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What is Reasonable
About God? Lenten Sermon Series: God in the 21st Century Readings: Luke 15, The
Parable of the Prodigal Son Once there was this man who had
two sons. The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give
me the share of the property that’s coming to me."
So he divided his resources between them. Not too many days later, the younger son got all his things
together and left home for a faraway country, where he squandered his
property by living extravagantly. Just when he had spent it all, a serious
famine swept through that country, and he began to do without. So he
went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who
sent him out to his farm to feed the pigs. He longed to satisfy his
hunger with the carob pods, which the pigs usually ate; but no one offered
him anything. Coming to his senses he said, "Lots of my father’s
hired hands have more than enough to eat, while here I am dying of starvation!
I’ll get up and go to my father and I’ll say to him, ‘Father,
I have sinned against heaven and affronted you; I don’t deserve
to be called a son of yours any longer; treat me like one of your hired
hands.’" And he got up and returned to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father caught
sight of him and was moved to compassion. He went running out to him,
threw his arms around his neck, and kissed him. And the son said to
him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and affronted you; I
don’t deserve to be called a son of yours any longer." But the father said to his slaves, "Quick! Bring
out the finest robe and put it on him’ put a ring on his finger
and sandals on his feet. Fetch the fat calf and slaughter it; let’s
have a feast and celebrate, because this son of mine was dead and has
come back to life; he was lost and now if found." And they started
celebrating. Now his elder son was out in the field; and as he got
closer to the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the
servant-boys over and asked what was going on. He said to him, "Your brother has come home and your
father has slaughtered the fat calf, because he has him back safe and
sound." But he was angry and refused to go in. So his father came
out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, "See
here, all these years I have slaved for you. I never once disobeyed
any of your orders; yet you never once provided me with a kid goat so
I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours shows
up, the one who has squandered your estate with prostitutes – for
him you slaughter the fat calf." "I Call That Mind Free," responsive reading
by William Ellery Channing
PRAYER Oh God, thank you for this good life. And forgive us when we do not love it enough. And strengthen us for the days ahead. Fortify our will, so that when conscience speaks we act. Invigorate our moral sensibilities, so when we face good and evil we have the courage to choose and the perseverance to see our choices through. Soften our hearts to the needs of those around us, that we may love them as we ourselves would be loved. And steer us to where we are needed, especially to those needs we wouldn’t otherwise see. Thank you for this good life, and what makes us free. AMEN
SERMON I have so appreciated up to now the journey we have taken together as we have tried as best we could to understand the troubling and marvelous times in which we live and the ways in which we might engage those days deeper and more meaningfully. It is a sign that we are building a spiritual community that we have undertaken hard and profound tasks together, in conversations during the week and conversations on Sunday morning. This Lenten series is an extended conversation about the ways we can conceive of the ultimate power and spirit that moves amongst human beings to form authentic community, how to conceive of that spirit in ways appropriate to the 21st century. It is an awesome, exciting, thought-provoking journey, which hopefully engages us at our most vulnerable and, thus, most receptive levels of understanding.
Calling the theological giant's stranglehold on the religion
industry "blatantly anti-competitive," a U.S. district judge
ruled Monday that God is in violation of anti-monopoly laws and ordered
Him to be broken up into several less powerful deities. "God has willfully and actively thwarted competition
from other deities and demigods, promoting His worship with such unfair
scare tactics as threatening non-believers with eternal damnation,"
wrote District Judge Charles Elliot Schofield in his decision. "God clearly commands that there shall be no other
gods before Him, and He frequently employs the phrase 'I AM the Lord'
to intimidate potential deserters," prosecuting attorney Geoffrey
Albert said. "God uses other questionable strongarm tactics to
secure and maintain humanity's devotion, demanding, among other things,
that people sanctify their firstborn to Him and obtain circumcisions
as a show of faith. There have also been documented examples of Him
smiting those caught worshipping graven images." Attorneys for God did not deny such charges. They did,
however, note that God offers followers "unbeatable incentives"
in return for their loyalty, including eternal salvation, protection
from harm, and "fruitfulness." Leading theologians are applauding the God breakup, saying
that it will usher in a new era of greater worshipping options, increased
efficiency, and more personalized service. "God's prayer-response system has been plagued by
massive, chronic backlogs, and many prayers have gone unanswered in
the process," said Gene Suozzi, a Phoenix-area Wiccan. "With
polytheism, you pray to the deity specifically devoted to your concern.
