Will the real God(s) stand up?

As some folks know, I have a love of inspirational card decks.  I have ones on leadership, art, labyrinth walking, discipleship and more.  I’ve taken them to workshops and council meetings, scattered them around the Sanctuary with miniature Jesus figures, used them for Coffee time conversations, and even handed them out in worship randomly. 

When I went to the first of the Blazing Walnuts Workshops, the minister that was helping Moderator Lansdowne with the course was Northern Spirit’s Office of Vocation minister, Rev. Laura Fause. She’s responsible for helping ministry candidates go through the discernment and education process that helps them decide whether or not they are being called by God into ministry with the United Church of Canada.  She’s also the author of five sets of inspirational cards that she sells on a website store (Affirmation Cards for Disciples – My Blessing Studio).  There’s one for disciples, there’s one for flourishing, one for pride folks and one for kids.  It’s a playful, joyful way of finding a thought to inspire our day.

At one time, playful and joyful were not words that we applied to Christianity or our understanding of God.  Many times Christianity is painted as a “Get out of Hell free” card, and the literature going out to recruit disciples is all about the torture and punishment of rebellious, wayward souls.  And at one point, the use of shame, fear and guilt seemed to bring people into the church and keep them there.

But since the 1960’s, people have been rejecting that.  They have been deconstructing this rigid understanding of God as the divine grumpy king sitting on his throne, pitching people headlong into fire and brimstone. And to be honest, the Bible is full of a diversity of images and names of God far grander than a miserable bearded codger on a glitzy chair. 

Genesis One is a good example of this.  Anyone who takes the Bible literally might consider looking at the ancient Hebrew names for God.  "Elohim" is now translated by some as plural, and "El Shaddai", used in the song of the same name, can mean both God of the mountaintop or anything cone shaped, especially women’s endowments, "The many-breasted God".  Elohim is the creator of humans in God’s own image.  Then in Genesis 2, we have Yahweh not Elohim, and it tells a different story of creation where humanity is made first before the plants and the animals are made last.  There are references to God as being a baker, a king, a woman in labor, a wind, a still small voice, and something so vast humans can’t even see God’s back side without risking their sanity.  All these images point to the human experience of God being complicated, and God being surprising.  God shows up in wondrous ways, or as our Song of Faith puts it, "above perfect knowledge, beyond perfect explanation, a holy mystery".

Humans have been trying to understand God as mystery for a very long time.  Some were people like Hildegarde of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich.

Hildegarde became the leader of a convent when she was very young, and dabbled in God language that shocked many, especially men in positions of power in the church.  She was a musician, a writer, a dreamer, a philosopher and a psychologist who wasn’t afraid to talk truth to politicians.  She was born 20 years after William the Conqueror took over England from the Anglo-Saxons and had many surprising ideas. She thought that women should strive to be more masculine, and men should strive to be more feminine, in order to become a balanced Christian. God was called Divine Feminine and Divine Wisdom.  She wrote of God speaking surprising words to her, “I am the one whose praise echoes on high.  I adorn all the earth.  I am the breeze that nurtures all things green…  I am the rain… that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.”[1] Her ideas of God were shared throughout Europe even though they were not conforming to traditional understandings.

Julian of Norwich lived in England about three hundred years later and also pushed the boundaries of God images.  She lived through wars, the Bubonic Plague, losing her husband and children in her early thirties, and surviving an illness that nearly killed her.  When she recovered, she had herself bricked into the local church where she was given meals through a slot in the wall and never came out in public again.  She listened to daily worship and many people who came to her curtained window outside.  It makes me wonder if she had neurodiverse characteristics.  Her routine would have been constantly the same, she never had to make eye contact with anyone, and she could write down her visions in solitude.  Even though she had lived through immense personal tragedy, she’s most famously remembered for saying “All Shall be Well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She said it because she believed that God is Love and as creator, God’s love will triumph. She described God as the trinity God: Maker, Keeper, Lover, or Might, Wisdom and Goodness.  She described Jesus as a breast-feeding mother, explaining it as “our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself… with the blessed sacrament,” how the bread and wine is as essential to us as a mother's milk.  She also had a vision that God’s creation is so precious that it is held in God’s hand, who loves everyone and everything in creation.

Whether we use Father Son and Holy Spirit, or as our Song of Faith puts it, “Mother, Friend, and Comforter/ Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love, our old understanding of God the angry emperor is rejected by many people.  They see Christianity as a weapon of control, and a tool of oppression.  We won’t go forth and make disciples if we cling to these feared images of God, more like the Greek god Zeus or the Roman God Jupiter than Yahweh, Elohim or El Shaddai.  But many people hunger for hope.  They still need good news.  They yearn for the tender love of a healing and caring God. They long for a community that will love them into healing.  Maybe it’s time for us to redraw our deck of cards when it comes to describing our God as closer than a loving parent, who feeds us like a tender mother and cares for us with a love that is unshakable.  May God's love, however we describe our higher power, our great mystery, continue to inspire, empower and encourage us and others.  Amen.

