Ancient Testimony: 1 Samuel 18:1-5; 20:42 Modern Testimony: Excerpt from the definition of “God” in Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God, by Carter Heyward, p. 188 ff.
March 17th is a holiday. We all know the most obvious holiday that falls on March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day. On this day, according to legend, one thousand five hundred nine years ago, after banning all snakes and frogs from the island, Patrick of Ireland died, thus becoming qualified, at least in one way, for sainthood.
But other things happened on March 17th. Many people were born this day. Some of the more famous ones include Patrick Duffy, Lesley-Anne Down, Rob Lowe and Kurt Russell. While preparing for this sermon, I even found a list of mathematicians who died on March 17th. You wouldn’t think that would be a long list would you?
There are also some notable events in history that occurred on March 17th:
45 BC - Julius Caesar defeated the Pompeians at the battle of Munda in Spain.
1337 - Edward III created the Duchy of Cornwall for his eldest son, Edward.
1776 - George Washington forced the British to evacuate Boston.
1906 - In a speech given to the Gridiron Club in Washington, DC, President Theodore Roosevelt coined the word ‘muckrake’.
1939 - British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain accused Adolf Hitler of breaking his word, after German troops crossed the Czech frontier.
1941 - In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art was officially opened by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1963 - On Bali, the volcano Mount Agung erupted, killing at least 11,000 people.
1967 - "Peanuts" comic strip characters, Snoopy and Charlie Brown, were on the cover of "LIFE" magazine.
But apropos to the sermon, in addition to it being St. Patrick’s Day, there are two events I want to bring to your attention. On March 17, 1918, Marvin Godwin and Bessie Stancil were married. They eloped. Today would have been their 84th anniversary. They were my maternal grandparents. And on March 17, 2000, I arrived in Charlotte, having decided to return “home” – to where I grew up; to where my family lives.
In our Sunday School class – the Round Table class – we have been reading John Spong’s book, A New Christianity for a New World. In it, Spong images a new comprehension of God. I don’t know what that new image is because we haven’t gotten to the end of the book. But I do know some of what Spong says God is not. God is not, according to Spong, a manipulative old man who uses us toward his own end. On the other hand, God is also not a helicopter pilot who drops into our crises, intervening in history when we face death or grief – or a pop quiz or our gardens are dry or when we’re late for an appointment and can’t find a parking place. Spong likes the spotlight and likes to present himself as though he is a maverick leading the pack, and, perhaps, in the universe of Episcopalian bishops, he is. But in truth many theologians and writers of equal or greater intuition have been examining the end Spong seeks.
Walter Bruggemann is one of the more classically oriented theologians in this quest – that is to say, a person more accepted by the ecclesiastical hierarchies. Bruggemann suggests that the new understanding of God is really a recapturing of the evolution of the understanding of God that can be found in the Hebrew scriptures. Interestingly enough, Bruggemann cites the stories of David as an example. In the David-cycles, God is portrayed as finally trusting humankind.[1] There are no caveats in God’s covenant with David. Other classical theologians have pursued this theme – H. Richard Niebuhr, Tillich, even Jurgen Moltmann. All of them have explored the idea that God is something other than a person.
In his book, Gay Theology Without Apology, Gary David Comstock (who was working on his Ph.D. at Union while I was a student there) creates a new credo: “I believe that we are created and destroyed in our relationships. God is the mutuality and reciprocity in our relationships, the compelling and transforming power that brings together, reconciles, and creates us. The creative power of mutuality and the destruction wrought by its absence are perhaps most readily and urgently represented by the “non-negotiable demands” that we humans are getting “right now from the air, the water, the soil.” (p. 127) This is an understanding of God that I can relate to – so to speak.
Clearly, I’m not the scholar that these other folks are. But even I have long been in the process of coming to understand that who God is – at least for me – is inextricably bound up with who I am – and who you are. When you speak, I hear the voice of God. When you touch me, I feel God’s hand on me. When we kiss, I taste God. When I see you, I see the face of God. When we carry on a conversation, that is prayer. All of that is not to say that I have had the courage to jump to an understanding that God is not some sort of separate entity. Gary is suggesting (with others, I might add) that God may not be a tangible thing. Now, how many of your think God is a tangible thing – like a book or a car or a cross? It’s easier to say no to the question phrased that way. But how about this – do you think God is a tangible thing like a person? I’m uneasy even with the question. But let me point out a few bit problems that a non-tangible understanding of God might assuage, at least for me.