If you wish to have children, you pray to the fertility goddess. If
you want to do well on an exam, you pray to the god of wisdom, and so
on. This decentralization will result in more individualized service
and swifter response times." One deity who is welcoming the verdict is the ancient
Greek god Zeus, who described himself as "jubilant" and "absolutely
vindicated." "For thousands of years, I've been screaming that
this third-rate sky deity ripped me off wholesale," said Zeus,
speaking from his Mt. Olympus residence. "Every good idea He ever
had He took from me: Who first created men in his own image? Who punished
mankind for its sins? Who lived eternally up in the clouds? And the
whole fearsome, patriarchal, white-beard, thunderbolt thing? I was doing
that eons before this two-bit hustler started horning in on the action…" "This decision is a crushing blow to God worshippers
everywhere, and we refuse to submit to a breakup until every possible
avenue of argument is pursued," lead defense attorney Childers
said. "I have every confidence that God will ultimately win, as
He and His lawyers are all-powerful." The other night I heard a rumbling mid winter thunderstorm
move through our area, the sound of the gods bowling, my mother told
me when I was a toddler, leaving the air and ground with the smell of
newness and re-creation and rebirth. Had I lived a thousand years before,
in medieval Europe, that thunderstorm would have sounded considerably
different. It is hard for us to understand how people in different cultures
and times grasped and made sense of their reality, but it surely was
a different reality from our own. In medieval Europe commoners wore
no wristwatches so church bells tolled the time of the day. The morning
milking of the cows would begin and end with the ringing of church bells.
The plowing of the fields would begin and end with the ringing of church
bells. Sewing and cleaning and meal preparation, all household chores
would begin and end with the ringing of church bells. And during thunderstorms
the church bells were rung feverishly because it was thought that God
threw lightening bolts to the earth as punishment for sins, and the
ringing of church bells might mollify God such that his anger would
pass by the local populace. Church bells were cast with a Latin inscription:
"I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I praise God, I shatter
the lightening." It wasn’t until Benjamin Franklin discovered
the cause of lightning and invented the lightening rod, during what
was called the Age of Reason, that its threat to human existence was
abated. It is inconceivable to us to think that ringing church
bells would keep lightening from striking, yet if any of us lived in
medieval Europe that is how we would grasp and shape reality towards
a meaningful life. It is a simple marvel that the human mind is capable
of taking in all the data, sensory experience, sort through it, think
on it, critique it, hypothesize and test it, and come out the other
side with some understanding of how existence is organized. And it is
an equal marvel that existence is receptive to being shaped by our conceptions
of it. So people can ring church bells utterly convinced it will protect
them from the threat of lightening. And then later, people can put metal
rods upon the tallest buildings and ground them, utterly convinced this
will protect them from the threat of lightening. We grasp reality and
shape it by the conceptions we have about how it works. And there are different, even competing conceptions of
reality that the human mind can construct in exercising this capacity
for ontological reason. Those who think ringing bells mollifies God
and lightening, and those who don’t. Years ago a twelve year-old
boy in one of my churches unexpectedly and tragically drown. This wonderful
boy was fishing a small stream when a flash flood overtook him and pulled
him under. His mother attended our church, as he did every other Sunday.
On the other Sunday he went with his father to a Missouri Synod Lutheran
Church, taking a catechism class that taught his mother was going to
hell, as was he when he attended our church. The memorial service was
at our church, and the family asked that the minister of the Lutheran
Church be allowed to speak also. I consented, and gave him the early
part of the service because I suspected what he would say. And he said it. This was an act of punishment God brought
upon the boy for the boy’s sin. The wages of sin are death, even
to a twelve year-old. It was God’s will that death be meted out
for human rebellion against that will. Or, if we had been in medieval
Bavaria, it could be said that the bells were rung but the sin was too
great. God was not mollified and lightening came down. Here was a man,
standing in a long tradition of grasping and transforming reality using
cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the human
mind. God was absolute, had formed existence in this way, the human
mind to fit into the world so created, and this was a predictable result.