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[1] P. 5, Earth Prayers edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, Harper San Francisco Press, 1991

Holy Impossible Math

 Romans 14:1–12 Welcome without judging

Matthew 18:21–35 How many times must I forgive?

The answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything, is, as every well-educated hitchhiker knows, 42.  If you are not sure why the answer is 42, check out the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Hopefully it will give you a chuckle.  However, in today’s scripture reading, it’s 490, way more than what Peter thought.  Peter may have thought he was going above and beyond in even suggesting 7. 

Why 7?  Well, how many days are there in a week? 7.  How many animals did Noah bring into the Ark in Genesis 7?  Surprisingly, 7, (the 2 by 2 is in Genesis 6, a good thing to toss out there if someone is trying to prove that the bible has no contradictions in it).  How many days did Jacob work so he could marry Rachel?  7.  How many days did Isaac grieve Abraham’s death? 7.  How many generations suffer for the wrong doings of their family? 7 generations.  How many years of famine brought Joseph’s family to Egypt for reconciliation?  7.  How many days did Noah wait before sending out the dove to find dry land? 7.  You get the picture.  7 was a special, almost magical number for the Jewish people.  It still is seen as a lucky number by people.  Also consider that there are the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven dwarfs, seven colors in the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven deadly sins, and we all want to get into 7^th heaven.  Buddhism believes 7 is the highest form of wisdom, and other faiths also have special meanings they attach to 7.

A mathematician explained that 7 is the only number that can be counted on the fingers of two hands that can’t be multiplied or divided into the other numbers on the hand. 2 can be multiplied, 5 can be doubled, 8 can be halved, but 7 is the only one that sticks out, dare we say it, like a sore thumb.

So, Peter may have thought he was onto something smart when he proposed seven.  Rabbis suggested three, which if you blew that, you were out of luck, just like a batter striking out in a baseball game.  Peter was proposing a level of forgiveness that was perfect in his eyes.  Jesus went even higher than that.  Perfection multiplied by infinity.  Ouch!

For so many of us, even one time seems impossible.  “I’ll never forgive Uncle So and So after that one time he did such and such” is more our style.  People don’t forgive the oddest of things.  I remember a time when I put a “No Smoking please, baby lives here” sticker on my front door and had an aunt and uncle tell me that they would never forgive me for my inhospitality.  And they would never visit me or my babies either.  Ouch!  Forgiveness is a dirty word, one that our society struggles to understand.  How many times have we heard, “I will never forgive you for that!” spoken in anger?

Then we hear in the news tales of forgiveness that sound unbelievably naïve.  The 2007 story of the Amish community who forgave the man who had shot and killed their children.  Or Reverend Dale Lang, an Anglican Priest in Taber Alberta who forgave the shooter who killed his son in 1999.  Or this week, Cheryl Uchytil, mother of Nature Duperron of Athabasca, who was in court to hear the sentence for her daughter’s killer, talked about how she needed to forgive what had happened.  Cheryl said that the anger made her sick and did not help her with her grief.  Forgiveness was healing, but it wasn’t easy or fast.

Some of the challenges we have with forgiveness is that we don’t know what it is.  Forgiveness is not tolerance.  Tolerance means we put up with bad behavior, which leads to further resentment.  Tolerance is a way to justify avoiding conflict, and it tries to strengthen us to continue to endure bad behavior.

Forgiveness is not forgetfulness either.  Rev. Lang will never forget losing his son, nor would he want to. 

Forgiveness is not conflict resolution.  Often people seem to think that they would have to look their abuser in the face and have a conversation with them that would lead to mutual understanding and peace.  There are times when reconciliation can take place, but there are times when reconciliation is not possible.  Nor is forgiveness a weapon to shame someone into admitting they were wrong and need to apologize to you.  Although that can sometimes happen, forgiveness doesn’t work like that except in daydreams and bad movies.

Forgiveness is a work of our hearts.  It is a reminder that we cannot fully judge other people’s actions without a clear understanding of why they did what they did.  Like an iceberg, their reasons for their actions are far below the surface of public statements.  Holding a grudge makes us sick and fearful and easily triggered.  Our reactions signal that we need to explore our own icebergs to find out why we are resisting forgiveness.  Did the event leave us feeling vulnerable? Unsafe? Afraid? Anxious?  What can we do to strengthen our hearts so we will feel safer, braver, able to better protect ourselves from future problems? 

One thing that we can do to strengthen our hearts is listen to Paul.  He wrote that we are to stop passing judgment on one another and resolve not to be stumbling blocks.  In other words, when we judge that the other person should have been better, smarter, kinder, calmer or more compassionate to avoid the bad behavior they inflicted on us, we are putting a barrier between ourselves and God.  Like the official who judges the servant and throws him in jail for an insignificant debt, we are failing God’s holy math.  When we forgive, we free ourselves from the painful addiction to a bad memory.  Or as one Facebook post said, “sometimes we are the collateral damage in someone else’s war against themselves”.

