Sunday, October 4, 2009, A Sermon by Reverend Lillie Mae Henley
God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.
We sang in our first hymn, “God of grace and God of glory, on thy people pour Thy power… Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour, for the facing of this hour…
A few years ago, in a hospital, a dying patient asked me, what does God look like? I smiled at him and asked, “What do you think God looks like?”
He said, I don’t know, but I sure wish I did.
What does God look like?
We do not know how very early humans saw the powers that created their environment. We do know that they created artifacts that were symbolic of religious response. We also know that since humankind has had the capacity to tell stories, we have seen the Creator as gods and goddesses.
Humankind’s story tells us that we have always recognized a power greater than ourselves. We have a need for some reason. Perhaps it is that we do have a “God-shaped hole” in our soul.
Sure, there are those who say they have no such need. They call themselves atheists. And whether they do not believe in Michelangelo’s image of God in the Sistine Chapel, or any other force of the Cosmos, they are usually sincere in their beliefs. That is their religion. While I do not agree; as a religious liberal, I do respect their position.
My message today is for those of us who have a need to believe in something greater than ourselves. Something that we can call “God of grace and God of glory” [s]omething that can “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour,” whatever this hour brings.
What does God look like?
You see, as human beings, sometimes, we need an image of the Creator, for our minds to “grasp” the meaning and significance of the Absolute. It is difficult to be in relationship with One for whom we do not have an image. That was a significant part of the battle between the Hebrew people and YHWH. When Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments they were making a golden calf to worship Baal. Why? Worshiping something they could SEE was more comforting than worshiping that which they could not see.
Yet, the Eternal Consciousness, the Absolute, the Creator, is incomprehensible to our human minds. We can never fully know.
Simone Weil wrote in her book Waiting for God, [New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love [for God] is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.
What does God look like?
The old, bearded man, the gray-haired father in Heaven is one image that we have of God. Father God is transcendent, outside our time and existence. This image of God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and never-changing. Never-changing is a characteristic that is significant for orthodox theology.
This image of God, however, for many years biased Christian worship towards a patriarchal view. Feminist theologians such as Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, tell us that seeing God as male has created a “Western patriarchy,” that has “mediated and perpetuated” male dominance in our culture for over two thousand years.
There are other ways to view God, other images to which we can call to “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour,” whatever this hour brings.
There is process theology which gives us a God that is transcendent, immanent, and changing. It began with Alfred North Whitehead, a renowned mathematician and philosopher, and his desire to explain all things. He suggested that everything is a part of everything else, that everything is part of a process that is both self-created and influenced by other processes. He believed that every entity was in the process of “becoming,” and every entity “prehends” or feels what other entities feel. God’s nature for Whitehead was both physical and mental.
Charles Hartshorne is the theologian that more fully developed Whitehead’s theories and said God’s nature was both abstract and physical. There is the eternal characteristics of God’s nature—abstract—and the physical—which is the accumulated physical experiences of God.
Both, Whitehead and Hartshorne were leaders in post-modern theology, and we must thank them for “process theology.” However, both emphasized creativity, and Hartshorne said that without the orderly processes of God the universe would be in chaos.
Of course, there is a body of critique, but what is significant in process theology: God is transcendent, immanent, and changing.
In a seminar once on process theology, the professor asked us to imagine the cosmos as a metaphor for God. God then would be transcendent from us, as Creator, and also within us and part of us as participants in the processes of the cosmos. Our existence, while very short in comparison to many of the other processes of the cosmos, is still influenced by God and influences God.
We are part of the God Process and as we change in response to our existence and in our relation to God, God also changes. All relationships of everyone and everything change in relationship to each other, including God.
Process theology has been adapted by Christian theologians such as John Cobb, Schubert Ogden, and others to demonstrate a dynamic changing God that reflects the God of the Old and New Testaments. A God that was “in relationship” with the Hebrew people and changed as they changed, as well as the God who is present in the story of Jesus.
What does God look like?
Another theologian that offers us a way to imagine God is Sallie McFague, author of Metaphorical Theology Models of God in Religious Language. McFague tells us that metaphors and models give us a very human way of visioning God. We must remember, she says, metaphors and models are “similar” as well as “dissimilar” to the object they represent. Her beauty is a rose in my eyes. Her beauty is beautiful like a rose, but her beauty is not a rose.
McFague wrote:
The simplest way to define a model is as a dominant metaphor, a metaphor with staying power. Metaphors are usually the work of an individual… which is often passing. But some metaphors gain wide appeal and become major ways of structuring and ordering experience… “God the father,” comes readily to mind: it is a metaphor …
that became a model.
Metaphorical theology gives us a way to see God in Jesus’ story. “If [we see] the parables of Jesus and Jesus himself as a parable of God” than both “Jesus” and “God” are metaphors, and “they give us a” way to envision a God with whom we can be in relationship.
McFague also wrote The Body of God An Ecological Theology and in this book, she uses the cosmos as a model for God. If we use the cosmos as a model, “It allows us to think of God as immanent in our world while retaining, indeed, God’s transcendence.” It is a powerful image and one which McFague believes is “a way to think about, [and] reflect upon, divine transcendence—a way to deepen [God’s]… significance for us.”
She is also hopeful, that if we see God as the body of the cosmos that our relationship with God, the earth, and our bodies will change in a positive way. This model “encourages us to dare to love bodies and find them valuable and wonderful...”
Let’s look at Hebrews 1:1-7 our reading today.
In times past, YHWH spoke in fragmentary and varied ways to our ancestors through the prophets, in these final days, God has spoken to us through the Only Begotten, who has been made heir of all things and through whom the universe was first created. Christ is the reflection of God’s glory, the exact representation of God’s being; all things are sustained by God’s powerful Word.
Having cleansed us from our sins, Jesus Christ sat down at the right hand of the Glory of heaven—as far superior to the angels as the name Christ has inherited is superior to theirs.
If we look at the words of the author of Hebrews, we can see that early in the Christ story, we have vivid and poetic images. We are reminded of the close relationship YHWH had with the Hebrews, and that the relationship is on-going. God has become Jesus; those who read the Bible literally, use “incarnate,” those who read the story metaphorically, see the transcendent aspect of God become immanent through God’s Word or God’s Wisdom. Wisdom through whom “the universe was first created” and who “sustains” all things.
The Christ reflects God’s glory, or goodness, yes love, and God’s willingness to be in a loving relationship with all of us.
The author goes on to say Jesus, who became the Christ is an exact representation of God. Literally for some, and metaphorically for others, the Christ can be seen as God. A God who, in loving relationship can restore us
when we sin,
when we fail,
when we are disheartened,
when we are lost,
when we are ungrateful,
when we ignore our relationships,
when we deny love,
when we are selfish,
when we hurt others,
when we hurt ourselves
—yes—the Wisdom of God who became the Christ IS one way of seeing the Creator.
What does God look like? What does God look like to you?
Is there time in your life to be in a loving relationship with the God of Grace, God of Glory? The One who can “grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour,” whatever this hour brings?
Amen
Posted by UNMC Office at October 7, 2009 06:06 PM