How do you know about God?

My friend Dan sent me a good question:

I’ve been very peaceful with my theology for some time. I start with the basic foundation that there is a God and that God loves us. Everything else grows from that premise. Everything must fit with the concept of a loving God.

So what’s the problem? It occurred to me a few days ago that the energy that I experience and what I call God could be the ‘collective unconscious’ of humanity. What if ‘God’ isn’t a conscious being or deity, but, rather the great cloud of ‘us.’ I’d rather believe that God is a benevolent entity, but how do I know? I won’t believe something just because someone said it’s so. I have to experience it for myself and it has to make sense to me. I thought I’d done that, but maybe not.

So… tell me… how do you come to believe that God exists? How do you know God is God and not just our higher selves?

My Answer:

I don’t know. And for me, that’s not a problem, it is as it should be. Not knowing is a prerequisite for faith. Or, rather, knowing that I don’t know, having the humility to know that I don’t know, is the prerequisite for faith.

There are a lot of the collected scriptures that teach us that when we think we know God, we had better watch out: God is going to surprise us. Like the bit from the book of Job that we will read in church on Sunday. Everybody in that story thinks they know God. Job’s friends think they know God. They consider all that Job has lost—all his children have died, all his wealth has been looted, and he is has become a sick, sad man—and they say to him, “Oh, man, you must have really messed up. Job, what have you done to made God so mad?” That’s a paraphrase, naturally.

Job thinks he knows God too, and he thinks that he has been treated unjustly. But when God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, God puts everybody in their place, saying, “You think you know me? You don’t know nothin’!” That’s a paraphrase too.

The fact that scriptures were written by people, who were doing their best to understand the unknowable, that in itself is an aid in interpretation. For thousands of years people have tried to understand God, and have told stories and written poems and songs to pass on to others the idea of God. Taken as a whole, the Bible, the Koran, the collected scriptures of the world's religions are perspectives on this mysterious concept of that presence that we sense, that in which we live and move and have our being, that breath that stirred the waters of the deep, that breath of life which is our beginning and our end.

So what if God is our “collective unconscious?” So what if God is the web of being that connects us to every living thing? So what if God is “our higher selves?” Those are all good metaphors. Metaphors are, by nature, both true and untrue. “A mighty fortress is our God,” is true and untrue. The experience of God can be like hunkering down in the castle keep during a battle, but not always. Sometimes God is an eagle that lifts us up out of danger. Sometimes God is a mother and I am a hungry infant, sometimes God is a shepherd and I am a lost sheep. Sometimes God is Ad-Aware and I am the hard-drive burdened with spy-ware and trojans—there’s an image too new for scripture, one which is probably already out of date.

I trust that God is. I believe that I will never know God perfectly, but that God is a worthy pursuit. What I have come to believe about God is that God is love, or the ability to love, or the quality that is love, that life-creating power. I believe that God smiles upon fairness, justice, mercy, kindness, whatever is good and pure and life-giving. I think God gets really pissed off at greed, and war, and waste, and meanness.

I believe that people live abundant life when we are part of the love of God. And I believe people are diminished when we fail to be loving. And I believe that whether people succeed or fail to love, as long as we live, we are undeniably connected to God, and in that connection is the potential for redemption, salvation, new life.

And I believe that we may continue in that relationship with God even when we cease to be, even in death, and afterwards. But I don’t know. And that is as it should be, for now.

Looking Out for Number One

Imagine you could have everything. Where would you put it? That’s just one observation on the problem of wealth. And it is a problem, no question about it. There was this rich guy once who ran up to Jesus, and asked him, “What must I do?”
And Jesus said the same thing every good Rabbi says, “You know the commandments? Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, etc….”
“Yes, yes!” the guy says, “I have kept these commandments since I was a boy!”
By this time, we’re picking up a sense of desperation. If he knows the commandments, and he keeps them, why is this guy running after Jesus? I mean, what more can he do?
So Jesus, looking at him and loving him—maybe because he too is sensing the anxiety that this man carries with him—said, “OK, here’s one more thing you can do. Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow me.” And the man went away grieving, because he had many possessions.
Now, most of the time, I feel pretty smug about this rich man, because I know I am not him. I am not a man, and I am not rich by local standards. My car is old. I don’t even own my own mortgage. I buy store brands. I get some stuff at the secondhand store. This laptop computer I’m writing on has Windows XP! It’s like, four years old!
But the truth is, I have so much stuff I can’t walk a straight line across my basement. It’s full of possessions for which I have no immediate need. I thought about having a garage sale this summer, but the other people with whom I share this stuff, they vetoed the idea.
And I am haunted by a story I heard from Brian Sirchio, who goes to Haiti every now and then to get some perspective. He was working for the Sisters of Charity, being a barber because that’s what they needed him to be that day. As he was cutting a man’s hair they got to talking about the rich and the poor, and Brian asked him, “Do you think I’m rich?
“I don’t know you well enough to say,” the man replied. “Tell me, how many times a week do you eat?”
“Come again?"
“I mean, do you eat every day? Because if you eat food every day, you are rich.”
So. That changes my whole perspective on this grieving rich man who had a problem with possessions.
Now, the wealthy church tradition emphasizes the part of the text that assures us that with God, all things are possible. And the wealthy Protestant evangelist will rationalize that the man’s problem wasn’t his wealth but his lack of faith in Jesus—you see, the man was trying to be saved by his works.
But that is just too easy. I think we need to let this text keep us on edge. We need this text when we are tempted to believe that what Jesus wants most for us is to win the lottery. We need this text to remind us that Jesus did not say to the man, “Put a tenth of your gross income in the offering plate and don’t worry so much!”
Wealth, which is commonly viewed as a sign of God’s blessing by those who follow the prosperity gospel, is not so much a blessing as a burdensome temptation. It is the golden calf. Money provides the “daily bread” for which we pray, but money is also the thing which most threatens to replace God as our Lord and master.
The very first commandment: I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me. Perhaps Jesus demonstrated that the man had not, as he claimed, followed all the commandments since his youth. He should have been looking out for Number One.

