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Is God Bald? Lenten Sermon Series: God in
the 21st Century
Reading: Luke 8:4-8 The Parable of the Sower And when a great crowd came together and people from town after town
came to him, he said in a parable: "A sower went out to sow his seed;
and as he sowed, some fell along the path, and was trodden under foot,
and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock; and as
it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell
among thorns; and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And some fell
into good soil and grew, and yielded a hundredfold." As he said this,
he called out, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
Reading: Changing Frontiers of Liberal Religion, James
Luther Adams, 1957 Liberal religion by its very nature has aimed to live on the frontier
and to break new paths. Moreover, making no claims of infallibility for
itself, it has aimed also to be self-critical. But to remain critical
is by no means easy. Movement itself can be merely inertia. Terrain that
was once a frontier can become simply an old frontier; and an old frontier
is no longer a frontier. Strategies that were appropriate for former frontiers
may no longer be appropriate for the new situation. Self-appraisal is
therefore demanded if we are to recognize the frontiers that are vanishing
and if we are to find new strategies for the frontiers that are emerging.
It is demanded also if we are to resist the temptation to wander in the
wilderness of self-worship.
Prayer O God of all the generations that have been and all those yet to be, we would pause from the hectic activity of the week and seek a wisdom deeper than the passing flux of information that bombards us from all sides. For we live in a time when the dark side of human nature, its failings and its foibles, are daily on display, and we would not wish to be naïve about our ignoble capacities. But open our eyes to something more in the human soul. We live in a time when human beings wrestle with one another for the power to influence our country’s future direction, and we would not wish to sit by idly, passive to the influence of others. But open our hearts to something more in the human soul. We live in a time which will try men and women’s minds and hearts, and we would not seek to live in a time when absolutely nothing was at stake. But open our conscience to what is just and what is merciful, for surely that is how we would hope history, other people, and God would judge us. O God of all the generations that have been and all those yet to be, we would pause from the hectic activity of the week and seek a wisdom deeper than the passing flux of information that bombards us from all sides. AMEN.
Sermon What is a religious community? What marks off a community as religious?
Is it that it asserts belief in Jesus or God or Yaweh or Allah, or denies
belief in Jesus or God or Yaweh or Allah? Or, is a religious community
in the 21st century something more and very, very different than this?
Friend and colleague Earl Holt wrote, "To believe that life is a
journey is to have a religious view of life, while to be non-religious
is to believe that there is no journey to take." ("The Hero’s
Journey", Earl K. Holt, III, 1994) I think that to find and become
part of a community that sees life as a journey is to find a religious
community. But the study had an aim. The study was aimed at articulating not common
theological belief, nor some social or political commonality, nor any
common rebellion against the orthodoxies of religion. The study was aimed
at articulating the deepest possible bond that can exist between and among
human beings. A bond of fellowship and a promise of fidelity to one another
throughout life. A community, deeper than belief or rebellion. And early
on this aim for study and conversation reached an impasse over whether
to include the word "God" in the written expression of community.
Some were certain they could not continue in a journey with others if
that word was included, while others couldn’t if it was excluded.
What would they do? If the impasse could not be conquered the community
and the journey would be defeated, held captive by words. What is it about religious language that seems to puzzle us so? In the
Hebrew creation story human beings are given the power to name the beasts
of the earth, so there is an element of the divine in the capacity we
have to use language. In that same story God uses speech to create –
"God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light"
- and the Christian Scripture of the Gospel of John starts out with, "In
the beginning there was the Word." We recognize a power to words.
They are powerful tools, and religious words are tools to the theologian
in much the same way as a scalpel is to a surgeon. In fact, you can’t
do theology without religious language any more than the surgeon can operate
without a scalpel; although I guess the surgeon could. It would just be
painful and threaten the health of the patient. But it is true that we liberal religionists puzzle so over how to use
religious words. Maybe like the surgeon who is so aware of the ways an
operation can fail that the first incision isn’t ever made. Maybe we are puzzling over the wrong things. Take the question, "Is God bald?" A nonsensical question, someone might respond, and maybe it is. How could we know if God is bald, anymore than we can know that God is male, or active, or just, or that God exists! So, maybe it isn’t as nonsensical as we might first think, because maybe a question like this is a question of deeper significance, as are the questions of what we might know about God or what we can say we know about God. In many real ways, the question, "Is God bald?" is a question that sums up philosophy in the previous century and encompasses the problems we face in liberal religion at the dawn of a new one. In the religious enterprise philosophy and theology are companions, but with different roles, like buddies in a buddy movie. Philosophy’s role in the religious enterprise is formulate questions, to probe, to analyze a situation and discern the challenges and phrase the questions of existence in appropriate ways. Its companion theology must suggest and point towards a path of action, a choice, a decision, a faith that is acting always upon insufficient information, but nonetheless shaping life choices in this way and not that. Philosopher Bertrand Russell posed a question to 20th century philosophy
that came to encompass much of our problems with religious language. Russell’s
contribution to that century’s debate in philosophy began when he
asked, "Is the King of France bald?" In his time, as in ours,
there was no King of France. And in Russell’s time part of philosophy
claimed that words stood for objects and that’s how a word derived
