- Dead Gods
I give thanks to God for this day, for my family and my church, for the music of our praise band, for this awesome California weather, and for the opportunity to minister with you as a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.
And I think about God often. (That’s what led me to ordained ministry.) And I’ve noticed that, as I grow older, the ways I think about God have changed.
And I’ve learned that this is OK. In fact, it’s necessary.
For a growing number of people, old ways of thinking about God no longer work. More and more people say they are “nonreligious,” or that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Most still believe in God or some sort of higher power, but the traditional ways of describing God just don’t make sense.
So it’s time for the church to start thinking about God in a new way. It’s time to re-imagine God. Theologian and church historian Justo Gonzalez says it’s time to let dead gods bury dead gods; and by that he means, it’s time to let the old ideas about God that no longer work die and fade away.
It’s time to let dead gods die.
To give you an idea what I’m talking about, here are some dead gods that we need to let die:
The god who is portrayed as an old guy with a beard.
The god who is exclusively male.
The god who is concerned only about spiritual salvation and not about life here and now.
The god who is a judgmental god, who only wants individuals to follow certain moral rules, and sends them to hell if they don’t.
The god who is against LGBTQ people.
The god who cares more about obedience to authorities than care for the oppressed.
These are all problematic images of God. These are gods we need to let die.
It’s not really God that we are reinventing. It’s the way we think about God. It’s the way we imagine God. It’s the language we use when we talk about God.
After all, I bet the way you think of God now is different than the way you thought of God when you were a small child. Your thinking has grown and evolved over the years, based on your own growing maturity, your study of scripture, and the conversations you’ve had with other believers.
And we do find precedent in the Bible for this. The Bible actually provides examples of Biblical characters doing just exactly what I’m talking about. In the Bible, we see people wrestling with their ideas about God. People like Jacob.
- Jacob
There is a lot for us to wrestle with in this story...
We just heard how Jacob was in the wilderness alone, and he wrestled with a man.
And already, the confusion starts. Was he alone? Or was he with another man? Because if there was another man there, he wasn’t alone; and if he was alone, then there couldn’t have been another man there.
But the scripture says that he was alone, and he was wrestling with another man.
And then all of a sudden it is God who is there with Jacob. So now we wonder: was it a man, or was it God, who Jacob wrestled with?
Or maybe Jacob was there wrestling with himself. And somehow, God was a part of that wrestling-with-himself.
And maybe at one level, because there are so many contradictions, none of this is true. And maybe, at a deeper level - even with all the contradictions - it’s all true.
Just like the images we have for God. They’re metaphors, mostly. And metaphors are always true and never true.
When Jesus told Zacchaeus he must be born anew, Zacchaeus insisted that that was impossible. Yet Jesus insisted that it was possible. And they were both right. It was true. And it was not true.
That’s what it’s like to talk about God. And we must all wrestle with this, all the time. The language we use to talk about God one day - language that is true for us - may not be adequate another day, and may not be true for someone else.
It may sound like I’m saying anything goes when it comes to how we imagine God, that we can imagine God however we like, whatever suits our fancy.
Not quite.
We’ve got the Bible to guide us in this. We’ve got the Spirit to guide us in this. We’ve got two millennia of Christian thought to help guide us.
- Wrestling with Satan
Remember when Jesus struggled with Satan in the wilderness? That was his own little wrestling match. But what was he wrestling with? Satan appears as a distinct character, but it also seems that Jesus was wrestling with temptations that came from within… temptations to power, mostly.
And how did that little wrestling match play out?
Satan kept quoting scripture at Jesus. And Jesus would quote scripture back. And just like when Jacob wrestled with the man who turned out to be God, I wonder exactly what it was that Jesus was contending with.
Was Satan a separate being? Was Satan a part of Jesus? Was Satan somehow connected to God? Did this all play out inside Jesus’ own mind?
And, in my own wrestling, I imagine two people in a conversation like the one Satan and Jesus had in the wilderness. They each present their own interpretation of scripture, and they go back and forth, making points and counterpoints, really listening to each other’s ideas and reformulating their own ideas in response, so that, together, as they continue in dialog, they both move closer to what is the actual truth.
I once heard a Jewish rabbi preach a sermon at which many Christians were present, and some of them - hearing the rabbi make a point they liked - hollered out “Amen!” And the rabbi laughed and explained that, in Jewish synagogues, people don’t yell out “Amen.” Instead, they come up to the rabbi afterword and say to the rabbi, “Is that how you understand it? Because here’s how I’ve always understood it…” and the dialogue continues… And both of their understandings draw closer to the truth as a result.
Sometimes it’s good to wrestle with ideas. Sometimes it’s good to wrestle with the ideas we have about God.
