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Sermon
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Everyone should try to get some grandchildren if they can . . . or at least have someone in their life who functions like a grandchild. Why? Because grand-children ask us those awfully difficult questions that honest Christians should have to face up to. The Bible says, “Out of the mouths of little kids your stronghold is built.” (Psalm 8:2a) Two quick stories to illustrate. First was when my eldest grandson, today nudging twenty, was seven years old. “Pop?” in this piping little voice. “Yes, Jonathan.” “Why did God make pit bull terriers?” That same week an elderly migrant lady in Perth, while hanging out the washing, had been mauled to death by two pit bulls that got into her yard. Jonathan’s question encapsulates a score of others. The UCA bookshop in Little Collins Street is still flogging a frig’ magnet that says “Don’t worry; God is in control.” After tsunamis, earthquakes and cyclones I can understand the passer by who says “Is God cruel, stupid or incompetent . . . or all of those?” What does the existence of pit bulls suggest about the nature of God? The other episode took place when my youngest granddaughter also was seven; she still is. “Pop, can I ask you a question?” “Sure, Juliet. Away you go.” “Pop what IS God?” Alongside of pit bulls and other nasties we meet, that highlights the other question a lot of preachers wish would go away. And because in their experience unsatisfactory answers are common, many pew sitters give up on that one. I’m going to meet this question “What IS God?” head-on this morning. I’m also going to tell you something about your fellow pew sitters; that is, assuming this congregation is not too different from most others. Consider. In any hundred faithful pew sitters, there will be about a dozen who are untroubled by the question. It’s a waste of space and they wonder why anyone should bother asking it. There will also be about a dozen who are what I call ‘tacit’ atheists; that is, not openly expressing it, but pretty well resigned to thinking there’s no God. They’re not without faith; they’re likely to be in church because they find something attractive in Jesus – but not in God. The remaining three-quarters put Juliet’s question “What IS God?” in the too hard basket. And that means when their grandchildren put the question, they gaze at the ceiling. They have my sympathy. I’ve had this conversation with some of you. “Given that we’re seven million miles away from where we were in space this time last week, who is ‘G-O-D’ for you?” You’ve thrown up your hands and gazed heavenward. I said I intended to meet the question head-on. I want to do it by telling you how I tried to answer it for a seven year old. Not that you are seven year olds, or even deserve to be treated like seven year olds – but in broad terms a truthful answer should be much the same for a seven year old and a seventy-seven year old. So, here’s the story. In the early 1960s I was headhunted by my denomination in South Australia to be ‘director of Christian education’. Part of my brief was to generate approaches to work with adults. There was predictable resistance. Forty years ago one rarely found in Congregational, Methodist or Presbyterian churches groups of 50, 60, 80, 90 adults coming to study programs. It wasn’t like today. “We’re not kids! We went to Sunday school, and that gave us the grounding we needed!” I developed a week-end format called a ‘church life conference’, and would take away 20-25 adults from a congregation to a small centre in the Adelaide hills. We would go there Friday evening and return Sunday afternoon. We had good food, lovely walks and late night sharing of stuff most had never talked about with fellow church members. People ‘had permission’ as we say today. In most cases the group went back to their church committed to continuing adult learning. It wasn’t all ‘verbal’. Often on the Saturday morning I would introduce folks to painting. I had been converted to this by a professor of art in one of the teachers colleges who was using it therapeutically with psychiatric patients; they were able to say things in form and colour that they couldn’t get out in words. In one of these church life conferences the oldest was a lady of 77 or 78 – which to me (in my early 30s) seemed very old! I will call her ‘Evie Mann’ (a good inclusive pseudonym!) We got over the initial awkwardness about everyone painting, and I gave them the assignment. I would say, “Do a picture that says something about your faith. The options are unlimited. After morning tea we will talk about our paintings.” I was always a wee bit nervous about pushing people into unfamiliar territory, but it worked wonderfully. They taped their paintings on the wall and we walked around looking at them over morning tea time. Evie’s had me puzzled at first. It looked like the beach, but with no people