When we pray that God forgives our trespasses as we forgive others who trespass against us, we not only let go of the anger and fear that the initial event triggered in us, we also commit to not retraumatizing ourselves by revisiting the old pain.  This can be just as damaging as the original event.  When we apply holy math and practice letting go of that hurt, we can heal ourselves and our relationships.  Brene Brown says that when we can accept that most people are doing the best they can, we can become kinder and more resilient.  That’s the kind of math Jesus wanted for us.  A math that leads to peace and compassion and kindness, a call to resilience and hope.  May we find ways to live out that call. 

The Heavens are Telling the Glory of God.

Have you ever been so lost that you didn’t know what to do next?  I had a moment like that.  As some of you know, I can be worse than the most stereotypical absent-minded professor when it comes to practical matters.  So I was very proud this summer in Vancouver when I figured out how to take a bus from University of British Columbia where I was taking a course, to the science museum.  I was supposed to meet Tim, who had taken the sky train, to the science museum, for a 2 o’clock show.  And for once in my life, I made it without any problem, arriving around 1:30. Half an hour early!  Woo hoo!  So not like me, right?

Got in, paid admission including the 2 pm show, but that’s when things went sideways.  I texted Tim, saying "I’m here, where are you?"  He quickly replied, "right by the phone booth in the lobby."  "What phone booth", I shot back.  Turns out there’s two science museums in Vancouver, the Telus World of Science next door to the old Expo site on False Creek, and the H. R. MacMillan Space Museum near Grandville Island.  And you guessed it, I was at the wrong one.  Drat!

Well, more than just a drat, actually.  It would take more than the now 20 minutes I had to get downtown and figure out which train to catch, and would miss the 2:00 show no matter what I tried, short of taking a taxi.  So, feeling quite sorry for myself, I went up to the planetarium, and sat down grumpily to watch the 2pm show. 

There’s nothing quite like a tour of our solar system to put one’s problems in perspective, and to come away with a renewed amazement at the beauty and complexity of our Milky Way Galaxy.  We soared over Mars, dove in and out of the rings of Venus and Saturn, looked at the shrinking Red Spot on Jupiter and toured some of the closer constellations in the summer sky.  Wow. 

By the time the show was over, I felt a lot calmer and was able to find my way to the train station, Tim, and even back home where we were staying for the week.  It’s truly breath-taking and still as mysterious as when the folks writing the Psalms and the Book of Job looked up at the sky and saw the Hand of God at work in the music of the spheres, as they called it then.

Planetariums have come a long way since I was a kid.  They could only project stars on the roof of a big domed ceiling and a guide would point out different constellations with a flashlight.  Now with computers and a touch of a button we can be zooming through a colorful kaleidoscope of breath-taking images from the Hubble Telescope.  Our knowledge of space has grown and our computers too.  50 years ago it took computers the size of this church to land people on the moon.  Now we have the same computing power as that room in a device small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

50 years ago today, the first astronauts to land on the moon finally came out of quarantine and could safely reconnect with their families and friends back home.  Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins returned to earth as heroes.  Nasa had managed to do the impossible, send humans into space and back again.  They did it with careful planning, by being prepared for as many different scenarios, and by testing their equipment over and over.  But they also managed to do it with faith. 

Not too many people know that the first food eaten on the moon was bread and wine.  Before Neil Armstrong left the Eagle for his famous walk, Buzz Aldrin opened his tiny box of private items that each astronaut was allowed and pulled out a glass much like this one, a bit of bread and a little vial of wine.  He read from a tiny piece of paper, “I am the vine, you are the branches.

Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. For without me you can do nothing.”  Then he ate the bread and drank the wine, making Communion the first meal to be eaten on the moon.  The cup is kept in a special case in a Presbyterian Church in Houston Texas that likes to call itself ‘The Church of Astronauts’.  Every July, they celebrate communion on the Sunday closest to July 20^th just like they did in 1969 with Buzz Aldrin.

How often do we hear that science and faith are incompatible?  How often do we hear of Christians scoffing at scientists or scientists writing books about how delusional it is to believe in God?  There seems to be in most people’s minds a sense that we have to choose one or the other.  I’ve even heard stories of Christians telling children not to waste their time on science because it’s not true.

Yet so many people find no such dichotomy.  Dr. Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year and was featured in Broadview Magazine as a faithful member of a United Church in Waterloo.  She’s not alone.

Here’s a quick quiz for you: Who said this, a scientist, a theologian or a philosopher?

“The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.”

–Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology

“It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

“People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible... However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”  –Physicist Paul Davies

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” Sir Isaac Newton

“I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.”  “If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.”

—Lord William Kelvin, who worked on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero and the Kelvin temperature scale.

And last but not least, “The more I study science, the more I believe in God.” by none other than Albert Einstein himself.

These are just a few of the top physicists and scientists who have concluded that there is more to our existence than happenstance or coincidence.  That this big beautiful planet we live on with just the right balance of water and carbon, heat and cold, liquid and solid, spin and tilt is no accident, and that the psalmists were scientists when they said,

When I look to the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their places, what are we mortals that you should be mindful of us, mere human beings that you should care for us?  You have made us little less than divine, and crowned us with glory and honour.       You have made us rulers over all your creation, and put all things under our feet.

May we learn to be as faithful as scientists and live with respect and gratitude in this beautiful universe that God has created.