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INNS ALONG THE WAY: "The God Room (1)" The issues that are being discussed as this "sacred journey" begins are to be found in "rooms." Questions about biblical religion, the nature of God, who is Jesus, the nature of the church, what does a Christian look like and a "guest room" for the consideration of all kinds of issues will be offered. You will find here a vision of the church that honors and believes in freedom, openness, acceptance and grace. I will argue that a Christian human being, in the most authentic version, looks like Jesus! The most unsettling dimensions of Jesus as a model for Christian life and behavior are voiced here. When questions interest you then you are invited to join the conversations. Maybe this concern about the nature of God is yours. I have always been a bit perplexed by those people who ask God to disrupt the normal functions of the universe to tilt it in their favor. That's a usual human reaction when things seem to be going poorly for us. This question surfaced in my mind in the summer of 2003 when I heard that Pope John Paul II was planning a mass to request God to cool down the unrelenting heat in Europe! I suppose he included the Vatican in the request. Cold logic seems in short supply there. It dredged up my memory of the emergency prayer meeting called by the clergy of El Dorado, Illinois, when I lived in Carbondale. The drought had baked the corn on the cob, exhausted the public and well-nigh emptied the reservoir. They determined that God should be contacted and requested to fill the reservoir. I never did find out whether God did or didn't open a holy spigot. I am guessing that .... your guess is as good as mine! I am not about to write with intolerant dogmatism but I doubt that such action influences the weather one iota or one raindrop. Don't misunderstand me. It is good for a child to talk to his or her father about anything that worries him or her. The image Jesus preferred to describe God was of a "father." At his or her best, a parent is accessible to the needs of a child. So, therefore, I am not about to be all that critical of prayer for climate change. I conducted "prayer meetings" in several churches I served over a period of 15 years and not one of them was noticed by the media! Of course, the thermostat was never a major concern. The point is, however, that a request from a limited wisdom for what one needs won't necessarily bind God. A superior judgment may prevail and be manifested. And that will be far more than just acceptable! My attitude is pretty much that of Huckleberry in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberrry Finn when he said, "Miss Watson, she took me in the closet and prayed but nothin' come of it. She told me to pray every day and whatever I asked for I would git. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish line but no hooks. It warn't no good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by, I asked Miss Watson to try for me but she said I was a fool....I set down one time back in the woods and had a long think about it. I says to myself, 'If a body can git anything they pray for then why don't Deacon Winn git back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow git back her silver snuff box that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, I says to myself, there ain't nothin' in it.'" For him, religion wasn't all that helpful. Prayer was useless. Moreover, God didn't take orders very well! However, unanswered prayers for rain, climate control or pleasant weather for a vacation tend to suggest divine reluctance or indifference to our human plight. This just isn't the case. We need to remember that, fundamentally, prayer is communion with a good and caring God and is a means of seeking ways to cooperate with God. Besides, to quote Krister Stendahl of Harvard Divinity School, "I'm in sales, not management." I don't have a perspective that is broad and inclusive enough to try to run this universe! Some days I'd like to try but not on the basis of a 24/7 arrangement! Some televangelists insist that they are capable of doing so. They have tried on several occasions but I don't know how successsfully. At least, they always seem to know how God wants us to spend our money! Maybe, they could take those offerings and dust the clouds to get some rain. After all, they claim that they are asking for "seed" money! If your concern is for the nature of God, there is more to be said. The religious experience of many of us is rooted in an understanding of God as One who was distant, aloof and far away. The words of Martin E. Marty in Speaking of Trust: Conversing with Luther about the Sermon on the Mount convey what many feel, "God isn't one who impinges on us. If anything, God is ...remote, absent, eclipsed, silent, hard to recognize and harder to count on." The Holy One inhabited the distant heavens. Theologically, God was understood as sovereign and almighty. Like primitive people who understood God in this fashion, modern people feel that they are worthless and God is indifferent at best and hostile at worst. Thus, the relationship of a human being to such a One is one of reverence and awe, maybe even fear. The ancient Hebrew poet looked at the Palestinian sky and must have felt that way. He asked, "When I consider the heavens...what is man that you are mindful of him?" The biblical faith, however, is rooted in the vision of God as One who is for human beings and their fulfillment. Jesus dares to assert that not even a sparrow falls to the earth apart from God's awareness and that even the hairs on one's head are numbered by God. Undoubtedly, this is a form of Oriental hyperbole yet it has powerful significance. Much of theological reflection has moved beyond the notion that God is a person. Yet, God is personal in terms of relationships, not a person in essence. If your experience is parallel to mine then you have never heard God say anything to you. To be perfectly honest, I have never heard God's voice in an audible sense. God has never materialized before my eyes as a visible object or person but I have experienced some events that were utterly appropriate for a relationship that can be described as personal. For example, I remember such a time in 1976 when my mother died as the result of a car accident. I was raised in a family from the other side of the tracks in Paris -- Tennessee. My father was a trucker and a member of the Teamsters Union. He was, at times, rather harsh and crude. My mother, however, was gentle and warm and supportive. In fact, my call to ministry came from my mother first. I so wanted to please her. She loved the church so I concluded, emotionally, that I could