Archive for September 2006

Imposter Gods (Notes from 9-24-06 sermon)

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

The Cosmic Vending Machine or Cosmic Bellhop God             God’s main function is to love and serve me (us).  If I put in a prayer, God owes me a certain result.  God’s main function in prayer is to answer my requests. Etc…you get the picture.  Such a God betrays God’s passion for relationship.
The God of Just Deserts            This imposter is in charge of carrying out our concept of justice or our agenda towards those whose actions/beliefs offend us.  This punitive God must make sure everyone pays for their sins and/or gets what they deserve.  Such a God betrays God’s mercy and grace.
The God of Limited Freedom             This imposter is a God who is held hostage by our understanding of God’s promises, word, and/or character.  God has to do this because “The Word” says so.  This is the God behind the popular health and wealth teaching.  Our understanding of “the law” or our view of what is right must be carried out by God.  Jesus demonstrated that the laws were created for humanity, not humanity for the laws.  In Exocus 33:19 God reminds Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”   Samuel Wells talks about the story of God being a drama of God turning God’s unlimited freedom into covenants and humanity turning their limited freedom into prisons.   Sometimes, when Christians insist that God fit into their small view, they not only imprison God, but imprison themselves as well.  This God betrays God’s sovereignty. 
The Gnostic God              This is the God of secrets, not mystery.  This imposter God doles out special favors to those who “discover” hidden secrets. Books with titles such as “Unlocking The Secret of God’s (you fill in the blank)” lead us to believe that God shows favoritism to those who have somehow read the right book, or discovered the right prayer, or have in some way stumbled onto a way to get more out of God via some bit of previously hidden information.  This God says there is a magic formula for healing, defeating sin, or releasing God’s wealth into our coffers.  When the disciples could not cast out a demon like Jesus they wanted to know his secret.  He said, “These things only come through prayer and fasting.”  That’s no secret.  As one matures in faith one does find one’s prayers and ministry becoming more effective, and a growth in one’s ability to discern God’s voice.  This imposter betrays God’s justice.

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You Shall Not Kill

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006


“Bishop George Packard has a burden.  He carries it with him.  There are times in his sleep when it overpowers him and wakes him, leaving him to wrestle through the night with shadows.  There are days when stress mounts, the memories suddenly bursting around him in unpleasant succession.  And in the ticking of the clock, the race toward oblivion that is the fate of all human beings, he seeks atonement in everything he does as a husband, a father and an Episcopal priest.”  (Loosing Moses… p 101)


Bishop Packard’s burden is the price he pays for killing…not murder but killing as a soldier in Vietnam.  Way beyond the politics and questions of morality involved in war is the stark truth that killing of any sort erodes one’s soul irrevocably.  Bishop Packard finds that the sixth commandment, “You shall not kill,” dominates his life, and his years of giving life as a priest hasn’t satiated his thirst for forgiveness/atonement.  The fact that he was doing his duty as a patriot and citizen does not seem to help.  “When my life is over,” he said, “when in those last 30 seconds that I am fighting for breath in some room, I will make a plea to God. I will say that I did the best I could in the oddities life gave me. I will ask to be forgiven.” ( p 114)


“Where was God in Vietnam?  It is the question all who have been to war face, for war is a Godless endeavor.  When love, compassion and human kindness are replaced by the vast, grotesque panorama of violence and destruction of war, God is banished.  Human beings, who have the freedom to choose good and evil, cannot find within them the power of the divine when they embrace a world of sin.  At that moment they shut out the divine.  And war is a state of almost unadulterated sin” (p104)


Added to war are the specters of addictions, sex trade, environmental poisonings, genocide, abuse of women, domestic violence, and unabated starvation.  Each of these is a way of killing and each of these weighs heavily on our hearts and consciences.  In the background the sixth commandment rings with new urgency and poignancy, “You shall not kill.”


Jesus fulfilled this commandment by filling it with the command to love.  He filled the commandment with warnings against belittling and destructive anger and stubborn grudges.   There is more at stake than just another’s physical life, there is the essence of a person that can be “killed” in a variety of ways short of murder.  He urged reconciliation and restoration in response to being wronged.   Also, James states clearly in his letter that war’s origin is greed, covetousness, and selfishness. (James 4:1-4)  When seen in the light of day, all killing springs from those same motives.


This coming Sunday, as you visit the “Stations of Mercy” you will become aware of how we all are indirectly complicit in some of these ways of killing.  It would be easy to become overwhelmed.  I would encourage you to prayerfully seek God’s counsel at each station and ask if there is some response that God would have us/you make. 