to be seen. Then I saw the head of someone in the water. It was Evie’s depiction of herself – of her faith and spirituality. She had grown up at Henley Beach (Adelaide), and with her father and brother had taken a dip almost every morning from early childhood. She couldn’t remember learning to swim; it had been too far back for conscious recollection – like “yesterday I couldn’t swim and today I can.” I asked Evie to tell us about her swimming in the bay. She said, “I have always, ever since I was a wee little girl, felt at home in the water. Oh, I know you have to be careful, but I felt so comfortable with it surrounding me, holding me up, letting me turn this way and that . . . and so much of it!” In a word, Evie’s depiction of herself in the water was a metaphor for her relationship with God. It was a very powerful image. That was in the 1960s. Forty years on, and having reflected on the idea of God as ‘the Ocean of Being’, imagine my surprise reading Marcus Borg. Borg is author of The Heart of Christianity and one of the leading progressive christians. He was a drop-out who came back into the fold with a kind of ‘mystical’ spirituality a bit like the Quakers. Borg says “We are in God as fish are in the sea.” I hope it has not escaped you that every Sunday morning we say together, “God is around us and within.” Let me take you back to this wonderful old lady, Evie Mann, and show you why the depiction of herself in the sea off Henley Beach has such potential when you’re seeking after deeper and richer truths about God. I have three quick points. First, Evie’s painting is a reminder. Reminder of what? A reminder that we speak of God only in metaphor. To say anything ‘literally’ about this unutterable mystery we dare to name is not possible. All we can ever say of God is metaphorical. Jesus used metaphors; lots of them. He spoke of God as elusive one, as quirky grape grower, as undiscriminating party giver, as lavish philanthropist, good shepherd and so on. He also used the metaphor of cosmic parent (father). Evie’s image of the surrounding and supporting water is another metaphor, of course. Second, her metaphor delivers us. Delivers us from what? It delivers us from our dependence on what we call ‘anthropomorphic’ ideas of God. These are ways we represent God as some sort of heavenly being like an old man with a beard riding on the clouds. This is the kind of nonsensical image that has been rejected by so many people we have failed to give a more grown-up way of thinking about God. Evie’s metaphor suggests there is another way to speak of God – not as a ‘being’ at all, even of unimaginably vast proportions. God is not a being among other beings; God is the very source and ground of all being. The problem with human type metaphors is that we end up making a god in the image of ourselves. Third, Evie’s metaphor (or better perhaps, Marcus Borg’s metaphor) is wonderfully graphic. First, It reminds us of the everywhereness of God, the theme of Psalm 139. It also reminds us that not only is the fish in the ocean; the ocean is in the fish. A fish is born in the ocean, lives in the ocean and dies in the ocean. It draws vital nutrients from the ocean. It is in the ocean that it has the freedom to explore and express its fishiness. There was one other thing we wanted to ask Evie, which has probably occurred to you already. How did she understand prayer? Did she pray – and how? “Oh, that’s an easy question,” she said. “You’ll think I’m not awfully spiritual, but I’ll tell you what prayer means for me. It means ‘floating in God’.” “Floating in God?” “I can remember that wonderful sensation when my daddy said I could stop waving my arms and legs in the water and just lie still. I found I didn’t have to do a thing. The water held me up, and I just lay there ever so still.” I said, “So prayer for you is like floating in God; stopping all that thrashing around and lying still.” She nodded her head. “Don’t you remember,” she said, “how the Bible says ‘be still and know that I am God’?” “Do you ever ask for things, tell God stuff, call for help?” “I have to disappoint you,” she said. “I don’t do any of that. I figure God knows all of it already, so I guess I’m just listening to see if God has something to tell me.” Evie had learned in childhood some of the things some don’t learn in a lifetime. She had learned the axiom that I know many of you attribute to our dear friend Gordon Powell: ‘let go and let God’. And she had learned that the essence of prayer is not telling God anything at all; it is listening for what God has to tell us. Any way, that is enough for one day on ‘The Ocean of Being’. Float! ___________________________________________________
An
address presented by the Rev Dr John Bodycomb at St Aidan's
Uniting Church, North Balwyn, on 10th August, 2008 IT MAY BE
REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. |
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Page updated 12/08/08