And this was a reasonable and complete explanation that accounted for
everything. Except that it is wrong. That is what I said when I got into the pulpit. That is
not the conception of reality that we hold here. Even in the midst of
the enormous differences we have, we agree we do not hold that conception,
but hold a different and competing one instead. The human mind has this
capacity to take the ingredients of existence, grasp them and transform
them into something new. From raw materials a bell is made, rung when
births and deaths occur and to order the day, and something new appears
in existence that wasn’t there before. Just like when the lightening
rod was invented and something new again appeared. Thus, we are affected
by the events of life and we affect the events of life. A sympathetic
relationship, which, if God created this order, a sympathetic relationship
that God must be involved with, too. A sympathetic relationship; a relationship
where two entities exist independent and dependent upon one another,
for they are in a covenant, they are in a relationship, and they are
both affected by the actions and the occurrences that happen to the
other. So, a boy tragically drowns. In one conception of existence,
God caused it. But in another the only role that could be called a God’s
role would be somehow to show an infinite capacity for compassion. The
boy’s mother and father and so many of us wept. We felt deep, unfathomable
sorrow at the occurrence. We want a God to be responsible for all the
events that occur in existence, but we know that is simply not true.
We made the bell, but we had no more control over the lightening than
did God. Likewise, the stream had trickled for eons, changed only by
torrential downpours; which it did again, and this time a boy was swept
along with the accumulations of thousands of years of nature’s
way. And we wept. And God wept, too, for there is a sympathy in this
existence for the deep pains that living entails. This is a different
conception of the world than the one the Lutheran minister lives in,
reasonable though his world may be. For this is another reasonable conception
that begins not with God’s absolute power, but with human experience. Mostly we think of reason as what theologians call technical
reason or reasoning, the ability of the mind to infer, deduce, make
hypotheses and test their validity. But that is just one capacity of
the mind, and we think too little of human beings when we restrict reason
to this narrow view. For music has a reasonable structure to it, and
elicits emotions that paint a world we understand and live in. How many
couples have a song that elicits sentiments from them that create a
world where their love makes sense? And there is a practical, pragmatic
dimension that reasoning doesn’t include, like when the first wheel
was sculpted from rock and suddenly practical tasks were literally transformed.
Scientists and inventors freely admit that many discoveries are less
the product of calculation, and more the providence of practical luck! All of this is to say that all human beings conceive of
the world through human eyes, although we desperately yearn to know
existence and life from a God’s eye view of things. This yearning
to know from a God’s eye view has led humanity to ring bells to
mollify what God must be thinking, and consign 12 year old boys to an
early grave as just desserts. As William Ellery Channing noted this
yearning can lead human beings to a reasonable conception of the world
with a gallows at its center. Likewise, the distortions this yearning
has yielded has led others to shrink humanity’s capacity to conceive
of its world, until that capacity is no more than the technical use
of the mind, in inferring, deducing, hypothesizing, and concluding,
which the philosopher Pascal dismissed in his sentence about "the
reasons of the heart which reason cannot comprehend." (Pencees,
Selection 277) What will invigorate the 21st century is a conception
of God which adds to our capacity to grasp and transform existence;
which adds to it by opening up dimensions of that existence that are
previously closed to our sense of things. We weep at tragedy and this
right, and whatever forms the center of existence weeps, too. It is
no gallows, but at the center is a heart. What will invigorate the 21st
century is a conception of God that begins with our experience of our
lives, and then asks what more could there be? What more of compassion?
What more of justice? What more of sympathy? What more of love? The Parable of the Prodigal Son is an old story, so old
that is hard for us to hear it as an invitation to be transformed! William
James called religion the prospect that there is an "unseen order"
that exists in the existence we grasp and transform, but is unseen and
opened up to us only at significant, revelatory, profound moments. The
unseen order Jesus and others have spoken about is as real and reasonable
as any others may have about how the world really is. But this order
is structured not on vengeance but on love. Its center is not a gallows,
but a heart. Hear then, again, this story, of a child and a parent and
the expansive love that forms the center of our being and our existence. Imagine that when you left home, it was abruptly, asking your mother and father for all that they would give you and taking that, you left. It may have been good for you to leave, or not. But leave you did, with all that you and they felt you deserved. But, life didn’t turn out as you had hoped, and all that you had, you lost, squandered away even that which you thought you had invested wisely. Destitute and utterly without any means to support yourself, you decide to return, thinking that at least you can work at home and survive, even if it means suffering the ridicule and constant reminder of your defeat and your failure. All the way home you practice your apology and practice, too, not resenting having to return. You imagine the reception you conceive you deserve. But the moment one of your parents spies you, they call the other, and both come running towards you with tears of sympathy and compassion and gratitude flowing down their face. This is what is the heart at the center of all existence. This is the reason of our days. This is the life we are called to live towards. And this is the reality that our living into, will find multiplied, until this force, this power, this spirit washes down upon all creatures of the earth. Bathing all like a rainstorm, with thunder and lightening. But creating all things new. AMEN. |
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