Scripture: Isaiah 40:26-31
One of the things I asked for for Christmas this year, and received, thanks to Ava, was Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy. You probably know that way before Barack Obama became the first African American president of the United States Toni Morrison became the first black American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She doesn’t get quite as much attention as Barack does, although she’s gotten her fair share thanks to Alfred Nobel and Oprah Winfrey and others. But she’s a novelist, after all, not a president, and I think it’s fair to say that probably most people, including me, don’t find her just real easy to read. But for myself I have found her worth the effort, and so when Dawg announced a couple of weeks ago that he was getting together a book discussion on Morrison’s latest book, I was glad. Among other things, it gave me the incentive I needed to read the book, which I hadn’t done yet, not having gotten to it over Christmas and finding it hard to get to reading novels when I’m not on vacation.
This sermon is not really based on Morrison’s novel, but the idea for it did come from a short passage in the book. Let me read it to you. Well, first I have to explain that one of the characters in the book is an Indian woman who is described as being quite happy not to sleep in the house of the people she calls master and mistress in spite of its obvious comforts in bad weather. Morrison goes on:
Her people had built sheltering cities for a thousand years and, except for the deathfeet of the Europes, might have built them for a thousand more. As it turned out the sachem had been dead wrong. The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease, more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places, and worship a dull, unimaginative god.
(Toni Morrison, A Mercy, p. 54)
As you might guess, it was that last phrase, about worshiping a “dull, unimaginative god”, that caught my attention and got me to thinking thoughts that eventually I decided to turn into a sermon. The Europes, as Morrison has her character call them, brought with them a dull unimaginative god.
There are lots of qualities that sometimes become part of people’s ideas about God that I think we know we need to watch out for. The idea of a violent god, for instance, the idea of a god who engages in, commands, wills, or condones violence in any way is one that I think in general terms we would all be opposed to, know we need to be on the lookout for, and try to counteract however we can. In a world where people maim, murder, and destroy in the name of someone or something they call God, we need to be clear that the God we worship is not such a god. We need to disown all such images of God, even if they appear in our own scriptures, which of course they do. We need to disown the images of God we find in the Bible where God is leading people into battle, where God is accomplishing God’s purposes by gaining a military victory, or by killing enemies or non-believers, or where God wills and plans the suffering and death of Jesus because only such shedding of blood can atone for the sins of humanity. I want to be clear that in my understanding, and in the way I present and express the Christian faith, my Christian faith, that violence is in no way part of the nature of God.
When human beings engage in violence, any kind of violence, they are not doing God’s work. They may be doing something that is sadly necessary given that we live in a radically imperfect world—I’m willing to listen to those arguments—but it is not God’s work. Violence is no part of the life, the being, the nature of God. It is not God’s work to go to war. It is not God’s work to engage in capital punishment—again it may be in some people’s minds necessary, but it is not God’s work. God does not work in such a way as to send people to hell—a violent thought if I ever met one. God does not cause people to suffer here on earth as a punishment for their sin. Maybe you don’t agree with everything I have just said, but we’re well aware of the issue of violence in relation to God, and I think most of us would agree that holy wars are in fact the unholiest of enterprises, and that one of the things that can justifiably give religion a bad name is this association of God with violence. The kind of Christianity I hope we are trying to embody here must be entirely empty of any theology, any image of God that is associated with violence. In any case, we all know that’s an issue. It’s an issue in the Bible; it’s an issue in the world we live in.
There are other images of God I am, shall we say, not very fond of. Some forms of religion, some forms of Christianity encourage people to try to relate to a demanding judgmental god, whose expectations can never be lived up to, whose favor needs to be earned, but then again never quite can be, who turns human beings into sinners, who makes that our primary identity somehow, who saves us from condemnation only by the riches of his grace, but whose grace is made necessary because of our general worthlessness, who often is a threatening god, at least a rather stern god, and who in the end, and in the beginning and middle, is not all that easy to get close to, or perhaps even to have a lasting belief in.