For instance, I have been disturbed by the notion that love comes in three flavors: agape, philia and eros. I’ve even preached sermons about this – I think I’ve preached about it here. I’ve said that I think God’s love isn’t just a pure love from afar – the traditional understanding of agape. God’s love is certainly erotic – even in my understanding of God as a tangible thing, as a person-like deity – I think God’s love attracts and pursues – that it is erotic. But it wasn’t until I read Carter Heyward’s words in Touching our Strength that I figured out why the trinitarian formula of Love irritated me so much. Heyward points out that “The moral distinction among the three forms of love is fastened in classical Christian dualism between spiritual and material/physical reality, between self and other. There is, moreover, a concomitant assumption that it is more difficult – therefore better – to express God’s spiritual love of enemies, strangers, and people we may not enjoy than to love our friends and sexual partners.”[2] And the reason that it’s better to love enemies than friends is because loving friends can be, quite literally, messy. It involves parts of our anatomy and sometimes spit. And loving enemies only involves self-denial – a christian must-have! If your God is a tangible thing, then God is either sexual or God isn’t. Personally, I don’t have a problem with a sexual God, as those of you who heard my last sermon here know. If God is non-tangible, however, that may solve the problem – but it may be a hard fix to swallow, because if God is non-tangible, then God isn’t a sexual being – God is sex, itself.
A second problem that a non-tangible understanding of God as mutuality might aid is the problem of Unity. We worship Unity. We strive for Unity. But we never get it. But maybe Unity is really a great goal. Or maybe we just understand Unity imperfectly. The ecclesiastical emphasis on unity has included a “...disdain and avoidance of disagreement – or for anyone who dares to make a fuss in the name of justice.”[3] It seems to me that mutual relationships often encompass conflict, anger and tension. In fact, show me a couple who says they’ve never fought – and I’ll show you a couple in serious need of therapy. Anger or tension or conflict in a relationship is a necessary part of growing and relating.
I like the idea that God is mutuality, reciprocity, relationship. “Mutuality is our shared experience of power in relation. By it we are called forth more fully into becoming who we are – whole persons with integrity, together. Our shared power is sacred power, and it is erotic. Our shared experience of relationship power, our sacred experience of sensual power, our erotic experience of the power of God, is the root of our theological epistemology. It is the basis of our knowledge and love of God. It is a calling forth, an occasion to touch each other’s lives, and an open invitation into the healing of common woundedness.”[4]
Like Bruggemann, Gary Comstock also uses David as an example of his understanding of God as mutuality in relationship. “Jonathan and David first make their covenant without any direct reference to Yahweh and later they renew it before Yahweh. In this case God is neither a party to the covenant nor a facilitator of it, instead, God is love and comfort that Jonathan and David exchange and depend on. Jonathan’s love for David is Yahweh’s action, not the result of Yahweh’s directions. This love is not initiated, made or directed by Yahweh; the love as it is shared and needed by David and Jonathan and as it changes and creates them in their relationship is Yahweh. God is not the facilitator of mutuality but is the mutuality itself: ‘Yahweh shall be between me and you for ever.’”[5]
I confess to you that I am very uneasy about this non-tangible understanding of God that I present to today for your consideration. I’m very comfortable thinking of God as a person – or at least as person-like -- as being somewhere, as omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. It’s almost like a form of star-worship – I want someone or something powerful and important to have a personal interest in me. When you really think about it, that prevailing concept of a tangible God is profoundly egocentric. We have made ourselves the center of the universe and we have made God our plaything. But I like it that way. I like having God at my beck and call. I like thinking that when I am in trouble God might burst through the door like some cosmic Superman (or Wonder Woman) and save the day (but, no – not like Mighty Mouse!). I find it extraordinarily comfortable to think of God as being like me, created in my own image. What I like most about my tangible God image is that I can image a tangible God in control of the universe. I haven’t figured out a way to image a non-tangible God as in control. Especially a God who is mutuality and reciprocity itself. Is it safe for the universe to be in the hands, if you will, of a God who is the relationship between me and Donna C? Or between Glenn Johnson and Ken O’Connell? Can anything good come from Nazareth – or to say it in another way, is it possible that a world dependent on the actions of humankind could survive?
