Thinking Outside of the God Box
November 23, 2008
Exodus 3:13-15; Matthew 1:1-17
One of the pieces of wisdom that old preachers pass along to those who follow in their footsteps is, “don’t preach the lists.” In other words, stay away from the genealogies – the long lists of names that crop up here and there in scripture and are, let’s face it, a bit tedious and tongue twisting to read through. But there’s a point to these lists; especially the quirky genealogy of Jesus that Matthew includes full of scoundrels, murderers and harlots. Not exactly the kind of family background to produce the king of kings and lord of lords, but then again, I suppose you can choose your friends but not your family.
Of course, that list of friends that unfolds in the gospels is not a whole lot more reassuring, come to think of it: tax collectors, more harlots, lower-class folks.
It seems as if the entire story of Jesus is about busting out of the mold.
Obviously, I’m going to like that story!
I’m not often accused of having thinking that is stuck inside of “the box.” However, I will confess that my thinking about God was stuck in the God box for quite some time and my thinking about the possibilities of church was stuck in, well, the sandbox.
My sojourn away from church as a young adult was driven by my own inability, and, to be frank, that of the communities of faith I had been a part of, to think beyond the God of height to one of depth, to think beyond a church of institution to one of movement. Perhaps I did not pay enough attention to the lists, and maybe my pastoral leaders ignored them. I’ll unpack the distinctions a bit later, but I want to suggest first that the failure was one of teaching and learning the distinctive and crucially important Christian practice of reflection or of thinking theologically.
I don’t mean by this merely the study of Christian theology or of foundational Christian texts – both Biblical and the texts produced by the post-Biblical tradition such as Augustine, Aquinas, the Desert Fathers, the writings from the Monastic periods, or contemporary classics such as Bonhoeffer, Barth or Tillich.
Although such studies are important and necessary for the living word of God to remain a lively word in our lives, I am more immediately concerned here with our capacity to see God acting in the world around us and to name God accurately in our lives. The ability to imagine God more fully and to name God more accurately for our time is a crucial task for the church in the 21st century, for when the God of love and justice is misunderstood as a God of merciless judgment human beings will call down the imagined wrath of God in holocaust that incinerates the innocent, the outcast, the marginalized and the powerless.
Therefore, our common task of theological reflection is critically important not merely as some esoteric academic exercise, but as central to our calling to live out the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
By way of example here are two stories.
First, from one of my favorite theological texts, Sports Illustrated, comes the story of two young professional athletes who were involved, within the same year or so, in separate horrendous automobile accidents. Each of the young men was held up as a role model in his community. Each was a Christian. Each was in the phenomenal physical condition of elite athletes. One walked away from his accident without a scratch. The other was grievously injured and, if I recall correctly at this point, died from those injuries some months later.
Rick Reilly asked the one who walked away without a scratch about the accident, and the young man said, “as the car was flipping out of control I just took my hands off the wheel and called out to Jesus.”
When Reilly asked why he’d walked away without injury when the other guy, who also spoke of praying in the midst of his accident, had suffered such horrible injuries, the athlete responded, “he must not have said it right.”
When I read that story several years ago I remember thinking, “what a strange notion of God that is.”
That God, a God of height, up there somewhere with a private line that requires secret codes to access, answer prayers capriciously and pulls the strings of our lives like some mad puppeteer. As those who follow the bloodiest century in human history – as those living after Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda and in the midst of Darfur – what can be said of such a God other than that he – and I use the masculine purposefully here – he is either not God or not good … or, perhaps, not good at being God.
That God is stuck inside a long, narrow, vertical box – a sarcophagus for a dead idol of our limited imaginations, and yet an image for God that remains dominant in so many churches, synagogues and mosques, in popular culture and imagination, and, significantly, in the minds of so many who call themselves atheists.
But what other images of God are possible if that God is dead?
Here’s another story, one that I posted earlier this week on my blog and beg your indulgence to repeat this morning.
As many of you know, my aunt Ruth died earlier this month after a long battle with cancer. Her memorial service was last Saturday and much of the clan gathered to worship and to honor and remember a life lived incredibly well and faithfully. Ruth and my uncle John, together with a small group of faithful Presbyterians, founded Camp Hanover outside of Richmond in 1957 – at the height of massive resistance to desegregation of schools and public accommodations in Virginia. From its inception, Hanover has been a place that welcomes everyone and its early days as a fully integrated southern institution came in the face of significant opposition.
Ruth died two days after election day and her final words, to my cousin Jo, were “see what we can accomplish when we all work together.”
Aunt Ruth was also an accomplished artist. At her memorial service, at Ginter Park Presbyterian Church near their home in Richmond, a banner that Ruth had constructed graced the sanctuary.