- Hosea, Ruth, Job & Peter
We see an ongoing conversation like this going on in the pages of scripture. We have the story of Jacob from the book of Genesis. But later, we have the prophet Hosea give his interpretation of this story, and what it means, and it doesn’t seem that Hosea’s interpretation is quite what Genesis had in mind.
And there are hints that in Hosea’s time, the northern kingdom of Israel had one idea of what this story meant, and the southern kingdom of Judah had a slightly different interpretation.
Is that a bad thing? Not if they can engage in a dialogue, engaging in conversation with humility, understanding that each of them probably has a good understanding of the truth, but at the same time a not-quite-complete understanding of truth, and if they engage in this dialogue, going back and forth, listening to and responding to each other’s ideas, then perhaps they could move even closer to what is the actual truth.
In the same way, there is an ongoing dialogue in scripture concerning how God’s people are to treat those who are different…
In Deuteronomy, it says that foreigners and eunuchs are not to be welcomed in the house of God. In Deuteronomy it says that Moabites are bad, and that God’s people are to have nothing to do with them. In Jeremiah, it says that people from Uz are horrible, detestable people. And every Jew knew the evils of associating with Samaritans.
But then, in Isaiah, it says that the foreigners and eunuchs that Deuteronomy says should be excluded - they are to be welcomed in God’s house.
And in the story of Ruth, the old prejudices against Moabites are overturned.
And in the story of Job, we have a horrible, detestable man from Uz who isn’t horrible or detestable, but the most blameless man on earth.
And in the stories and actions of Jesus, we learn that old prejudices and animosity concerning Samaritans should not keep us from loving any person who is our neighbor, even if they are Samaritans.
That’s a lot of wrestling with different ideas and different interpretations and different understandings… and it all takes place right on the pages of scripture.
And it all continues in the New Testament, as the new church struggled to define its identity in the years after Jesus. It was well understood that Jesus was a Jewish messiah, sent for the Jewish people.
But then a bunch of non-Jewish Gentiles were attracted by the message and teachings of Jesus, and they started to join the movement, and the disciples had to wrestle with the question: Could the Gentiles join as Gentiles, or did they have to become Jews to join?
And a good portion of the book of Acts describes the struggle.
And eventually, with the Spirit’s guidance, they did realize that Gentiles could be a part of the Jesus movement without having to first convert to Judaism. The apostle Peter even said, “I really am learning that God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another.” It wasn’t that God changed, but Peter’s understanding of God certainly did.
The answer wasn’t there in the beginning. The disciples had to struggle with their questions, before the answer became clear.
- Blessed
Earlier this year I read a wonderful book by Emily Kegler called One Coin Found. In it she talks about a lot of things, including how she - a queer woman who grew up in a conservative Evangelical church - spent many years wrestling with God and with interpretations of the Bible.
Emily Kegler says that for so long, she was afraid of the Bible - and that fear guided how she interpreted scripture. She was afraid of those who would use the Bible against her, those who had bruised her in so many ways.
And the bruises remain. Yet she continues wrestling with scripture, and she will not let go of it until it blesses her.
Emily Kegler quotes an essay by Phyllis Trible which says: “Jacob’s defiant words to the stranger [are] a challenge to the Bible itself: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” I will not let go of the book unless it blesses me. I will struggle with it. I will not turn it over to my enemies that it curse me. Neither will I turn over to friends who wish to curse it. No, over against the cursing from either Bible-thumpers or Bible-bashers, I shall hold fast for blessing.”
I am thankful for the writing and scholarship of people like Emily Kegler. I am always searching for different perspectives to help me in my own wrestling. I am always trying to read the Bible through different eyes.
Because an African-American theologian, or a gay or lesbian theologian, or a female theologian, is going to see scripture through a different lens than I do. So I listen to their thoughts, their ideas, their scholarship, and compare them with my own… I let the ideas wrestle in my mind for awhile… And I meditate on them, and pray that the Spirit of love will help me.
If I want to better understand how God wants me to relate to immigrants, I need to read not only the Bible, but also I need to read books written by immigrants.
If I want to better understand how we can work toward better race relations, I better read books by people who are of a different race than me.
If I want to better understand how we can more fully live out our congregation’s identity as Open and Affirming, I better listen to what people in the LGBTQ community are saying.
And all these ideas I’m exposed to wrestle with each other. They all join in a great struggle for truth, in the same way that different books of the Bible will engage in a dialogue with each other…
And it is a struggle.
And if the struggle is really great, I may end up with a limp. I may be shook, as my understanding of what is true is forced to grow and evolve.
But in the end, after all the struggling, after all the wrestling, I’ll have a better understanding of God. In the end, if I hold on, I know I’ll be blessed.
