Moments of Transcendence
Craig Anderson
Matthew
13.10-17 September 15, 2002
Kirk Hadaway, head of research in
the UCC, says that in many churches, “there is a ‘don’t’ ask, don’t tell’
approach to the question of God.” The
topic is confusing and potentially divisive.
With a great deal of theological uncertainty in the air, the approach
seems to be, “give this one wide-berth.
Hands off. Don’t ask, don’t
tell.”
Being a sophisticated congregation,
I don’t have to tell you that this dog won’t hunt! If we can’t put this subject on the table, then it’s time
to close the doors, which by the way is what a lot of churches with this policy
of avoidance are doing. No, when the
subject is God, we’d better ask, and there is a need to tell.
Let’s start with the truth. According to Marcus Borg, “there is a lot of
uncertainty and confusion about God in our culture and among our
churches.” Early signs of this confusion
were evident thirty years ago in Bishop Robinson’s controversial best-seller, Honest
to God; which was followed shortly thereafter by a raft of books and
articles on the death of God. More
poignantly, I remember sitting in a group with an older gentleman twenty-five
years ago; a mill owner in Lowell Mass., Harvard class of ‘21. A Soviet cosmonaut had just taunted the west
from space by announcing that there was no heaven to be seen in the heavens,
and no God out there either. Having
lived with a conception of “God out
there” all of his life, class of ‘21 admitted he was experiencing some
uncertainty and confusion in his faith.
With cosmonauts and space telescopes
exploring the heavens, conceptions of the universe and our place in it have
changed, but our conceptions of God haven’t always kept pace. A holocaust perpetrated upon the Jews by the
spiritual inheritors of Luther and Bach, has led to still more questions about
the nature of God: God’s goodness and
power. And neither do continued
slaughters around the globe, the degradation of the environment, the relentless
spread of AIDs, and the exploitation of the poor, (neither do these) inspire
additional faith or confidence in a transcendent power masterfully guiding
human destiny to a happy end. The
uncertainty and confusion about God therefore, have been a long time building,
through most of our adult lives really.
Many of us, myself included, would probably have an easier time
describing which god we don’t believe in, than in the more constructive task of
affirming what we can say. “Don’t ask,
don’t tell,” almost begins to sound like a reasonable strategy after all!
But that dog still won’t hunt. We know what we don’t believe, but what can we say more constructively?
In the first place, let’s not get
too much in a twist because conceptions of God from other eras no longer
work. Karen Armstrong, in her book, A
History of God, asserts that through time human beings have been pretty
pragmatic about their religion. She
says, “when one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it
has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology.” Studying the three monotheistic faiths,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Armstrong finds no one “objective view of
‘God’.” It is her view instead, “that
each generation of believers has to create the image of God that works for
it.” In a few weeks with this year’s
confirmation class, I’ll again be reviewing some of the many images of God
present in our tradition; from the warrior God decimating Israel’s enemies; to
the sage old king seated high on a throne; to the special effects God of the
burning bush and rumbling volcano. The
God of fury condemning a wayward people.
The anguished parental God compassionately running down the road to
greet a prodigal son. If you grant that
our forbearers in the faith did not all experience their God in exactly the
same way, then perhaps you will also accept, that contemporary views also need
to conform to our experience of the Holy, even as we let go of earlier
conceptions which no longer work.
If we strain the first century
name-calling out of today’s passage from Matthew, we can almost hear in it the
same kind of confused agonizing over faith and belief that we experience in our
time. The context of the passage is
societal calamity following a brutal suppression of social rebellion by Roman
legions. It is also a family break-up,
a divorce, and the language is often exaggerated and acrimonious. But one era is giving way to another. One side says it can’t see the other side’s
God out in space, or up on the hill where the temple once stood. Temple religion took a devastating hit in 70
AD, when the temple was destroyed.
Those who had waited for God’s messiah to intervene and rout the Romans,
lay rotting in their graves all over Palestine. The faithful in the pillaged capital city were homeless, starving
refugees. A god up on the temple mount
or out there in the heavens, had failed to act, or at least had not acted in
anticipated fashion. To some it seemed
as if the hearts of the formerly
faithful had “grown dull;” their ears
“hard of hearing;” their eyes “shut.”
