Silence

Scripture: Selections from the Psalms; Deuteronomy 6:4-9

This is a sermon about God, even though its title is silence. This sermon will largely be about why I have called a sermon about God, “Silence”. And of course if I am going to give a sermon I will need to jabber away at you about both God and silence, which is something of a strange, incongruous thing to be doing. I will be gratified if, when I am done, you don’t have the feeling that I have been jabbering at you, but I do have to talk. As with last week, I want to speak as personally as I can. Let me begin this way.

I believe in God. Not a surprising thing for a minister to say—on a Sunday morning—from the pulpit. But let me try to assure you that I do not say this in some formal, official way, as though I were reciting a creed or responding to a public opinion poll about how many people in the United States believe in God. The truth is that when I am invited to say a creed—“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”—I may say it, but I don’t say it with conviction. I may say it out loud but in my heart there are lots of doubts and reservations about what I am saying, and not just because of the Father language. And if someone from Gallup or Roper were to ask me whether I believed in God, I would be strongly tempted to cast my lot with the two or three or five percent of people who would respond “no” or “not sure”, as opposed to the ninety-some percent who said that they did. Maybe you’ll understand why I say that as I go along this morning.

But among my friends here at Sojourners, who I trust to hear me speaking personally and not just officially or officiously…I believe in God. More than that, and this is a major jump more than that, I love God. I love God, to use the words of Deuteronomy which Jesus later famously quoted, I love God with all my heart and soul and strength. God is the center of my life.

I want to say all those things without any “buts” attached to them. I believe in God, but…I love God, but…none of those kinds of “buts” that seem to take back what you’ve just said, hardly before the words are finished escaping from your mouth. You know the kind of “but” I’m talking about. “I’m not prejudiced, but…” No “buts”, or “ifs”. “Ands” are a different story. I do allow myself some “ands”. I need some ands to go along with what I’ve said.

I believe in God and I have not always believed in God and there are some days even now when I’m not sure about this believing in God stuff. You see, for me anyway, there’s a big difference between saying “I believe in God, but there are times when I’m not so sure” versus saying, “I believe in God, and there are times when I’m not so sure about believing in God.” I love God, and there are times when I don’t feel very close to God at all. I love God, and I have questions about God, and I have questions for God, and I am not always so sure I even know what I mean by God, much less loving God. I love God with all my heart and soul and strength, and I hear that out-of-body self I was talking about last week saying something like “How dare you make a claim like that. How many people in the history of the universe do you think there are who have loved God with their whole heart and soul and strength? You’re still on page one as far as loving God goes. In fact you’ve shown that you don’t have a clue as to what loving God is all about.” Well, I hear you, I say, all of that is true, and I don’t mean it as a boast, but nevertheless, you out there, I do in my own little, broken way love God with all my heart and soul and strength, even if in my case the all is not very much.

I believe in God and I love God and I have had to overcome a lot of hurdles to get to that place, and if that sounds like I’m repeating myself from what I said last week about how there were lots of hurdles for me to overcome in deciding that I am a Christian, it’s no accident. My struggles with God have certainly been a key part of my struggles with Christianity. And I still have to overcome a lot of hurdles every day with regard to believing in God and loving God. And I often feel more spiritually kin to people who think of themselves as agnostics or atheists than I do with other people who say they believe in God, but who either say it too easily, or are too certain they know all about God, or who believe in a God different from the God I believe in, or who hold their belief as a kind of badge of honor that proves them to be morally or spiritually superior to others, or some or all of the above. I realize there’s a danger in what I’m saying, a danger of a kind of reverse discrimination where I assume that people who believe in God are more likely to have offensive or shallow notions about God than other people. I confess that I am prone to that idea, not so much because I think believers are such a shallow lot, but because the agnostics and atheists I have known have generally been thoughtful people, who ask the same questions I ask and are troubled by many of the same things I am troubled about.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that atheists may be among the best of God’s friends. The god atheists don’t believe in is very often the same god I don’t believe in. Some ideas, images, thoughts about God ought to be done away with. Some ideas, images, thoughts about God need to be done away with in order for some of us to be able to believe in God. Believing in God may sometimes mean believing in false gods. Not believing in God can sometimes be a good thing. There are images of God that get in the way of believing in God.

There are warlike gods out there, gods who command or encourage or support our going to war with each other. There are gods out there who want us to destroy or beat down or forcibly convert the enemies of god, whatever form they are currently coming in and whatever name we are currently calling them.

There are angry, demanding, judgmental gods out there, considering everyone of us a potential enemy of god and seemingly ready to make war on anyone, even believers, threatening them with hell if they don’t believe in quite the right way or behave in quite the right way. These gods, in my mind, are only a variation on the gods who justify earthly warfare. These gods threaten people not with earthly destruction but with eternal destruction if they for one reason or another do not measure up.