--Thoughts for Sunday, October 11.

The Jesus Ethic

"Is it lawful..." began the question. "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
It was a trick question. They already knew the answer. Which is why Jesus answered their question with a question, "What did Moses say about it?"
Yes. It is lawful.
But wait, there's more.
According to the law (see Deut 24:1), a man could divorce his wife if he found something objectionable about her. There is no elaboration on what sort of objectionable feature-- presumably if she burns the bread or talks back, or rolls her eyes at him in an objectionable way, a man could write up a bill of divorce and throw her out. There would be no division of assets, no custody disputes (the children remain the property of the father). There is no provision at all, in the law of Moses, for a wife to divorce her husband, and in fact, if the man makes false charges against a woman, he may not divorce her ever. Apparently, it did not occur to Moses that the woman might not wish to remain the wife of a man who would be so cruel. In the whole of the law, women and children are about equal with cattle.
The Jesus ethic is not about what is lawful. Jesus criticises the law as something created by Moses to accommodate men's hardness of heart.
Jesus would not ask "is it lawful?" Jesus would have us ask "Is it compassionate?"
Is is compassionate for a man to throw his wife out of the house with nothing but a certificate of divorce?
In the past, this gospel reading was excised from the context of the gospel and used as a mallet to beat on people who divorce and remarry. I suppose in some churches it is still used that way. But I don't think Jesus was about replacing the law of Moses with an even stricter legalism.
Consider the object lesson that follows this discussion.
They (and would they, perhaps, be women?) were bringing children (children being a little lower on the scale of humanity than women) to Jesus that he might bless them. The disciples "spoke sternly" to them, shooed them away. But when Jesus saw this he was indignant, and said "Let the children come!"
And he enfolded them in his arms and blessed them.
The last and the least of these, he blessed them.
"What would Jesus do?" is sometimes an inadequate question. How can we know what Jesus would do with our complex, urban, industrial, information-age quandries?
"What is lawful?" is also an inadequate question, as Jesus demonstrated. The law is of human origin, and therefore, always skewed to someone's benefit.
"What is compassionate?" Now there is a good question. "What is the most compassionate, loving way to respond to the benefit of the last and the least of God's children?" That, I believe, is the Jesus ethic.

for Sunday, October 4, 2009

Hold your tongue!

Look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
James 3:4-5

We all make mistakes, "James" wrote. In speaking, in writing, in communicating we all make mistakes. Not many of you should be teachers, because teachers will be judged with a greater strictness, and we all make many mistakes in speaking. People who don't make mistakes in speaking, they must be perfect! Because if you can control your urge to speak (when you don't know what you are talking about, but you don't realize that you don't know what you are talking about), well, then you must be perfect.
The hardest thing about being a preacher: You have to speak. At least once a week, for 10 minutes or so, you have to have something to say, even if you know you don't know what you are talking about. The greatest temptation is to use the sermon to show people how clever is their pastor. That is always a mistake, for, when I try to be clever I am most likely to reveal myself as a fool, and not a "fool for Christ" either, just a damned fool.
As a child, for a long time I refused to speak. That was probably a good instinct. I was the youngest in the home and in the neighborhood, and I learned that when I spoke, people laughed. It offended me. So I kept my words to myself.
Perhaps we should all be so careful.
There are a lot of people who really ought to measure their words more carefully, mete them out as if they were nearing the end of their lifetime supply. Most of these people work for a certain television network.
Let there be more peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Amen.