In her reflection, the Rev. Carla Pratt Keyes, the current pastor, told the story behind the banner. It was a story that Robert Fulghum tells about a conversation with philosopher Alexander Papaderos. In response to Fulghum's question, "what is the meaning of life?", Papaderos answered,
"When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.
"I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine -- in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.
"I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.
"I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world -- into the black places in the hearts of men -- and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."
Ruth heard that story and produced a piece of art that suggests mirror fragments falling from the Holy Spirit into outstretched hands of every size and color. Like all good art, the piece resists reduction to any single explanation or to words, but as I reflected on my aunt's final words and the testimony of her art, I thought about being one small part of the many who are holding small mirrors these days, trying to catch the light and reflect it into the darkest places of our world.
The God of a thousand shards of mirror is a very different God from the God of puppet strings.
Obviously, both are metaphors, images for a God who is beyond our words, but words and images and metaphors are all we have. More to the point, the words, images and metaphors we choose for God make all the difference in the world to the way we ultimately respond to God.
I don’t want any part of and will have no truck with a God who wills the deaths of innocents for some hazy higher purpose. But the God who, in the resurrection of the Christ, says a final, pleading “no” to such sacrifice, such violence, such murder for so-called “just causes,” well, that God calls me and compels me to act in the world with compassion and justice and mercy and love by means that are congruent with ends, by ways that reflect ultimate purposes.
That is the God I meet in Jesus. That is the God whose light spreads into the world and whose light I am called to reflect into the world’s darkest places. That is the God I meet in all those others who are also trying to reflect light into the darkness. That is the God indicated in the Quaker wisdom, “let the light in you seek out the light in others.”
That God is a God measured not so much in height as in depth and breadth – a God whose dimensions are not confined to the vertical but also include the horizontal, spreading out across creation and incarnate – not fully or completely and, too often to be sure debased – but incarnate nonetheless in creation itself, in you and in me.
That’s why the cross remains for me such a powerful symbol. Not only does it represent God’s “no” to violence, but moreover it speaks God’s final, powerful, undeniable “yes” of resurrection in the face of humanity’s fearful “no” to the love that Jesus embodied. Moreover, in its very construction, the cross draws together both the transcendent nature of God – the vertical aspect, if you will – with the incarnate One and the continuing incarnation in and through us – the horizontal aspect of God, if you will.
Thus it is that I can sing with a faith that is not triumphal but rather that of a servant, “lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.” Amen.
Exodus 3:13-15; Matthew 1:1-17
One of the pieces of wisdom that old preachers pass along to those who follow in their footsteps is, “don’t preach the lists.” In other words, stay away from the genealogies – the long lists of names that crop up here and there in scripture and are, let’s face it, a bit tedious and tongue twisting to read through. But there’s a point to these lists; especially the quirky genealogy of Jesus that Matthew includes full of scoundrels, murderers and harlots. Not exactly the kind of family background to produce the king of kings and lord of lords, but then again, I suppose you can choose your friends but not your family.
Of course, that list of friends that unfolds in the gospels is not a whole lot more reassuring, come to think of it: tax collectors, more harlots, lower-class folks.
It seems as if the entire story of Jesus is about busting out of the mold.
Obviously, I’m going to like that story!
I’m not often accused of having thinking that is stuck inside of “the box.” However, I will confess that my thinking about God was stuck in the God box for quite some time and my thinking about the possibilities of church was stuck in, well, the sandbox.
My sojourn away from church as a young adult was driven by my own inability, and, to be frank, that of the communities of faith I had been a part of, to think beyond the God of height to one of depth, to think beyond a church of institution to one of movement. Perhaps I did not pay enough attention to the lists, and maybe my pastoral leaders ignored them. I’ll unpack the distinctions a bit later, but I want to suggest first that the failure was one of teaching and learning the distinctive and crucially important Christian practice of reflection or of thinking theologically.
I don’t mean by this merely the study of Christian theology or of foundational Christian texts – both Biblical and the texts produced by the post-Biblical tradition such as Augustine, Aquinas, the Desert Fathers, the writings from the Monastic periods, or contemporary classics such as Bonhoeffer, Barth or Tillich.
Although such studies are important and necessary for the living word of God to remain a lively word in our lives, I am more immediately concerned here with our capacity to see God acting in the world around us and to name God accurately in our lives. The ability to imagine God more fully and to name God more accurately for our time is a crucial task for the church in the 21st century, for when the God of love and justice is misunderstood as a God of merciless judgment human beings will call down the imagined wrath of God in holocaust that incinerates the innocent, the outcast, the marginalized and the powerless.
Therefore, our common task of theological reflection is critically important not merely as some esoteric academic exercise, but as central to our calling to live out the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
By way of example here are two stories.