There are vain, jealous gods out there who want to be worshiped, flattered, praised, and who don’t like it when they’re not and who don’t like to be called by the wrong name.

There are willful, demanding gods out there who have rules they want us to obey or who have ideas about how we should act. Sometimes these gods are patient and forgiving and give us second and third chances, or lots and lots of chances but some of them are less forgiving and some of them are very forgiving but not forever and some of them have infinite patience and forgiveness to the extent that it may seem they have forgotten whatever ideas they had about how we should act in the first place.

There are powerful gods out there, who in some distant time before there was time, by a word brought something out of nothing and by a breath bestowed the miracle we call life. There are also powerful gods out there who we call “almighty” and “omnipotent”, who are in charge of the universe and who we bring our requests to hoping that some of them will be granted, and who could, if they would, snap their fingers and make whatever they wanted to happen, happen. And I can’t resist saying that those gods in my book have some things to answer for. I have some things I would like to bring up with them—like cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, tsunamis, hurricanes and a bunch of other things too—though I don’t think I will get to ask my questions because I don’t think those gods are real.

There are all sorts of gods out there. Some of them are obvious phonies. They might be so far from the truth as you or I understand it that they don’t even sully the name of God, they are so far from being credible imposters. Others not so obvious and for that reason more difficult to deal with. They are embedded in our hymns, our prayers, our language in general, like the almighty, omnipotent god many of us have grown up with and do believe in, or are tempted to believe in, or think we are supposed to believe in. But are we supposed to believe in a god who could, let’s say, cure an illness if he or she would, but chooses not to, or who listens to the prayers of some but not others, or who responds to people who have prayers being said for them but abandons those who don’t? So what if that god is a phony too? We know some of the gods out there are phonies. What’s to say they aren’t all phonies? We know that the true god is nothing and no one who can be described by our meager words, yet our words are we have to describe, and so we make up images and ways of talking to and about God, the best we can with the words we have. But what is to say that all those images we make up are nothing more than that, things we make up? There are lots of phony gods out there, and although we may recognize some of them as phony rather easily, they clutter and confuse our spirits, and can make the act of believing more difficult.

It is important to ask the questions, and it is important to clear away as best we can the gods and the notions about God that are false or misleading. That’s why I think I feel most akin to agnostics and non-believers and disbelievers. I am all those things too. As a believer I need to be. I need to be constantly sorting through all those popular idols and false gods who try to seduce us into believing in them, not because I want to deny God but because I believe there is true God to be found amidst the debris of our religious creeds and made-up notions about God.

At the end of our questions there are not answers. Is everything we say about God wrong because we are imagining God in human terms, the only terms we have? Is God nothing more than the product of our vivid and needy but well meaning imaginations? At the end of questions like those is not an answer. At the end of the questions is silence. It is silence, but it is not emptiness. At the end of the questions is silence that I believe is filled with the grace of God. At the end of the questions is wonder. At the end of the questions is reverence at the whole of our being, so little of which we understand and all of which we receive as a miracle. At the end of the questions, after we have finally given up our demand for answers, is a peace that passes understanding. At the end of the questions is God.

And in the questions too–God. Not in the questions themselves in the narrow sense. But in all the loving and pondering and wondering and caring and grieving, in the weariness and hopefulness and hurt that has brought the questions into our hearts. God is there too. I believe God is there too, though my words are too poverty-stricken to give you a good picture of this God I believe. And I love God—this God who is present in the silence at the end of my questions, and in the questions themselves—I love God with all my heart and soul and strength, even if my all is not very much.

And…and…I don’t in any way possess God, and I sometimes don’t feel especially close to God, but do feel close to those who may not feel close to God. I said earlier that I felt that agnostics and atheists may be among the best of God’s friends. I also want to say that those who feel God as missing or absent or silent, those who have less of a belief in God than a kind of ache for God, I feel may be among those closest to the heart of God. In any case, I will gladly cast my lot with people who are missing God in their lives, as opposed to those who believe they have this believing in God business all figured out, know how to talk about God, and are ready to tell you all about who God is and what God will do for you. And as opposed to those for whom God is not even a question. Missing God, which is something very much a part of my experience, is a large part of what my spiritual journey is all about, and more than that it is all a part of my loving God, and loving God is not the same thing as but can also not be separated from loving the journey and from the loving of life itself. And by the way I do not believe loving God is something I ought to do or you ought to do. It is more like something we one day discover we are doing, and maybe can’t help ourselves from doing.

Silence. The silence at the end of our questions and within them. The silence in our hearts that leads us along on our spiritual journeys. The silence in our hearts that may make us ache for God. That silence is holy. It is filled with God. It is God. And I am in love with that holy silence. And I am still learning to love it, just a beginner really. Amen.

Jim Bundy
September 25, 2005