Scripture: Acts 17:22-31
First of all, I want to thank all those helped make worship happen last week here at Sojourners while six of us were attending the Central Atlantic Conference annual meeting in Newark, Delaware. I knew what Shelli was going to say in her sermon before you did because she had her sermon done before we left and was good enough to share it with me. This of course made me jealous, since I can’t remember ever having a sermon done that far before Sunday. But after I got over the jealousy, I was grateful for getting a chance to read the sermon you were going to hear, and grateful for what she had to say. I won’t lie to you and tell you I was thinking about Sojourners at 10:00 last Sunday morning, but since I had read the sermon, I could theoretically have been imagining at least the sermon portion of Sojourners with some specificity while we were in Delaware.
As it happens, the theme of the conference we were attending was “Imagine”. I was not involved in the planning but I think the idea of the theme was that we were to be involved in various ways in imagining the church of the future, shifting the mindset from the question of how we are to work at having the church of the past survive into the future to imagining a new kind of church, focusing not on the continuation of the church but on the becoming of the church. Imagine what the church might become, what it might be becoming already. Imagine what might be possible for the church at every level. Imagine what the United Church of Christ might look and be like in the future. Imagine what the Central Atlantic Conference could look like. Imagine what your local congregation could become. I will mention that in that regard one congregation from each association was asked to talk about some new initiative in its life and Caroline East spoke on behalf of Sojourners and the Shenandoah Association, spoke of our new social justice groups. She did a good job (as you know she would), as did the people from the other associations. Beyond that, I won’t try to assess in any detail how well the conference succeeded in stirring the imagination, not because I have nothing positive to say—like most such events it succeeded in some ways and not so much in others—but it’s not my purpose this morning to evaluate a church conference of a week ago. It’s not where my mind is this morning.
I have taken the time to mention it a little bit though because the “Imagine” theme and some of the specific things that happened did succeed in stirring my imagination a little bit so far as what I wanted to preach about today. What it made me think—and again this is not a criticism of the theme of the conference, just a different direction to go with that theme—but what I came away from the conference thinking about was how it is important for us in the church to engage in imagining but how it is not so much the church we need to imagine. As I try to imagine a church of the future, as I try to imagine what I hope the church or my church, Sojourners, will always be in the process of becoming, it would be a church that might be thinking about, envisioning, imagining its own future, yes, nothing wrong with that, something wrong with not doing that, but where the hearts of the people would really be elsewhere.
On God, for instance. That sounds like a preacherly thing to say, doesn’t it? But I don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean it as an advertisement for God. I don’t mean it to sound like I’m just hyping God. “Every good Christian should have his or her heart focused on God all the time.” That sort of thing. What I mean is something different and more specific than that. Let me try to explain myself.
I imagine the church not as a place where people come together to imagine the church but where they come together to try to imagine God. Not where like-minded people come to express their belief in God, mind you, but where we come to try to imagine God together. Imagining God is different from believing in God. I’m not saying that we should focus on God when we come to church. That’s sort of an uninteresting thing to say. I’m saying that when we approach God we might gain something if we re-imagine how we approach God. We would do well, I think, to approach God as imaginers of God more than believers in God.
Belief divides people into camps, the believers and the non-believers. It even divides some Christians from other Christians. Maybe it even divides us within ourselves. Do I believe in God, or don’t I? Maybe we feel like we have to choose, yes or no, believer or non-believer, one kind of Christian vs. another kind of Christian. Maybe we feel like we have to decide what label we’re going to wear. Or maybe we feel more like there is some kind of debate or struggle going on inside us between the believing parts of ourselves and the non-believing parts of ourselves. But imagining God bypasses that tension that we either place between ourselves dividing ourselves into the camps of believers and non-believers, or the tension we feel inside ourselves as we struggle with belief on the inside.
If church is a place where people come sincerely trying to imagine God, we will be less divided. In order to engage in imagining God, you don’t have to decide whether you believe in God. That’s a different thing, and it can wait until some other time. There are people, I know, who argue against believing in God because, they say, God is nothing other than a product of the human imagination. We make up God in our heads, some people say. But I’m wanting to say today: of course we do. It is what we are supposed to do. It’s what we are called to do. Imagining God is a good thing. It’s not a sign of belief or unbelief. It’s a sign that we understand that God is greater than what our words our thoughts can capture. God requires of us not our agreement or our consent but our continuing efforts to imagine whoever or whatever it is that we call God. And if we approach God in this way, we will understand also that the same God that people who consider themselves unbelievers say they don’t believe in is often the same God who believers don’t believe in, if you know what I mean. One argument from non-believers is that God is so often an agent of intolerance, even calling people to holy wars. But the God of intolerance, a God who calls people to war is also a God I don’t believe in…as a believer I don’t believe in that God. If believers don’t settle for phony beliefs, they will continually be trying to imagine God in deeper, truer ways than anything we have been able to settle in on or carefully define.