First, from one of my favorite theological texts, Sports Illustrated, comes the story of two young professional athletes who were involved, within the same year or so, in separate horrendous automobile accidents. Each of the young men was held up as a role model in his community. Each was a Christian. Each was in the phenomenal physical condition of elite athletes. One walked away from his accident without a scratch. The other was grievously injured and, if I recall correctly at this point, died from those injuries some months later.
Rick Reilly asked the one who walked away without a scratch about the accident, and the young man said, “as the car was flipping out of control I just took my hands off the wheel and called out to Jesus.”
When Reilly asked why he’d walked away without injury when the other guy, who also spoke of praying in the midst of his accident, had suffered such horrible injuries, the athlete responded, “he must not have said it right.”
When I read that story several years ago I remember thinking, “what a strange notion of God that is.”
That God, a God of height, up there somewhere with a private line that requires secret codes to access, answer prayers capriciously and pulls the strings of our lives like some mad puppeteer. As those who follow the bloodiest century in human history – as those living after Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda and in the midst of Darfur – what can be said of such a God other than that he – and I use the masculine purposefully here – he is either not God or not good … or, perhaps, not good at being God.
That God is stuck inside a long, narrow, vertical box – a sarcophagus for a dead idol of our limited imaginations, and yet an image for God that remains dominant in so many churches, synagogues and mosques, in popular culture and imagination, and, significantly, in the minds of so many who call themselves atheists.
But what other images of God are possible if that God is dead?
Here’s another story, one that I posted earlier this week on my blog and beg your indulgence to repeat this morning.
As many of you know, my aunt Ruth died earlier this month after a long battle with cancer. Her memorial service was last Saturday and much of the clan gathered to worship and to honor and remember a life lived incredibly well and faithfully. Ruth and my uncle John, together with a small group of faithful Presbyterians, founded Camp Hanover outside of Richmond in 1957 – at the height of massive resistance to desegregation of schools and public accommodations in Virginia. From its inception, Hanover has been a place that welcomes everyone and its early days as a fully integrated southern institution came in the face of significant opposition.
Ruth died two days after election day and her final words, to my cousin Jo, were “see what we can accomplish when we all work together.”
Aunt Ruth was also an accomplished artist. At her memorial service, at Ginter Park Presbyterian Church near their home in Richmond, a banner that Ruth had constructed graced the sanctuary.
In her reflection, the Rev. Carla Pratt Keyes, the current pastor, told the story behind the banner. It was a story that Robert Fulghum tells about a conversation with philosopher Alexander Papaderos. In response to Fulghum's question, "what is the meaning of life?", Papaderos answered,
"When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.
"I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine -- in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.
"I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.
"I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world -- into the black places in the hearts of men -- and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."
Ruth heard that story and produced a piece of art that suggests mirror fragments falling from the Holy Spirit into outstretched hands of every size and color. Like all good art, the piece resists reduction to any single explanation or to words, but as I reflected on my aunt's final words and the testimony of her art, I thought about being one small part of the many who are holding small mirrors these days, trying to catch the light and reflect it into the darkest places of our world.
The God of a thousand shards of mirror is a very different God from the God of puppet strings.
Obviously, both are metaphors, images for a God who is beyond our words, but words and images and metaphors are all we have. More to the point, the words, images and metaphors we choose for God make all the difference in the world to the way we ultimately respond to God.
I don’t want any part of and will have no truck with a God who wills the deaths of innocents for some hazy higher purpose. But the God who, in the resurrection of the Christ, says a final, pleading “no” to such sacrifice, such violence, such murder for so-called “just causes,” well, that God calls me and compels me to act in the world with compassion and justice and mercy and love by means that are congruent with ends, by ways that reflect ultimate purposes.
That is the God I meet in Jesus. That is the God whose light spreads into the world and whose light I am called to reflect into the world’s darkest places. That is the God I meet in all those others who are also trying to reflect light into the darkness. That is the God indicated in the Quaker wisdom, “let the light in you seek out the light in others.”
That God is a God measured not so much in height as in depth and breadth – a God whose dimensions are not confined to the vertical but also include the horizontal, spreading out across creation and incarnate – not fully or completely and, too often to be sure debased – but incarnate nonetheless in creation itself, in you and in me.
That’s why the cross remains for me such a powerful symbol. Not only does it represent God’s “no” to violence, but moreover it speaks God’s final, powerful, undeniable “yes” of resurrection in the face of humanity’s fearful “no” to the love that Jesus embodied. Moreover, in its very construction, the cross draws together both the transcendent nature of God – the vertical aspect, if you will – with the incarnate One and the continuing incarnation in and through us – the horizontal aspect of God, if you will.
Thus it is that I can sing with a faith that is not triumphal but rather that of a servant, “lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.” Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:40 PM
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