2024-09-23
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
September 22, 2924 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a The Federated Church, UCC
God. That’s our topic for today. I thought I’d try to tackle a small subject! And while it may sound just a tad presumptuous to think we can deal with the fullness of God in one sermon, it may also seem somewhat odd to declare that as today’s subject, because isn’t God the subject of every sermon? And you would indeed be correct to remind me of that.
Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile to me, as I wind down my ministry, to reflect some on the richness of the One who is at the center of our life together. Through thirty-seven years, I have talked and preached and taught about God. And today I want to try to articulate what I find to be central. What I say will inevitably fall short, and may well leave more questions than answers. I may leave totally unsaid what you find most wonderful, or most mystifying, or most vexing about God. So I invite you to think of what I do this morning as something of a faith witness—my testimony to what I find most crucial about the God whom I have wrestled with and adored over the course of my life.
What I want to say first is that God is mystery. We’re not talking here about facts or logical demonstrations or proofs. We can’t provide incontrovertible evidence of God’s presence or activity. It is also true, though, that neither can we provide evidence or a clear proof of God’s absence. We dwell here in an area of deep unknowing, with little more than a felt and in some ways largely inarticulable sense of what we trust and of where we want to give our allegiance.
Given that God is a mystery, I am drawn, as I try to unfold who God is for me, to an expression of the philosopher William James, who talked over a century ago, about what he called “the More.” James essentially looked at the world around him and thought, ‘There’s something beyond what I see and feel and hear and smell and touch.’ Life can’t be reduced to the food we eat and the screens we watch and the hobbies we pursue. Beyond life’s routine lies something bigger than all of us. Just as I sense without proof that Meg Washington singing “Lazarus Drug” is more riveting than the notes on the page or that pesto and tomato on toast is more life-changingly scrumptious than the sum total of basil, cheese, oil, nuts, and tomatoes, so I sense that there is something more to life than the customs and duties and cars and furniture and clothing and gossip and chores and politics and even sports that so often consume so much of our attention. There is a “More” that lies beyond it all.
And, along with so much of human culture, I choose to call this More by the name God. Because I sense that this More somehow enfolds me in its grasp, because I perceive that I matter to this More and am embraced in its arms, I elect to give it a name, and that name is God.
For as long as people have sensed themselves to be in relationship with God, they have tried to find words and images that convey the wonder of this Holy One. These metaphors convey for us some of what we find to be central in God. So we liken God, perhaps, to a Rock who undergirds us; a Fortress who makes us feel safe; a River who flows in and through us. God is an Eagle on whose flight we soar, or a Hen who holds us under her wing, or a Shepherd who leads us beside still waters, or a nourishing Bread who feeds us.
A moment ago, we sang a hymn that lifts up various images for this God at the center of everything: strong Mother God; warm Father God; old, aching God; young, growing God (“Bring Many Names”). In the gospels, a forgiving father embraces a rebellious son; a good Samaritan embodies the giving heart of the Holy One; a generous boss is lavish in paying every worker extravagantly. Nourishing images for God abound.
And it’s the very variety of these images that has conveyed for me the mystery and wonder of the One who is always More than what I see and hear and do. I love knowing that God is all these things: Father and Mother and King and Bread and Light and Wind and Fire and Water and Shepherd and Tree and Woman in labor. It’s the very superfluity of these images that conveys the fullness of this More that we call God.
Because I have found such richness in this immense panoply of story and metaphor, part of the emphasis of my ministry has been on conveying that richness, and of not being tied down to a few limited images. I read every Sunday, as some of you know, from a translation of the Bible that was penned by my father and some other scholars of the Bible. Called The Inclusive Version, it tries to rid us of the sort of idolatry that insists on one predominant metaphor as the only one for God. The Christian church has often insisted on language for God that is extremely male-centric. For many centuries, the language of God has been almost entirely about Father and King. And I have found, when language is so restrictive, so doctrinaire, so excessively biased in one direction, that I have a calling to help the congregations I have served be exposed to a God who is far richer than those extremely narrow and slanted images. Which is why you hear us refer here, for example, to God as “Father Mother” and “Ruler,” and to God’s abode as the “Dominion” of God rather than the “Kingdom” of God. The very variety of these images opens us to God in fuller ways.
When my father was working on that inclusive translation and first published it, it was so unnerving to people, and so aggravating, that he received a significant amount of hate mail, including a threat to kill him and his children. Indeed, the issue of extending images of God beyond Father and King was so controversial in the wider culture that my father appeared on an episode of the TV show “Donahue,” then the nation’s preeminent talk show, to debate it with two others who thought that making such changes was sacrilege.
Clearly the issue touched a nerve. It was difficult for many people to give up the notion that God was male—and thus, in the words of the theologian Mary Daly, that male was God. All this to say, though, that the proliferation of manifold images for God as I was beginning my ministry was, to me, a gift of the first order. It gave words to my inchoate sense that this mysterious More was far grander and broader and more multi-faceted than any one narrow collection of images could convey.
Part of what all these images conveyed, and part of what I began to realize the more I reflected on God, was that God was not the magician that I had assumed God was. I don’t know what it is about the way we think about God, but the prevailing notion seems to be that God can manipulate things to get us the results we want. If I just pray hard enough or act responsibly enough, or God will finally just see the light, God will come through for me in ways that give me just what I’ve been hoping for. I would say that a good part of my life of faith has been unlearning that image of God pulling puppet strings and engineering the results you and I might crave.
