Scripture: Genesis 32:22-32 and Job 38:1-18
I have been struggling with this sermon for several weeks, which is to say that I have been struggling with God about this sermon for several weeks, which is in part the reason for choosing the scripture about Jacob wrestling with the mysterious stranger—angel, God, but I’ll get back to that. This is, as those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember, part two of a two part sermon. (You’ll be happy to know that I resisted the temptation to make it part two of a three part sermon.)
I began talking, two weeks ago, about gender and God. After spending most of that sermon talking about why this is an important subject and a deep subject, I came to the point where I said I felt it isn’t enough to say that for many reasons we need a much richer set of images for God than what we have been offered in the predominantly and oppressively male culture of the church, that it isn’t enough to urge that we expand the way we talk and the way we think about God specifically in relation to gender, that we need to go on, I need to go on from there to talk about what my images of God are, not just to talk about the need for them.
This is, after all, one important reason to stop thinking and speaking of God in exclusively male terms. It leads us to re-examine how we think of God and who God is for us and not to avoid a real engagement with God by hiding behind the easily spoken, masculine, words that we have been given and have for too long taken for granted. Re-examining all that keeps us from taking God for granted. So I promised that I would continue that sermon this week by trying my best to put into words what my images of God are—some of them.
This is not an attempt, I’m sure you understand, to arrive at truth, not truth with a capital T, not even truth with a small t. It is an attempt to put words to my experience of God, which is not an easy thing to do, should not be an easy thing to do. I think that everything I say today is going to be partial, misleading, and false. It is also, if I am able to be honest with myself and then also with you, going to be all true. I hope you know me well enough by now that you know I would not suggest that my words, or the images of God I am going to try to put into words, are in any way definitive, that these images of God are the right ones or have some kind of ministerial authority. I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t let me get away with it anyway, ministerial authority not being exactly a core value at Sojourners. Nevertheless, I have to say it or I just wouldn’t be able to go on.
This is a really iffy thing in a lot of ways, for me anyway. The issue I face every week as to how to speak of God with honesty and integrity and without being careless or casual, that issue or problem that I face somewhat every week, and fail at every week, is intensified many times over this week. I have been struggling some with the question Padma raised. Some parts of the Christian tradition, and this is even more true in Judaism and Islam, would say that it is wrong headed and wrong spirited to think of any kind of images in connection with God. Some of you, after the sermon two weeks ago, told me that you didn’t really think of any images at all when you thought of God. And neither do I a lot of the time. Sometimes my reaching out for God is a matter of trying to empty myself, my mind, my spirit precisely of all the clutter that is there, all the different images that come to me from who knows where, including all the false images of God that may get in the way of my seeking. Maybe I will try to imagine pure love or pure holiness or pure mystery or something. So that’s part of my experience of God, or of my experience of seeking God.
But I do have images. When I speak about the hands of God, which I do, it is not just a figure of speech (though it’s that too). I actually imagine hands. When I speak of the heart of God, it is not just a figure of speech. There is some kind of an image there, though I’m not sure how I would draw it, even if I could draw. When I speak of the face of God, I imagine faces. These are images I have not of God exactly, but images that are connected to God somehow. I do not in any way presume that they describe God and they are not there to answer my questions about God and they are not there to present any theology about God and they are not there to be consistent with any ideas about God or any attributes about God, but they are there. A little bit like a dream, I thought to myself. A dream of God. Thus the title to the sermon.
For instance, here is a dream I have of God. There is a woman, an older woman I think, a grandmotherly type woman, who has invited me into her kitchen. A pot of water is heating up on the stove and she asks me to sit down at the kitchen table. It’s an old wooden table with lots of stains and scars on it, meaning to me that a whole lot of people have passed through here before. There’s a plate of cookies on the table. The woman pours me a cup of tea, sits down across the table from me, looks me in the eyes, and says, “Well, Jim, how are you?” And I say “Fine, thanks”, and reach for cookie. I look up and she’s not saying anything, just still looking at me, kindly. I put down the cookie and I say, “Well, okay, pretty fine. I mean I’ve been getting some headaches recently and there is this war you know that my country started,” and my voice trails off. And eventually I look up and she’s still saying nothing and I say, “Well, okay, fine really isn’t a good word at all. I’m really much better than fine, so much better than fine that I don’t even know how to express it. But I’m also afraid, to tell you the truth. I’m afraid for my world, your world, our world. I’m afraid for Americans in Iraq and Iraqis in Iraq. And there are some days I’m glad to be alive and some days when sadness gets the best of me and…” I look up and I realize I’m going to have to go to the next level and the next. And I don’t think I’ll go there this morning out loud, because although I’m prepared to be somewhat personal this morning, I don’t think I’m prepared to be quite that personal, as personal as I would need to be to really answer the question, “How am I?”
This is not a story. There’s no end to it. It is for me, an image of God. Now of course we say that’s silly. You could say to me, I could say to myself, “This is no image of God. God is the creator, larger than life, larger than everything. God is, as God so poetically put it in Job, the voice that speaks from the whirlwind, the one who laid the cornerstone of creation when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy. God is the one who loosed the cords of Orion and caused the dawn to know its place.” And so on. I am impressed by the language of Job and I am moved by it, and maybe it does touch on some parts of who God is for me, but so too does the image of a woman who sets a table before, and looks into my heart, and asks me how I am.