its meaning. And, so, since there is no King of France the question was
nonsense. Yet, we can still comprehend the question. Maybe in the world
of logic there is a bald French monarch, but not in the world of hard
knocks. Philosophy presented us with a puzzle of words and their meaning:
How can a nonsense question make sense? Or to repeat Forrest Church’s observation, "God is not God’s name." A word does not have to denote an object like a name does, to have meaning. A word does more than just paint a picture of an object. There are different kinds of paintings than the depiction of a still life, as the local exhibit on Picasso shows. So, if we just ask, "What do you mean by the word, God?" in the manner of, "What object does the word God stand for?", we miss most of human experience because we miss the imagination. A word is a tool, not the picture of an object. So, if we seek out what a word can be used for it may help shape us towards a greater breadth of existence we might not otherwise have seen or heard. Take the word, "Liberal." Who among us would dispute that word is currently used to paint an exact portrait of someone colored by certain political theories and social policies? Even amongst us. We describe our associating together and measure its effect in terms derived primarily from politics or progressive social policies. But, a human being is not first and foremost a politician or social theorist. An individual is called to see and hear and try to understand life, and to live it appropriately. In other words, to discern the religious impulse. And so much of 20th century philosophy concerned itself with battling against the bewitching characteristics of language. In fact, much of 20th century philosophy was preoccupied with language, and with the puzzle that words and word usage entailed. And 20th century religious liberalism was equally bewitched by language until the bewitching became paralyzing, became a way of not acting and reflecting upon action as religious folk. People asked one another, "What do you mean by the word God?" as if that philosophical question were a religious one. And over time that concern over words chained us to conceiving of the words themselves as possessing some kind of power that required us to be pure about how we used them. Our liberal religious quest became a quest to purify language of its inconsistencies, incongruencies, inaccuracies, injustices. That became the new frontier. To use language precisely and to jettison what could not be used with certainty. "I believe in God" or "I do not believe in God" became the chief form of communicating the religious from one to another. And, "What do you mean by God?" became the chief response. And we created this puzzle of words, and this became the soil whereupon we scattered the seeds of a religious liberalism as it was handed down to us by our spiritual ancestors. In other words, we lost the capacity or willingness to engage the religious question and quality of our lives, and sowed seeds on rocks. The once new frontier is now the old one, and the soil upon that landscape is barren and dry, and the seeds scattered upon it whither and dry up for there is no moisture there any more. Human beings are now seeking what Joseph Campbell called the "rapture of being alive." There are no word puzzles on this new frontier, but there is the longing, the yearning, the thirst for an experience, a feeling of transcendence, an active search for God as a transcendent imminence. In our pursuit of pure language and precise use of words we have left behind the part of humanity that is engaged by and driven by the religious impulse. We have left behind the willingness and ability to scatter the seeds of the word "liberal" upon the soil of God. What need be a liberal now? A liberal religionist. A person willing to search for an experience of God as the foundation of the religious life, but shaping oneself towards experiencing the liberalis of God; liberalis, of freedom, noble, generous, emancipated from convention, to grow, abundant, bountiful, ample, full large, free from restraint, not narrow in mind. God is present in experiences that lure us towards these qualities in existence because the substance of God is of liberalis. One of my seminary professors long ago declared that learning about your faith is like learning a new language. There are new languages that need be learned on the new frontier of the 21st century, and old languages that need die away. The old frontier included rebelling against religion and religious language. But the new frontier is to find new meanings in a new time that yields new evidence of a new spirit through a new form of community. Last week I was talking with a member of this community, devoted seeing life as a journey and, thus, as a religious enterprise. And we were talking about how the world had changed since September 11th. But we weren’t talking about the change in our attitudes towards terrorism. We weren’t talking about the change in our sense of security or our need to be vigilant in ways we did not need to before. We weren’t talking about the war on terrorism, a war unlike any the 20th century and preceding centuries encompassed. And we weren’t talking about nationalism, patriotism, or the ways the United States’ economic driveness and political favoritism contributed to oppression. We were talking about the phenomenal, worldwide response of sympathy and sentiment to the families and victims of the attacks. It’s misunderstood if one sees it as the origin of patriotic nationalism, as conservatives do. It’s ignored if one sees it as a betrayal of the social, political, and economic inequalities that contributes to oppressed people lashing out at the West. This is a yield of the religious impulse. It is a new expression of the spirit. It is worldwide, and knows no boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, creed, or national boundaries. Whatever has been moving amongst human beings all these centuries bubbled to the surface after September 11th, and the response has been awe inspiring. It brings tears to the eyes of even the burliest of big men. It brings forth sympathy from even the hardened heart. It engages us as such a deep, deep level, beneath all that would divide the human family. It is noble, abundant, generous, not narrow in heart or mind. It is a liberating spirit. No longer can God be held captive by one locale, one faith, one group, or one individual, for the religious impulse is revealed now to have no boundaries. It is not the God of orthodox conformity, nor the God within. It is a social spirit, because it is a spirit that can create a new community and a new world, a liberality to compassion and justice and wholeness and love. It is that spirit that is sought by this community’s journey. |
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