“Rediscovering God”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Text: Revelation 4:1-11
Philip Yancey tells of a time he visited a chapel in the basement of an old Soviet prison in 1991. Located on the lowest subterranean level of the gaol, the chapel was an oasis of beauty in an otherwise grim dungeon. Prisoners had cleaned out a seventy year accumulation of filth, installed a marble floor, and mounted finely wrought brass sconces on the walls. It was the only prison chapel in all of Russia and each week priests travelled from a monastery to conduct a service there.
We spent a few minutes admiring the handiwork and Brother Bonifato pointed to the icon for the prison chapel, “Our Lady Who Takes Away Sadness.” Ron Nikkel of Prison Fellowship commented that there must have been a lot of sadness within these walls. He then turned to Brother Bonifato and asked, “Would you say a prayer for the prisoners?”
“A prayer? A prayer you want?” Brother Bonifato said. The rest nodded and watched as he disappeared behind the altar. He brought out another icon of the Lady Who Takes Away Sadness, retrieved two candle holders and two incense bowls, which he hung in place and lit. He removed his headpiece and outer vestments, and laced shiny gold cuffs over his black sleeves. He placed a droopy gold stole around his neck and then a gold crucifix. He carefully fitted a different, more formal head piece on his head. Before each action, he paused to kiss the cross or genuflect. Finally, he was ready to pray and he sang prayers following the score from a liturgy book. Twenty minutes after Ron had requested a prayer for the prisoners, Brother Bonifato finally said, “Amen.”
Yancey continues, “Elsewhere in Russia, I met Western Christians who sharply criticized the Orthodox Church. Yet I came away with the conviction that we have something to learn from the Orthodox about reverence, submission, awe.”
I have encountered the polar-opposite of orthodox tradition in a church that claims to be, “A church for people who aren't into church.” It started in one of Toronto's suburbs and now boasts attendances over 5,000 each Sunday. I've gone along a few times when I've been on holiday and am amazed each time. First, at the demographics (the congregation filled with children and teenagers who actually look like they're enjoying themselves.) Second, by the atmosphere - many show up in t-shirts, cargo pants, and sandals, there's laughter and happiness as people enter, grab a coffee and muffin at the on-site cafe and take them with them into the theatre style space in which they meet. Third, I'm amazed at the technology that goes into the services, the guitars, amplifiers, synthesizers, and huge audio-visual screens and presentations. And then, four, I am amazed at the paucity of anything I would associate with worship … a little singing and a brief, very brief prayer in the midst of some announcements.
After the one Sunday experience, I was hanging around in the foyer with a friend and was introduced to someone who was incredibly enthusiastic about her faith. She was bubbly, full of stories of what God was doing in her life. But when she told me that God was leading her to buy a new car, I couldn't help but think of a story I read about Frederick Buechner. Buechner, a writer and Presbyterian minister, spent a semester teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois. While there, he encountered evangelical Christians and their conversation for the first time. He said, “I was astonished to hear students shift casually from small talk about the weather and movies to a discussion of what God was doing in their lives. If anybody said anything like that in my part of the world, the ceiling would fall in, the house would catch fire, and people's eyes would roll up in their heads.” Although he came to admire the students' fervency, it seemed to him at first that their God resembled a cosmic Good Buddy.
Two churches in different parts of the world: Both claim that “Jesus is Lord,” both uphold the role of the holy scriptures as word of God, and yet they worship God in such different ways. What is it that allows one Christian to approach God in confidence, happiness and assurance while another does so with an element of awe and reverence and even fear? The perceptions of God that we can draw out of those approaches must lead some to ask if they're even worshipping the same being.
This week, we have entered the Lenten season. The broader church encourages Christians to take the 40 day period prior to Good Friday (excluding Sundays) to reflect, to focus on how we live before God. It is supposed to be a time of searching and repentance and change, but one wonders with conceptions of God that are so different, if there are some of us who cannot really engage Lent? If we imagine God to be some sort of deistic - Santa type figure, why would we bother look for change. God doesn't really interact with us. Or if we imagine that God is a cosmic friend and good buddy who supports us no matter what, why would we worry. And so in the face of Lent, it is useful to ask, “Who is this God we glorify? What is she like? How do we determine what he is like?”