“Seeing, they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do
they understand.” I know the
feeling. How about you?
It would be mistaken to assume that
a new Christian faith triumphed in the first century, while rigid old Judaism
failed. Such a view is too simplistic,
too one-sided, too chauvinistic.
Neither party in the divorce emerged unscathed or unchanged. Each adapted to the realities of a new era:
and both emerging Christianity and Judaism created new conceptions of God more
adequate to the needs of the time.
Christianity emerged as a renewal movement from Judaism, but Judaism was
also changed. And by now we recognize
that such processes of theological reform have continued ever since, even to
our day.
Such a pragmatic, developmental
approach to understanding theology through the ages can be unsettling, because
many of us have operated with a view that God is unchanging and eternal. Such a view may continue to be meaningful to
you, which is fine, but you should also know that the “unmoved mover” is an
idea we inherited from the Greeks and not the Hebrews. Perhaps God is unchanging, but how our eyes
have seen, and how our ears have heard, are not unchanging. At the very least our apprehensions of God
have changed. And if God is a dynamic
creative spirit, then perhaps God has also changed.
I’m hedging my words and qualifying
my language here, because whatever God is, we mere humans seem incapable of
fully seeing or hearing or understanding the full reality of God. Whatever else God is, humans have affirmed
through the centuries, God is mystery.
The sacred is indescribable. And
our ideas are never more than provisional, never more than approximations. It has been said that theology should be
done like we do a crossword puzzle, in pencil, not pen; and that every
theological statement ought to end with a question mark, not a period or, (God
forbid!), an exclamation point.
If
we no longer look upon the temple mount, or beyond the moon and stars for God,
where shall we look, when shall we listen?
Some contemporary theologians would point us toward what they call
boundary situations, or the outer limits of human experience where moments of
transcendence can be known. When does a
tear come to your eye, or a lump to your throat? Keep track of the times when you say “Wow!” or “Yippee!” Chances are you’re exploring a new boundary,
or have surpassed an old limit. Don’t
such experiences sort out into two basic types: positive and negative? Situations of guilt, anxiety, and sickness;
or moments of ecstasy when we are caught up in joy, love, or creativity?
If the experience is one of a
dangerous illness, and the possibility of our own death faces us starkly, our
very faith or unfaith in life’s meaningfulness can be disclosed to us. Faith and trust are tested at the
boundaries. We discover what we’re made
of, and what we believe in.
On the positive side, love and joy
can be “self-transcending.” David Tracy
writes that “ in the grasp of such experiences, we all find, however
momentarily, that we can and do transcend our usual lackluster selves and our
usual everyday worlds to touch upon a dimension of experience which cannot be
stated adequately in the language of ordinary, everyday experience. Authentic love puts us in touch with a
reality whose power we cannot deny.”
You’ll notice that instead of
pointing us out there to find God, today’s theologians are pointing us in here,
to our own lives, and to our own experiences to find the holy in our
midst. Instead of waiting for God to
descend from on high, we need to use our creativity and imaginations as
artists, poets and composers do, to create a sense of the holy for ourselves. Many of you, I know are familiar with Sister
Wendy, a quirky little nun, with the perceptive eye of a genius, whose command
of art history is awesome. She also has
a wonderfully imaginative way of talking about the sacred. She says that “everybody has experienced
moments of transcendence: to be present at the birth of a child; to become
aware of death and its inescapability; to be lifted out of the narrowness of
self by love; to reassure a child crying in the night that all is well; to be
touched by the silent beauty of the natural world: each of these experiences is
sacred, not because we have designated them as such, but just because our
humanity responds to something greater than itself, yet intimately part of us.”
“Blessed are your eyes, for they
see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and
righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear
what you hear, but did not hear it.”
Was that because they were looking and listening in the wrong places? Keep track of your tears and fears. Treasure your loves and joys. God may be closer than we think, a reality
lurking at the limits in the transcendent moments of our lives.
Would you like to raise a question or make a comment (even a provocative one)? If so, e-mail Craig Anderson at craig@brooksidechurch.org