best please her by becoming a minister. But that ingenious God whose other name is Surprise took my inadequate reasons for beginning and translated them into appropriate reasons for staying. When she died I was introduced into the fraternity of the grieving for the first time. I was absolutely devastated. I remember the anger I felt when someone urged me to accept her death as God's will. An inexplicable incident happened when I was in my study grieving and thinking I had no resource to get me "through the valley of shadow." But, then, idly, I picked up a handwritten note. I opened it and read it. Its luminous quality is still blinding. It said, "The stark tragedy that stalks this earth belongs not so much to the will of God as it does to the providence of God." To this day I am not certain how that note got there on my desk. But my guess is that the God who is usually experienced by me in absence had something to do with that personalized word for my need. Surprise and mystery are God's other names. I am convinced, sometimes in spite of the facts, that I am not an orphan in this universe and that the caring I experienced back then was tailored to such precise details that it was experienced by me as personal! This One desires that human beings live happy lives. The design of life I experience is in keeping with One who yearns for my happiness as much as I do. If this is true then one lives out of gratitude. When God is understood negatively then the life of a human being is that of blind obedience. During the early phase of my experience as part of the Christian community, I wasn't concerned with God's acceptance of human beings. I was concerned with behaving and acting in such a way as to be pleasing to God. For me, surely, the best way to please God had to be the avenue of becoming a minister. So I came to believe that God was luring and nudging me into ministry. As I plunged into an intensive study of the gospels as part of my ministerial preparation, I came to believe Jesus of Nazareth was a reflection or disclosure of God's nature. Indeed, to the mystery of Godness Jesus gave a face and on that face was a loving and accepting smile, not a frown or scowl of disapproval. The image of God that came into focus was that of a loving Father, the precise image Jesus was so fond of using. The more I kept examining the documents of the faith the more I came to see God differently. That ancient anthology of religious documents called the scriptures records the experiences of hundred of persons across the centuries. Although those experiences reflect an incredible diversity of form, the consensus is that of a personal reality interacting with persons. God is never spoken of abstractly as "the cosmic source" or "the ground of being" but as One who is concerned with persons. Moreover, the best analogies I know are rooted in a variety of images related to persons. To paraphrase the cryptic words of Marcus Borg's book called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, I was meeting God as if for the first time. Here is One who, in the words of Augustine, "loves each person as if there were none other to love and who loves all as God does each." This love has a center that is nowhere and a circumference that is everywhere. This love includes me and every other human creature, as well as the created order. As you know, this vision of God isn't the one that's implied in much of popular religion. God is either a moral judge or One who helps us overcome a self-image that holds us down. And morality, for those who see God as judge, consists of fidelity to the precise details of the Law or the Decalogue or some other code of individual, not social, conduct. This is because God expects obedience above all else. The avenue to a relationship to this One is clear. Only those who are striving to become perfect can hope to enter the presence of such a being. Is God a moral judge who insists we are to post the Ten Commandmentas in a courthouse in utter contempt for and insensitive to the faith traditions of others? Who demands that we abandon, condemn and prosecute the woman who is struggling with the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy? Or is God a psychotherapist who is just concerned with the self-image of folk who need to feel warm and fuzzy and prosperous? This vision that is espoused by much of evangelical Christianity is deficient. I confess that personal experiences and reflection across many years have tipped the scales in favor of a personal shape of the Holy. In The God We Never Knew Marcus J. Borg has an illuminating passage that he calls Experiences of the Sacred. He argues that there are "particular kinds of experiences that seem to those who have them to be experiences of the sacred." His description of these experiences seems, to me, to imply or infer One who relates on some kind of personal level. The One who is behind all things can be called "personal" because of the way such a One relates to individuals. In The Heart of Christianity Borg claims that experiences of the heart, his metaphor for the Christian vision, are "about becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God." With Paul Tillich in Dynamics of Faith Borg's The Heart of Christianity recognizes that all language about God is symbolic. Thus, he sees three dimensions of meaning in referring to God with personal language while rejecting the notion that God is a personlike being. He sees God as personal because our relationship is such that we are touched at our deepest and most passionate level. Second, using the distinctions of Martin Buber in I and Thou, he senses the quality of presence as another indication of God as relating to humans in a personal fashion. Third, Borg says that "proddings" or "leadings" come with a sense of being addressed in a personal fashion. Gary Dorrien's book The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity has a provocative summary of this perspective. According to Borg in The God We Never Knew the understanding of God that dominates much of modern thought comes from what we learned as children. God was conceived in the third person, as a distant being who is not here. When do we talk about someone in the third person? When he or she isn't there. Third person language implies absence. It makes God seem "unreal, remote, distant and problematic." Thinking about God as transcendent and immanent, the paradox known as panentheism, as the beyond who is 'right here,' leads to a vision of God that is relational in nature. Such a vision rescues a person from much of the misunderstanding that keeps thinking of God as a warrior or a righteous judge or angry potentate. Indeed, such a vision nudges a person into the divine embrace. |