Some people think of God as wholly indescribable. And the thing with things that are indescribable is that we have to resort to analogy and use concepts and language that are common to us to describe them. The problem is that our concepts and language and emphases are always in flux and I have wondered if we tend to allow that flux to influence our perceptions of God. I think for instance of changes that I have witnessed in my own lifetime, changes wrought of growing up in an old world country with its rules and customs and social mores and the things I experience today in north American society. I have wondered if changes in thought from one generation to the next and from one region to another account for some of the differences in how people approach God.
I look back, for instance to a very staid worship style in Europe. To quietness, reverence and even dullness. From the pulpit, the fear of God was instilled in us by reformed and Methodist preachers. I wonder if those perceptions and practices were related to the general attitudes of that society. Children in those days were taught to look up to adults and authority figures. I got to know Mr. Kingston, Mr. McCann, Mrs. McCartney, Miss MacIlwain. Never for one moment would I have thought of saying, Paul, Ernie, Margaret or Kathleen, they were all Mr., Mrs., or Miss and it set up lines of separation, distance, and a degree of respect.
And if we ever thought of being disrespectful, there were ways of keeping us in line. I recall one day as a ten year old, in our school music class. We were singing a song that had a particular beat to it and a friend and I as we were singing along were admiring the pig tails of the girl in front of us bobbing along to the song. At almost the same time, we thought that it would be a wonderful if those pig tails bobbed a little more and so we each grabbed one of Sharon's pig-tails and yanked them a little harder from this side to that. We were having such fun at Sharon's expense, but did not realize that while we were singing, the head-master had entered the back of the room and quietly stepped up behind us. Joy turned to fear in seconds as his hands took our shoulders and promptly escorted us to his office. Today that would be a minor problem, but in those days, parents were not called when a child misbehaved. Indeed, I don't recall anyone's parents being called when someone misbehaved. Where there was a problem in school, the school dealt with it. It was up to the teacher or the head-master and in this case, Mr. Porter reached behind his door and said, “McCart, McMaster, hold out your hands.” We sheepishly held them out as the bamboo cane whipped down upon them. I don't know about my friend but for half an hour, I had an ouch-moment and we learned something that day about behaviour and authority. There were people over us and if we stepped out of line we would be quickly brought back into it. I don't want to get into a debate about corporal punishment but events like that shaped our lives and thoughts, who we became, and our views of life and society and, I wonder, our view of God.
I can't help but compare that with the frustration I hear from time to time from teachers and principals in our day. With fewer measures of discipline and a frequent lack of respect, many struggle. One principal told me the other day of an event in which a child was suspended for ongoing behaviour problems and lashing out at teachers. The parents were called, the facts presented, and difficulty upon difficulty, the parents took the side of the child versus that of the principal. The suspension was appealed to the Superintendent of Schools. The Superintendent supported the Principal because of the strong evidence. The parents are now considering taking the matter to the Trustees. I suspect that this pattern alters how a child perceives of adults, teachers, persons of authority. One wonders what it will lead to down the road? Will there be higher percentages of adults who lack respect for others, the rule of law, and those who seek to uphold it. And then I wonder, because we use what we know to describe an indescribable God, if it changes our perception of God from that perceived by former generations. Are we then less able to conceive of God as separate from us, one to be revered, one to be held in awe? Does our perception necessarily then take on a more friendly, more egalitarian, more buddy type characteristic?
On the egalitarian front, think for a moment of royalty. In the past, the greatest human powers were clothed in majesty. They were the strongest, the boldest, sometimes the wisest, they were our lords, our kings and queens and there was a time when human beings knew what kings and lords were. Now, however, with our ideas of democracy and equality, with our notions of human rights, we have tossed aside ideas of difference and superiority. O we still have bosses and leaders, but few people actually think that their bosses and leaders are any better than they, deserving of any more respect. Democracy has taught us that we are all equal. Does that change how we see God. If we define God in terms we know and we no longer are able to perceive differences of the kind that used to be between lords and gentry and commoners, do we lack the categories to imagine a chasm between our existence and that of God. Do we perhaps read words about the majesty of God, king of kings and lord of lords, but not really understand what those mean in the same way, for instance, Victorians would have understood them? Has egalitarianism affected our estimation of God?