I think Paul was trying to say something similar to what I’m trying to get at in the words we heard from the Book of Acts this morning. He was speaking to the Athenians, people who came from a very different religious background from Paul, people who lived in a very different culture from Paul, people who had very different assumptions and ways of thinking. Paul tries to make contact with the Athenians as one human being to another. He notices an altar with an inscription that says “to an unknown God”. He commends the Athenians for such an altar. Indeed, God is unknown, Paul says (I’m paraphrasing here). Yes, you understand and I understand that God is beyond any of our monuments, our traditions, our fancy words, our religious practices, our philosophies or theologies—God is beyond all of it. And I want to talk to you about that God. I know it’s true that we are all engaged in searching for God, maybe even groping as though we were in the dark with nothing really to guide us. And yet, he says, I imagine God as near as the air we breathe, a reality in whom we live and move and have our being. I ask you to re-imagine God with me, to try to think past all our flawed images and words about God, knowing that any way we have of imagining God will itself be flawed and partial and limited, but never settling, never latching on to one image, never ceasing to keep on imagining God in new ways, never ceasing our search for the God who lies somehow simultaneously in some other dimension at the heart of the universe and at the deep core of the human soul, yours and mine.
This, in any case, is the way I hear Paul addressing the Athenians and addressing me. Though he clearly says that God is more than our human imaginings, he also says, if I hear him right, that this does not mean we should stop trying to imagine God, but that we should continue to try to imagine God in ever more creative ways, and that we will find common ground in doing so. Not that Paul wants us to stop there. Not that I would want to stop there. Not that that is all there is to faith, playing with different images of God. Ultimately, for me, faith is about loving God. It is about learning to love God. It is about growing into the love of God. Just loving God, delighting in God, just for its own sake, for no other reason, not so that it will get us to heaven or get us anything or anywhere, just for its own sake. Loving God. That is something we humans do imperfectly to say the least. Only the saints begin to come close to loving God. Nevertheless, I sense it to be a goal of all faith, if not “the” goal of all faith, certainly a goal of my faith, to grow toward loving God.
Imagining God is not the same thing as loving God, but I believe it puts us on the right track. It puts us on the road to loving God. Imagining God may not be the same thing as loving God, but it is not as far away from loving God as belief is, if you ask me. In my book, imaginers of God are much closer to loving God than believers are. Believing has a certain set quality, a certain “should” quality, even a “should if you know what’s good for you quality, a certain “take-it-or-leave-it” quality, a certain cookie cutter quality that is just out of sync with whatever I know of God.
Imagining God puts us in a better frame of spirit. Of course there are an infinite number of ways to imagine God, which is part of the point. But we might imagine God, for instance, as that holy explosive power that flung galaxies into space at the beginning of time, who imagined into being stars and planets, and who made a place in the universe for this tiny, miraculous thing we call earth, who over a gestation period of millions of years gave birth to various forms of life, including this form we call human beings—but who knows how many other planets and life forms there are elsewhere in this universe so vast I can’t get my mind around it, much less get my mind around God who is so much greater still. And how much different is all that from saying “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…” I suppose it is theoretically possible to say those words with imagination and with wonder. I personally don’t think it happens too often.
So I imagine a church that doesn’t so much try to imagine itself but is engaged as best it can be in imagining and continually re-imagining God. That might involve imagining God not so much as one who spoke the world into being, who commanded the world into being, who said “let there be…” and there was, but as one who imagined the world into being, one difference being for me that we—the earth, the life of this earth, the human beings of this earth—would be understood as coming less from God’s mouth or mind and more from God’s heart and spirit. I imagine God imagining us into existence. I imagine God still imagining us into existence even now, imagining a new creation. And I imagine a church that together tries to take that leap of faith that tries to imagine the world as God might imagine it. I imagine a church where people are not all wrapped up in loudly proclaiming their belief in God, but where there is space and spirit for people to be free to imagine God with an expansive heart and thus to grow, slowly but surely, toward loving God.
But it is not just God who requires our imagination. It is our sisters and brothers too. Compassion, literally a “feeling with” another person, is dependent on our being able to imagine ourselves into someone else’s skin, or at least into the way someone else might see or experience the world. When Jesus was asked what the greatest of the commandments were he said “to love God” and a second is like unto it, “to love your neighbor”. We gather in worship, we gather in church community, to try to imagine God. We gather too to try to imagine our sisters and brothers as they experience the world, to try to imagine our sisters and brothers too as God would see them, to try to imagine a new world as God would imagine it. Those things all go together. They are of a piece. Jesus reminded us of that. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 22, 2008