It’s this image of God as engineer or puppeteer that I find increasingly problematic the older I get. I confess I no longer think God has a “plan” for me, in the sense of mapping out just how my life will unfold. If I believed that God had a plan for me, that would mean I had no agency at all, that I was just being manipulated to do whatever God had determined I would do. That doesn’t accord with my experience of life. I sense that I am free in this moment to stand in this pulpit or to jump out of it. I could, in this very moment, if I chose to, curse you, or bless you. God doesn’t make one thing or other happen. God leaves it to me to seek to live in the fullest, richest, most generous way possible. Or not. But it’s not God’s doing. It’s mine. God’s the guide. God’s the nudge. God’s the accompanist. But God is not the one putting all those blocks in place.
So much, of course, is out of our control. That doesn’t mean, though, that God is manipulating all the minutiae. Stuff just happens. Not because God malevolently wills it, but simply because that’s the way God made the world. Tornadoes happen not because God is seeking to cause ill, but because the Earth was created with a certain sort of climate system, and also because human beings were created with the capacity to exacerbate the dangers by way of their own meddling. Buildings collapse not because God wishes to cause harm, but because God made the earth such that earthquakes happen, and such that all of us human beings, including engineers and builders, mess up. Natural disasters and human acts of cruelty are not God acting meanly, capriciously, and arbitrarily, but rather consequences of the way things were created and the freedom with which we were all born.
As some of you have heard me say before, a few days after 9/11, the journalist Bill Moyers interviewed the distinguished New York minister, James Forbes. Moyers said to Forbes, “Do you think God caused those twin towers to fall?” And Forbes said something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “I don’t believe God makes everything to happen. But I do believe that God can make something happen out of everything.”
This was Forbes’ way of saying he didn’t think God was engineering every cruelty and injustice, but also that when those awful things happen, God is still working in them for good. There is no better manifestation of this, it seems to me, than Jesus on his journey to the cross. God doesn’t direct Jesus’ death with some sort of absurdly callous disregard for Jesus’ wellbeing. It’s human beings who put Jesus to death. And, on the other hand, God doesn’t intervene to stop it. Even though Jesus is put to death, though, that doesn’t end God’s involvement. The crowning moment of that episode and of Christian faith happens when, in the wake of that death, Jesus is given new life. Resurrection is God not preventing cruelty and death, but instead transforming it and making new life where none had seemed possible. God can make something happen out of everything.
At the heart of what God does is certainly not to cause suffering. Nor, though, is it even to extract us from what is difficult or painful or uncomfortable. It is, instead, to walk with us in that difficulty or pain or discomfort. The wonder of God is not that strings are pulled and we’re saved from pain. The wonder of God is that in the very agonies that undo us and tear us apart, God is right there with us. The analogy of a parent with a child is particularly apt in this regard, it seems to me. No parent can assure you won’t skin your knee or fail your algebra class or be dumped by a lover. But a good parent can sit with you when those things happen and give you a soothing comfort.
This, it seems to me, is the way God is. When we hurt, God may not undo the cancer or the disaster at work or the estrangement between a parent and child. But God does sit with us and assure us that we are not alone. It may not seem like enough. But an honest reckoning with God asks us, I think, to give thanks that that’s the God we, in truth, get. As the great UCC pastor William Sloane Coffin used to put it, God gives us “minimum protection and maximum support.” And it is enough.
It’s Coffin who brought this most vividly to life in a sermon he preached ten days after the death of his son Alexander. Twenty-four-year-old Alex had driven off a bridge in Boston one night after having had a few too many beers. Several days later, this was the scene:
“When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, ‘I just don’t understand the will of God.’ Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. ‘I’ll say you don’t lady!’ I said.
“For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with . . . fingers on triggers, [with] fists around knives, [with] hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths . . .. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, ‘It is the will of God.’ Never do we know enough to know that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break” (https://www.beliefnet.com/love-family/1999/12/eulogy-for-alex.aspx).
“When the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” That, in a nutshell, is what I believe at my core about God—that God walks with us in our loss and pain, and accompanies us in our grief. The very heart of God is presence. God accompanies. God strengthens. God enables the finest in us. And God promises that no loss is too great, no failure too all-encompassing, no hopelessness too all-consuming that God cannot turn it around.
One more thing. Life is so much more than loss and pain and grief. If that’s all it were, it would be pretty depressing. It is also joy and laughter and mutual care, isn’t it. Life is full of a transcendent magnificence. The great Roman Catholic ethicist Daniel Maguire once said something I’ve never forgotten. When asked what he believed most deeply, he said, “I believe in the normative normalcy of joy.” Which is theological speak for: ‘I believe we were made to be people of joy; I believe we were intended to be steeped in radiant delight.’
The God I know is the God who leads us to bask in each other’s presence; who, when all seems lost, makes a way out of no way; who gifts us with laughter and tenderness; who inspires the phone call when sorrow seems to break us; who moves the neighbor to bring soup when we’re immobilized; who sees us in all our inadequacy and failure and holds us in the fondest imaginable embrace. This is the God whose name is Effervescent Delight and whose very reason for being is to hold us all, and indeed this entire magnificent Creation, close. “Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you” (James 3:8). May it always be so.