Allow me to share with you from Carter Heyward’s thesis, The Redemption of God, through which she is helping to redeem God for me. She says, “To my knowledge, there is no Christian theologian who has held unequivocally that, just as evil is the result of humanity’s wrong choices, so too good is the result of humanity’s right choices. Christian theologians have tended to berate humanity for evil and praise God for good. This is a serious error, I believe, because humanity cannot un-do evil without doing good, which is a single human act and our common vocation.”[6]
“Neither good nor evil can be laid on the shoulders of an anthropomorphized deity, for God is “no one” but is rather a transpersonal spirit, power in relation, which depends upon humanity for making good/making justice/making love/making God incarnate in the world. To do so is to un-do evil. The doing of good and the un-doing of evil is a human act, a human responsibility. God is our power to do this. We choose this power which is constantly available to us, and it is good. God is a power which we can and do love – that is, actively realize as present and creative in our lives. To love God is to un-do evil. It is a moral imperative, not a sweet feeling, a private personal relation, or a charitable gesture.”[7]
March 17, 493 A.D., was the culmination of a lifetime. Patrick was a British Celt captured by the Irish and enslaved for about four years. It was when he was taken away into slavery -- away from his family -- that he finally met the “true God”, as he puts it. Sixteen years old at the time, he was taken away from everything he knew and everyone he loved – all of which he had taken for granted. And in the breach came a realization of the “true God,” growing clearly out of relationships – interrupted relationships, new relationships, perhaps even unhealthy relationships – but relationships nonetheless.
In the morning of March 17, 1918, my grandmother got dressed. She never left the house without her gloves, and her younger brother thought he could stop the elopement by hiding her them – but they were found, my grandfather came and fetched her, and they were married by a justice of the peace nearby. For the prurient among you, their first child was born in 1920. They worked and played and loved until my grandmother died in 1974. As Carter says in the Modern Testimony read earlier – My grandparents “godded.”
March 17, 2000, marked the end of a long process of decision making for me. I didn’t particularly enjoy living in the northeast, but that was not the driving factor in my move to Charlotte. I grew up here. My family lives here or nearby. I wanted to be near them. I wanted to “god” with them. Our relationships are not perfect – they are human, as they should be. Having arrived here, I found this gathering. And we have “godded.” Maybe I can’t tell you with any assurance that an understanding of God as mutuality and reciprocation is a good understanding. I know that I can’t call it “correct” because I don’t know what that means. But I can tell you that the prevailing understanding of God in our general society is seriously, profoundly flawed and that it’s past time we started prospecting for a new image of God, a new understanding of the eternal Deity in which we can find a spiritual ground. I urge you to take a look at how you see God – and then try to see God from a different angle. It could make all the difference.
Think about God as being the relationship between you and others. Let God be “the-loving-of-the-other-as-you-want-to-be-loved that creates a community in which the gifts and talents of all are welcome, developed, considered special. …[U]nderstand God not as above, other, or outside but as among, between and part of us.”[8]
Amen.
1]In Man We Trust: The Neglected Side of Biblical Faith, Walter Bruggeman. See especially p. 38ff. [2] Touching our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God, Carter Heywood, p. 98. [3] Eros Breaking Free: Interpreting Sexual Theo-Ethics, Anne Bathurst Gilson, p. 80. [4] Touching our Strength, Heyward, p. 99. [5] Gay Theology Without Apology, Comstock, p. 128-9, emphasis added. [6] The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation, Isabel Carter Heyward, p. 159. [7] Ibid. [8] Gay Theology Without Apology, Comstock, p. 129.