Images of God do not have to represent all of God. They can’t. Images of God do not need to give a theologically adequate description of God. They’re not meant to. Our images of God do not speak to the question of whether God is or is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omni-anything. Our images of God do not have to do justice to God. They’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to do justice to us, to our experiences of God, which will be partial and limited and specific.
The image I just described is not original to me. I read it some time ago. It was a Jewish woman’s image of God, and some of her description I didn’t identify with, but the center of it I did, and her dream of God has since become one of mine. That image made sense to me because my experience of God is partly that God is that something or someone who will not settle, and will not allow me to settle, for my easy answers or casual superficialities, one who leads me, persistently, tenaciously leads me deeper into myself, who does her best not to let me lose my soul. When I want to dismiss her with a word—“fine”—her eyes, though not harsh, don’t let me go. “Stay with it,” she seems to say. “Stay with it.” And she keeps on listening until I am willing to tell her how I really am, which I think to myself is maybe what prayer really is, telling God how we really are.
Which is also one reason why the image of the wrestler in the Jacob story has always struck a responsive chord with me. The image of one who will not let go, with whom I have to struggle, the one I have to contend with, when all my daytime business is over, one who troubles my sleep, and who troubles my daylight sleepfulness. It’s a more strenuous image. But not altogether different from the image of a wise woman sitting across the kitchen table from me. Both images completely false in a way, but also for me true.
Here is another one, also from someone else’s writings, and less clear than the kitchen table image, but still a bit of an image that took some kind of hold with me when I read it. It comes from a short story called “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter”, and it’s a story not about God. It’s a story as I recall, about the stresses of a family from India living in the US, and the older generation wanting to hold on to some of the Indian ways of life and the younger generation wanting not to hold on, to become completely American. But there was a line in the story I have remembered through quite a number of years. The mother, Mrs. Dutta, remembers some seemingly insignificant detail from when the children were young in India, and a son says to her something to the effect of, “Ma, I don’t remember that. How do you remember such things?” Mrs. Dutta didn’t reply, but she thought to herself, “Because it’s the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to. We are the keepers of the heart’s dusty corners.”
I don’t know as I can explain to you why, but I remember when I read that not just thinking that it was a nice turn of phrase—“keeper of the heart’s dusty corners”—but having a kind of minor religious experience. That’s how I think of God. Another of the many ways I think of God, but a way. Maybe in the same sense as the previous image, maybe a kind of suggestion that I value and visit some of the dusty corners inside myself, some of the places I don’t visit too often. Maybe too in the sense of remembering parts of the world that too few people care to. The heart’s dusty corners, the world’s dusty corners, God is the keeper of such places.
This probably needs a lot more explanation on my part, why that notion was and is so important, and I don’t have time for it today, and I’m certainly not going to spin out any elaborate theology based on that phrase (the older I get and the longer I’m in the ministry, the less interested I am in elaborate theologies), but I will just say that for me God has a lot to do with why some old dusty corner in me, or some old dusty corner that is me, is worth remembering at all, is worth keeping at all. And when I think of Mrs. Dutta, as I still do, though I don’t have a very clear image of her, when I think of Mrs. Dutta, I think of God.
Here is another image I feel a need to mention this one because we have been lighting candles for people and putting them in a bowl full of sand as we offer our prayers at the end of our Wednesday evenings here during Lent. I dream God as one keeps vigil for us, all of us, who maybe lights a candle for us and says a prayer. I know, you’re going to ask me who would God be praying to. And you may ask me something about if this is all God does, is light a candle for us. Can’t God bring herself to be a little bit more proactive here? Can’t she go ahead and answer a few prayers, rather than offer them?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I just point out that images don’t have to answer questions, be consistent, or make rational sense. They are just images and I point out that one of the images we have from scripture is of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and saying “Would that you knew the things that make for peace.” When I dream God keeping vigil over our world and hers, I usually picture her as a woman. But Jesus weeps over our world and his, and for me that too is an image of God. It is not an image that answers questions, but it is for me a true image.
And here is one reason it is a true image. Here is another thing I believe about God, or another way I experience God. When I picture God, I dream a God who is dreaming me. Dreaming us. There is a way we are supposed to be together. Right now, we are not it. But there is some way we are supposed to be together, we sisters and brothers—is it God who gives us that dream of ourselves, who even suggests such language, that we are sisters and brothers? There is a way we are supposed to be together. And there is even some way I am supposed to be. And I am not it. When I dream of God, I dream a God who has a dream for us. And so it may be that in the end we don’t really commune with God by trying to imagine or dream God directly but by trying to dream the dream God has for us.
In the meantime, if we can dream of a God who splashes the skies with stars, can we not believe in a God who lights candles for us, or who sets a table before us, looks us in the heart and lovingly asks how we are, a god who is both woman and man and more, always more? Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 30, 2003