For August 30, 2009

In the sight of God, pure, unadulterated religion is this: to seek out and care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself untainted by the world. (James 1:27, my translation)

One constant conversation that is going on throughout scripture, in both the Hebrew scriptures which we call our "old" testament, and in the Christian scriptures which we call "new," is, how can we be sure that our religion is the true, genuine article, and not just some human invention? One school of thought is that as a people of a faith, we must safeguard ourselves from others. That is where the "holiness code" weighs in. The dietary laws, the laws pertaining to personal appearance (what not to wear, how not to wear your hair or trim your beard), the instructions on how to number the days and celebrate festivals-- these are all about how "we" are distinguished from "them."
The warnings given voice in the stories of conquest-- do not leave any survivors, do not intermarry-- this is the extreme, violent end of the spectrum of the biblical conversation. The stories of Ruth and of Jonah are meant to contradict the xenophobia of the conquest narratives. One is the story of a foreign woman who gives rise to the kingdom of David; the other a testimony that God's love and mercy extends even to the non-Hebrew city of Nineveh.
The gospels tell us that Jesus was criticized for being irreligious. He ate with defiled hands (defiled, meaning not ritually cleansed before the meal). "So, you are supposed to be this great rabbi, and you don't even follow the rules? How come?"
Jesus responded by quoting another part of the scriptures, the book of the prophet Isaiah, who said,

This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.
The gospel of Matthew puts it even more plainly. In a series of curses, Jesus says,

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin [the herbs from the garden, not very valuable], and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. (Matt. 23:23)

Even so, after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the early Christian leaders struggled to define their faith, when people who were not Jewish like them came to them to be baptized. Some thought these people ought to become Jewish first, obey the customs of the Jewish people, and be circumcised. That was the first Christian identity crisis. It was resolved in favor of inclusion. "What God has made clean, you must not call profane," is the message that Peter heard in a vision, and later told to the other apostles, adding "who was I that I should hinder God?" (Acts 11:17)
As it has through the ages, the question arises, even now. How do we know that our religion is the the religion? Some people respond by drawing boundaries between "us" and "them," establishing rules about who is in and who is out. The rules rarely have anything to do with the heart of the faith.
James' answer: it's not about what you wear. It's not about the words you use when you pray. Here is what genuine religion looks like, to God: go and search for orphans and the widows, and attend to them in their distress.
Your actions speak louder than your words. As he wrote elsewhere, what good is it if you talk the talk, if you say to someone who is naked and hungry, "God bless you, stay warm and eat well," and do not lift a finger to help them! No good at all!
As for that second phrase, "to keep oneself untainted by the world," well, I think by "the world" the author means the culture, the society, which is all about appearances. You are what you pretend to be in this world. Don't let the world color you phony.

For August 9, 2009

We Are Members of One Another

Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, 19th century:
We are leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Ephesians 4:25-5:2
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.
Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.
Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.
Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

For Sunday, July 19, 2009

"A Dwelling Place for God"
Once upon a time, when David was king, he was talking with Nathan, the man of God, about building a house to replace the tent in which (so it was thought) God was currently residing. Nathan agreed that it was a solid idea.
But it turns out, God was offended by the idea. God never asked for a house, and God certainly didn't need David to build him a house, as if God were one of David's wives. God was not going to be "kept" by David.
David's mistake was thinking that God was somehow limited to the tabernacle (the God-tent), that God's presence could be carried around in the ark of the covenant (the God-box). But it was a common mistake, one that the people in the biblical stories make again and again. It's written that way because that's the way people are-- we constantly need reminding, that God does not live in a box. Or a Tent, or on a Mountain, or in a Temple or in a City... though God can be experienced in any or all of these places.
We forget, that God is not limited to our side of the border. That we cannot claim to have God on our side, because God is not going to put up with that kind of talk. As if we were God's keepers.
Paul, in his letter to the church folk in Ephesus, reminisced about how he used to think of Ephesians as foreigners, aliens, nobodies. But he no longer thought of them that way. "You are no longer strangers," he wrote. Once he would have thought of them as filth, but he wrote to them to remind them that they were "a dwelling place for God." And God's presence is not filth.
We worship in special buildings we call "churches" or "temples" or "congregations" or "sanctuaries." Sometimes people refer to their church as "God's house." I remember my mother scolding me for kicking the pew in front of me when I was particularly bored, she said something about it not being polite to kick the furniture when you are a guest in someone's house. I laughed, derisively as only a 6-year-old can, and said, "but this isn't anybody's house!"
"Yes it is," she replied, solemnly. "This is Gawd's house and that is Gawd's furniture."
I was, naturally, horrified. I haven't kicked a pew since (not on purpose anyway). I can not commend my mother's parenting style, but it did have the desired immediate effect.
We call it "God's house" (and perhaps even "God's furniture") to signify our respect for the place, and for the purpose to which it is dedicated, but, let's make this perfectly clear: God is not kept in any kind of box, not a wood-frame church in the vale, not a cathedral, crystal or otherwise.
In fact, God is so beyond any of our boxes.
God is so beyond the limits of language that anything we say about God is inadequate, and inaccurate. Including this.