I don't want to say that one view is right and one view is wrong here, just draw our attention to the possibility that our experiences and world views and language and concepts may influence our perceptions of God. I would love to go on and talk of other things like the way we have changed in terms of society's ability to judge between right and wrong, good and bad. I'd love to say something about the self-help industry and how it programmes us to view the self in an elevated sense. If we truly are special, “great big bundles of potentiality,” as they say, does that disable our ability to see God in elevated terms or as holy. If God is just lucky to have us around, how does that change how we relate to God? All these, I think, affect our ability to think of God, they affect our worship, and the real question becomes, “Where is truth?” Which view, a traditional or a contemporary view is true? Do they all reveal truth in different ways? Or, is humankind continually creating and recreating God in its own image?
For millennia, the church, spiritual men and women have pointed us to the holy scriptures. The Basis of Union of the United Church of Canada, falls in line with the church of the ages when it says, “we build upon the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. We affirm our belief in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the primary source and ultimate standard of Christian faith and life.” So as we begin Lent, here are a few passages from Old and New Testaments that say something about God, who he is and how we should approach.
When we open the first page of our bibles, we read the words, “In the beginning God…” Before there was anything else, before there was a sun and moon, before there were stars in the sky, before there was an earth, before there were things on the earth, before the big bang, if ever there was such a thing? … God. God is. God has always been. God is beyond all things and brought all things into existence. That beyond-ness, the sheer power of the One that brought all things into being by the big bang or whatever, should tell us something of how we should approach God. We have no capacity for that power. We are not the same as God. I think of what God said to Job who thought a little too much of his own abilities, God came out of the whirlwind, “Where were you (Job) when I laid the foundations of the earth, tell me if you have understanding? Who determined its measurements - surely you know (38:4)! Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth from the womb? - when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it … and said, 'Thus far you shall come and nor farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped' (38:8ff)? Where were you Job then?” Job was reminded of who he was in the face of the Creator.
Or take the Exodus. After the people had gathered around Mount Sinai to make a covenant with the Lord, they washed and consecrated themselves on two succeeding days before the Lord would appear. Limits were set around the mountain upon which the Lord would descend. The people were to draw near but only so near, lest they die (Ex. 19:16-20; 20:1-3). Just for a moment, immerse yourself in that imagery. Think of the mountain wrapped in smoke, the fire, the shaking of the ground, the sound like a trumpet getting louder and louder, the Lord speaking in a roar like thunder. Imagery to describe the indescribable. Whatever it was, the whole camp trembled before God.
We could talk about Isaiah as he went before God in the Holy of Holies in Isaiah six. How he could do nothing but fall to his knees at the scene before him. We'll go on to Revelation because it's similar. The imagery, this vision of the heavenly, and worship the majesty of the throne surrounded by 24 thrones, the elders wearing crowns, the light and sound described as lightening and thunder, the sea of glass, the indescribable living creatures singing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, who is worthy to receive glory, honour, and power.” There is no equality here. God is God. Humankind is humankind. I wonder where these ideas are lacking, if we need to bring them back into our view of God, if we need to rediscover these things and build them into God and our view of self and our view of our relationship to God. Because society may have changed, our concepts of respect, authority, royalty, justice, self, and many other things may have changed but should we allow those changes to dominate our thoughts, our conceptions of God? Or does the word of God have something to say to us? Perhaps we should build these things into our approaches to God in this Lenten season and while we cannot forget what Jesus reveals to us about God's love and compassion and grace, we also have to remember first of all this otherness. The complexity of God, the greatness of God, a God whose character and nature is not easy to comprehend, far beyond us, and that is as it should be. So if there is one thing, I would like to get across as we begin our Lenten journeys, it is that we recover a sense of the otherness and power and majesty of the God a God who is beyond our wildest imaginations and restore a sense of the sacred and holy into our worship and approach as we relate to our Father in heaven. Amen.