alfred Kinsey’s study, Sexual Response in the Human Male, was published in 1948, the first to document the numbers of men with homosexual orientation in the general population. Although some quibble about his statistics, Kinsey’s work started other scientists thinking, and the rest, as they say, is history. If the light gets much brighter, we’re going to need sunglasses in church. The evidence that sexual orientation is, at least in part, genetically fixed is stronger than the evidence that left- and right-handedness are so determined. Men and women in every generation have been persecuted, prosecuted, imprisoned, tortured, condemned and murdered because of a fact of life over which they had no choice. And I don’t mean left-handedness. Although of course, left-handed children were once believed to be the spawn of the devil and treated shabbily at best, and at worst, neglected or killed.

I believe we err when we ascribe fair-mindedness and purity of motive to those who oppose the welcoming of GLBT people into membership and leadership in the church. The evidence is simply too clear and the fairness too obvious to give the benefit of the doubt to those who continue to proclaim that GLBT people are unworthy. We should issue no free passes to those who advocate bigotry in the church of Jesus Christ. Sanctified ignorance is still ignorance, and I believe that wealthy and powerful interests lurk behind groups that seek to divide and conquer the mainline denominations over the issue of sexual orientation. Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, all of us are under siege over the welcoming of GLBT folk. And if resistance over this issue is fierce now, just wait till we tackle the authority of Scripture, the doctrine of sin, and the meaning of salvation, all of which are implicitly challenged in our acceptance and celebration of human sexuality in all its various wonders. As Bette Davis once advised, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

But a necessary one, and at the end we will find a new and loving church brimming over with God’s grace and justice, filled with happiness and hope, reaching out and welcoming all people with faith and doubts into the community of grace. But of course that is what we have here, today. We are already a model for the future.

I want to share a story with you. This happened to someone I met on a cruise in the Caribbean. I do not tell you that to boast about my travels, but to frame the context: We were on a small sailing ship with about 70 other men from the US and Canada. One of the Canadians related a conversation he had with a St. Lucian man. The St. Lucian asked the Canadian if he was part of the men’s group that was boarding the Windjammer. “Yes,” replied the Canadian. “Are you homosexual?” asked the St. Lucian. “Yes,” answered the Canadian. “My partner and I are married.” “Married?” asked the St. Lucian, surprised. “Yes,” answered the Canadian, “in Canada gay men can marry.” The St. Lucian frowned. “Which one of you is the woman?” “Neither,” answered the Canadian. “That’s the point. We’re both gay men.” “We don’t have gay men in St. Lucia,” said the other. “We have queers. They dress up like girls. We kill them.”

So you see, “More Light” isn’t just about who gets to sit on the Session, and who gets to stand in the pulpit. It is also about who gets to live. And even though we feel safe and free, it is important to remember that a great, great many of our sisters and brothers are not safe, not free to live openly as they are, with the one or ones they choose. And that our own safety and security are the legacy of a great many struggles and sacrifices, and are not guaranteed.