Then there is the image of a God who lays down the rules, rules about how to act or what to believe. Actually of course it is really the church who does this, not God, but when religion sets itself up as a system of rules and regulations it implicates God in what it is doing. It implies that what God cares about, it implies that what God is all about is commandments and law and right belief. And I should say in this connection something that I often feel the need to say because Christians are prone to describe Judaism as a religion of the law which has been supplanted or superceded by the superior religion of Christianity, which is based on grace. But in fact and in practice Christianity has been no less committed to establishing codes of behavior and creeds of belief than Judaism has, in fact in many respects more so, from the Catholic church’s system of identifying sins that need to be confessed and then laying out the penance that is appropriate to the sin, to the more Protestant practice of proclaiming the absolute, literal, and quite rigid authority of the Bible in controlling the life of the believer, and the widespread practice affecting both Protestant and Catholic of trying to definitively determine exactly what beliefs make one a believer. The images of God that accompany that whole way of thinking are, in my way of thinking, and to say the least, suspect.
But what occurred to me when I came across that phrase in Toni Morrison about the Europes bringing with them, along with a bunch of other objectionable things, their dull and unimaginative god, what occurred to me was that that phrase in some ways goes to the core of what so often goes so wrong with our various images of God. It would be a dull and unimaginative god who could think of no other way than violence to work out her will among earth’s people. It would be a dull and unimaginative god whose purpose in bringing people into being was nothing more than to create some creatures who would spend their lives trying to make him happy. It would be a dull and unimaginative god whose dreams for us were no larger than that we walk a straight and narrow path. It would be a dull and unimaginative god who would be happy if the main thing the thought of him inspired among human beings was fear. It would be a dull and unimaginative god who thought that heresy was even something to be concerned about, who decreed that human beings having all sorts of wild thoughts is dangerous, who wanted the thinking of her children to be above all orderly and consistent and limited and right.
I had considered titling this sermon “Thou Shalt Not”, by which I would have meant to add another commandment to the familiar ten, or perhaps to rewrite the first commandment so that instead of saying, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me,” it would read, “I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, who made a way for you out of no way. You shall not make of me a dull and unimaginative god.” That single, simple thought is in fact my basic message for this morning, but I decided the title was not in keeping with the spirit I wanted to convey. Religion that consists primarily of thou shalt nots and even thou shalts is part of the problem. Judaism at its best has avoided the problem by having so many people devote so much attention to the Torah, the commandments and the rest of the books of the law, that there is such a rich body of interpretation around the law that instead of laying down the law, the law opens out onto a whole rich body of thinking and reflecting and praying about the life of humans and the life of God. In the right hands the law is anything but dull and unimaginative. Still the title “thou shalt not” sounded a bit restrictive which is what I am trying to say faith should not be.
So I turned to the words of the story of creation from Genesis as more in keeping with kinds of images we should have of God. Let there be light, God said. Let there be night and day. Let there be sky and sea. Let there be trees and bushes and flowers and fruits and vegetables. Let there be stars and planets and solar systems and galaxies (Genesis doesn’t say all that but it implies it). Let there be birds of a thousand colors and sizes, and profuse life that lives in the oceans. Let there be animals of every kind, wild things that roam the earth and not so wild things and even bugs and insects. Let there be creatures called man and woman, cousins to every other living thing. In the light of the image of God we are given in the first words of the Bible where God not just speaks but imagines creation into existence, to turn God into someone dull and unimaginative seems like the ultimate blasphemy. I cannot resist saying too how dull and unimaginative the whole argument over evolution and creation so often is. Is not God imaginative enough to use what we refer to as evolution and perhaps other means that we don’t yet even have a name for to bring life out of no life? Is it not the height of unimaginativeness to insist that God’s role in creation is limited to what can be set to writing in a few pages of the Bible, rather than to let those few words lead our spirits into the midst of the miracle that the words struggle to describe?
I imagine a God who says to us let there be…Let there be many good kinds of believing and let there be unbelief; we need it too. Let there be not so much the right way and the wrong way as so many right ways that we hardly know where to begin. And let God’s people constantly be in the process of finding new paths to follow, new ways to begin, not to determine what restrictions God has placed on our lives, nor to understand what God expects of us, but to be always aware of the holy possibilities that God has set before us, and to give thanks. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 15, 2009