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You shall have no other God’s before Me

Monday, September 11th, 2006

Chapter One:  Mystery 

As a young seminarian and aspiring youth minister, Chris Hedges entered a world too big for his God.  His God at that time was his own virtue, his aspirations of being a man of God, and his desire to “make a difference.”  In this first pastoral placement, buried deep in the slums of Roxbury, New Jersey, Hedges discovered that he wasn’t able to live into even his minimum expectations for his life and ministry.  He ended up at war with his church and literally at war with the drug-addicted thugs on “his street.”  When the promised attempt on his life became a reality he left the slums, the church, the ministry, and their associated institutions.  He left the church in which he had found his “last refuge from God” and with leaving experienced the shattering of all moral certitude.  He ends this chapter with these autobiographical reflections, “Before God we all are powerless.  We are all afraid.  It is in this fear, this darkness, that I found God, even as I thought I was fleeing from God.  I abandoned the institutions that claimed God’s authority. I walked down Parker Street the night I smashed that bottle on the church doors, leaving the light, and entering ‘the darkness where God was.’”
Hedges imposter God was a God without mystery, a God who rewarded virtue with powerful ministry and success, a God who kept evil and good in distinct and separate worlds, a God centered in Hedges own “virtue,” a God who was blind to the arrogance and pride in Hedges soul.  When it was revealed to Hedges that this God was not God at all, but was an imposter, it was a faith shattering and a self-shattering experience.  In his words, “I had to learn my own complicity in oppression, my own sinfulness, how evil lurked within me, how when I was afraid I could turn on the weak and powerless.”
“You shall have no other Gods before me,” says God in the first commandment.  Its too easy to just assume we are keeping this simple command, and not search our souls deeply enough to recognize that the God we are worshipping might be an imposter – a God we created out of our own expectations, out of our own need to have a God we can trust, or respect.  For many the real God would shatter their faith and their lives.  The real God would neither condemn the right people, nor reward the right people, nor agree with one’s assessment of one’s own virtue, especially in comparison with the virtue of others.
“Here ye O Christians!” The Lord your God is one God.”  This one God will be who God is regardless of the imposters we create to put before God.  Like Chris Hedges experienced in the slums of Roxbury, we will eventually experience the shortcomings of the God we create in our own image, or in the image of a belief system which singles us out for extra rewards or benefits.  I wonder how God would respond if we were to simply ask God to point out the imposter Gods in our midst.  I wonder if we have the courage to examine our God for authenticity.  I wonder.
What do you think about these observations?  What is your own experience?  Keep the conversation alive by posting your response here.
Stan

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The Ten Best Ways

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

The best introduction to this series is in the epilogue of “Losing Moses On The Freeway.”  Last things first, I guess.  “By giving up parts of ourselves for others, by accepting that we must be willing to lose life to create an preserve life, we honor the core of the commandments.  The commandments hold out to us the possibility of love….  We all stray.  We all violate some commandments and do not adequately honor others.  We are human.  But the commandments bind us together.  They work to keep us from revering the false covenants that destroy us….  The commandments are guideposts.  They bring us back, even when we stray, as we all do, to the right path.  They are our protection against the siren calls of glory, wealth and power that will ultimately dash us against the rocks.” ( excerpts from Losing Moses pp 171-176.) 

As we think about the history of the commandments and the rule of law established by Moses at that time, it’s easy to relegate the commandments to “Old Testament Legalism” and ignore them altogether.  Besides, didn’t Jesus’ teaching fulfill or even supercede OT law?  What have the commandments to do with us and our problems today?  Good questions. OK, but what if we take the commandments as reflections of God’s heart and God’s vision for humanity-in-relationship?  What if we chisel away the set-in-stone aura that surrounds them, and move them into the context of New Testament grace?  Don’t they then suddenly burst with new life and new relevance? 

In preparation for worship on the 10th (this Sunday) it might be good to reflect on how you see the principles behind the commandments operating in our place and time.  Notice how covetousness, deceit, theft, envy, and idolatry work themselves out in our world of increasing violence, fear, and intolerance.  Notice, on the other hand, how love, generosity, honesty, honor, peace, and integrity work themselves out in our world today. Notice how these things, both positive and negative, effect your life, the life of your family, the lives and experiences of people in your workplace, and in our community. 

God’s best comes to us through our clear understanding of God’s “ways.”  Those ways reflect divine wisdom and a creator’s understanding of human nature.  As Chris Hedges points out in his epilogue from which I quoted above, the foundational concepts behind the commandments have to do with love.  Our love for God, God’s love for us, our love of neighbor, and our love of Life lived at its best, all find expression in the intentional living out of God’s heart as expressed in these ten commandments. 

A fun exercise might be to look at Christ’s teaching in one of the gospels and identify which of the commandments are reflected in His words.  How does Christ’s life and example fulfill the commandments?

 

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