February 27, 2011
It has been a while since I spoke at a Sunday morning at Eighth Day, so I am glad to take the opportunity to do so this morning. Over the last year or two, I have been doing a lot of reading, studying and thinking about our Christian faith and I want to share some of that with you. I see this more as a focused sharing rather than as a formal teaching.
The scripture that I have chosen to use, which is the basis of my speaking to you, is from the 46th psalm, the first part of the 10th verse, King James Version. It is a short, but, in my opinion, powerful passage. You see it whenever you visit the retreat center at Dayspring. It is simply this: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
It should be obvious that although I have selected this Bible passage, I am not going to follow it. If I did, I would sit down now, we would have twenty minutes of silence and everyone would probably gain a more profound understanding of God from the silence than from anything that I will say. Unfortunately, I have not yet reached that stage of spiritual growth.
I also want to warn you that this sharing may be fairly heady or intellectual, but I can’t help it. That’s the way God made me.
Our current Membership Commitment says “I commit myself to following Jesus” and “I will endeavor to follow Jesus in paths of peace, forgiveness, healing, justice and, mercy.” Along with other members of Eighth Day, I have made this commitment and I plan to renew it on June 12th.
I believe, as our membership commitment reads, that the teachings and commitment of Jesus of Nazareth are “fully centered in the grace and truth of God,” I want to live now, as much as I am able, in the divine domain, often translated as the kingdom of God, about which Jesus spent his public life teaching. I fully believe in the words attributed to Jesus: “I have come that you may have life and have it in all its fullness.” [John 10:10, NEB]
But I find myself asking some very basic questions. What exactly is “the grace and truth of God”? Is God simply one’s ultimate concern as some theologians suggest? Does God actually intervene in human history as many prayers I have heard at Eighth Day suggest? Or is God simply an uninvolved creator who just wound up the universe and let it go? Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong says that “… religion is, in fact, a human creation that serves a human need.” [Eternal Life: A New Vision, p. 84] Is the same true of God? My basic question this morning is: Is there an existential reality of God apart from any human existence?
Let me share some of my troubled thinking that gives rise to these questions. For example, when Gail Arnall left for a trip to Iraq several years ago, we gathered around her in our worship service and asked God to care for her and protect her on this journey. This type of prayer is a very common and beneficial occurrence in this and many other churches. It gave me, and I believe Gail also, a great sense of comfort and caring. What we were doing was directly telling Gail how much we loved her and cared for her safety. A few weeks ago we did the same thing for Susie Jones when she prepared for surgery, as we have done for many others.
But to continue the example of Gail, do we actually believe that we can persuade God to intervene if Gail were in danger on her trip? Worldwide, 10,000 children are going to die today of preventable malnutrition, and tomorrow and every day this week. Would we believe that there is any grace or truth in a God who would intervene on Gail’s behalf but not in this continuing preventable tragedy?
So in exploring these unanswerable questions, I asked myself, is there any hard evidence that I can come up with that would demonstrate to me the presence and nature of God? I believe there is. I want to share briefly with you three points, as examples, of what I believe are this evidence.
First point of evidence: you cannot destroy life. One can certainly destroy a life, as we, as a nation, experience all too frequently, but life itself may be the only advanced form of matter that cannot be destroyed.
What in the world do I mean by that? Follow along with me in this fantasy. Suppose we were to gather a lot of paper here in the Potter’s House or some safer place and burn it all up – totally destroy it. Then we added all sorts of junk to this pile, the only condition being that everything had to be totally destroyed. Then we accumulated a really big pile of totally destroyed material – about the size of this planet.
Suppose that I told you that, if we just let this junk sit where it is in orbit around our sun, after a while, and it might take quite a long while, things would start to emerge from this pile – things like the Eifel Tower, the city of Copenhagen and Sarah Palin. Would you believe me?
But that is exactly what happened. I am talking physics here not theology. To the best of our knowledge and research, when our universe was created, matter exploded with such energy that not even the atoms could stay together. There was total destruction of all matter. Yet life emerged. How did it do that? Once something is destroyed, it is supposed to stay destroyed. Recent astronomical observations point to the existence of literally hundreds of billions of planets similar to earth in our universe where life may have emerged. The emergence of the complex phenomenon of life from totally destroyed matter makes no logical sense. Something is going on.
Second point of evidence: complexity increases. This also makes no sense. As time goes on, our experience is that things break down. Their form or substance simplifies. Animal life initially emerged as one celled animals. I think it would be logical to expect them to stay one celled animals and perhaps die out after a period of time. As you know, that didn’t happen. They changed into elephants and eagles and rattlesnakes and, eventually, into you and me. How was destroyed matter programmed to do this? Something is going on, the understanding of which is so far beyond us creatures, who are part of this creation, that we really can only experience it.
Third point of evidence: life regenerates itself. Could the most brilliant human mind or combination of minds design a machine that would continually recreate itself so that it would never wear out? The question is laughable. Yet two billion years ago, someone figured out how to do this. Something is going on.
What this all says to me is that there is a presence in the world that is beyond anything that I can understand. Being human I believe we tend to conceptionalize God in human terms. God laughs, gets angry, loves us and can do anything God wants to do. We see God as a super human being. More recently I have come to experience God more as a presence than as a person.
I experience my and our prayers as often telling God what to do or asking God to do our will rather than the other way around. I believe that if we truly resolve to follow Jesus, our prayers should be to discern God’s will for us in our particular individual circumstances today and then try to live into that calling.
How do we do this? I believe that Jesus devoted his life to telling us how we do this primarily though his parables and aphorisms. That is why his life was so celebrated and all sorts of stories were made up to glorify his past presence among us.
I have been describing how my concept of God works for me in what I believe are rational and logical terms because that’s the way I try to think. I understand that this way may work or may not work for you.
Karen Armstrong, in the introduction to her book A History of God, says that “… it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound.” [A History of God, p. xxi] What I have described is my approach to trying to understand the nature of the divinity. I hope that it has provoked some ideas, concepts or questions in your thinking.
I still have a lot of questions. I have asked all these questions in my prayer time. And I have received an answer. The answer was this: “David, be still and know that I am God.”
Thank you for listening.