Letting God Out of the Box

Is your God - or I could say, your idea of God – safely inside a nice comfortable box?  This is probably a rhetorical question because I think if is inevitable that we either consciously or unconsciously put God into a box to contain our idea of God.

Now, at this point you might be asking, what about atheists?  They don’t believe there is a God.  Now I could interject and quote psalm 14, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’”  However, that would be unfair and what would be the point is quoting scripture to an antsiest.  To stay on point, saying there is no God is actually a way of putting God on a box which is labelled no God.  As I recall from my grade 10 or 11 math a null set is a is a subset of every set (or something like that as grade 10 was a long time ago).   Another way of responding to an atheist is, tell me about the God you do not believe in. 

Some boxes that a person can put God into can be very well defined.  It might be that God is in a box that is defined by the Old testament - a God of judgement that can strike down enemies of the builder of the box.  Another box might have walls that are defined by love.  Another might be a God that set things in motion and then sat back and watched creation unfold according to the laws God established at creation without getting involved any further.  Other boxes may have very expandable and rather nebulous walls such as the God of Teilhard de Chardin who saw God as the omega point or the God of process theologians who saw God evolving along with God’s creation.  This is a box that seems to allow for a God who is both immanent and transcendent – which is another pair of boxes we can put God into.

So, given that we can have boxes in which put our version of God, does that really matter?   Does the God we believe in affect the way we live or is it the other way around?  Is who we are – the type of person we are (I could say how God created us to be but that would be a bit circular), determine the type of box we construct to put God into?   I can’t say that I have reached any conclusions on that.  However, perhaps what I am suggesting today is that it is useful to consider the box that you have put God into and to consider what happens if we discover something which may be from God that don’t fit that picture we have about God.

Perhaps exploring this could produce something worthwhile – bear some good fruit. 

Blessings on your journey.

Experiencing the Divine

One of the deep questions which, I believe, is lurking behind or beneath life to day is, do people have an experience of God, however you want to name that experience of the divine, the ineffable other in your life?   Perhaps some people do not even have an awareness of that presence in their lives.  Perhaps they are not paying attention to that being too busy with the day-to-day routine or work and busy schedules which life seems to be organized around these days. 

In our culture for many people that experience used to be found in worship on Sunday morning or whenever the designated time was for their religion to come together and worship their God.  For those of us who attend church services today, how many of us have an experience of the presence of God/the divine in that time and place?  Organized religion, for many people, is no longer the designated institution in which people turn to for that experience.  Of course, worship is more than that – than an experience of the divine.  We come together to give thanks and praise to the source of life, to acknowledge our separation from that source, God i.e. our sinful estate, to ask for and receive forgiveness for the things we have not done that we ought to have done and the things we ought to have done and have not done.  Hopefully, we receive inspiration from hearing God’s word in scripture and being preached.  We physically receive the presence of Jesus Christ if the worship is a Eucharist. 

However, my question remains; do we experience the presence of God in our worship?  Liturgical renewal is an attempt to make worship more relevant to those participating in it.  It put worship in language which is supposed to make it easier for people to understand using the language of the day – language which is clear and easy to understand.  However, the divine and my experience of it is not clear and easy to understand and is primarily a mystery and is at its core mysterious.  Our culture does not encourage experiences which are mysterious.  Can you worship God with a Tweet or in clear simple language?  Or perhaps my question should be, can we experience God in a Tweet et al at all? 

In the work that I do with dreams we identify dreams as God’s Forgotten Language.  To understand our dreams, we need to learn the language that God speaks in dreams.  In the same way in our culture, we need to relearn the language of the experience of God.  Perhaps God can speak to people in clear, simple language.  However, that is generally not my experience with some notable exceptions such as the New Zealand Lord’s Prayer which I wrote about last week.  The genius of that prayer is its clear language which is also poetry.  It speaks to the soul and resonates at a deep level.  That is what is needed in our worship. 

Blessings on your journey. 

The Word Made Fresh and Refreshed

I have been, and continue to be, ambivalent about use of colloquial language in worship.  There is much value in the traditional but there is also much value in speaking the language of the people today.  I dislike it when traditional language is changed to make it more palatable to current sensibilities.  For example, to change the soul-wrenching confessional, “to save a wretch like me” in Amazing Grace to, “save a soul like me” defeats the powerful message in that wonderful hymn of redemption.  We are, after all, sinful people who continue to need God’s forgiveness. 

On the other hand, some people need to be reminded that Jesus did not speak in the language of the King James Version of the bible.  Language has been continually updated and the battle of the bible over the use of the language of the people has been fought many times and many people have lost their lives in those battles.

I love the poetic language of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer compared to the pedestrian prose of the Book of Alternative Services which, if effect, did replace it despite the waffling of the church officials who gave it the title of “Alternative” while intending it as a replacement for the BCP.  There are, of course, theological issues which needed to be addressed with the Book of Common Prayer which was composed by Thomas Cranmer who produced a masterpiece of liturgical prose.  It is unfortunate that those who developed the Book of Alternative Services did not have anything approaching the genius of Cranmer but I am sure they did the best they could.

That being said, it is a spiritually satisfying experience to discover a updating of liturgical prose that does justice to not only the intent of a familiar piece but also is inspirational in making the message come alive in the language of today.  One of the best examples of this is the update of Lord’s Prayer developed by the Anglican Church in New Zealand in its Prayer Book.  One source, https://livinghour.org/lords-prayer/new-zealand-maori/,   described this effort, “This prayer book was celebrated by clergy and lay people alike for the way it combined the traditional Anglican prayers and forms of worship with the rich earth-based spirituality of the Maori and other Pacific Island cultures. It is eloquent in its wonderful simplicity and diversity, and is worthy addition to anyone’s book of prayers.”   Apparently, it is possible to update a prayer book and maintain  language that is moving. 

Here is the Lord’s Prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book:

  THE LORD’S PRAYER: MAORI & POLYNESIA

Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe;
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world;
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings;
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trial too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever. Amen.

I thank God for the person who composed this wonderful addition to the prayer life of the people of God.  Blessings of your journey

Epiphany Now

Today is the celebration of Epiphany in the Church year.  This the day which marks the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child in Bethlehem.  They were magi or wise men – no they were not kings but I wouldn’t want to change the words to the carol – We three Magi just doesn’t do it.

The event is called Epiphany.  However, that has a broader meaning than the event celebrated.  The definition of epiphany means, among other things:

(1): a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something

(2): an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking

(3): an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

b: a revealing scene or moment (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany)

In the case of the Magi, it is the revelation of the Christ Child, the long-awaited Messiah, to the Gentiles – the non-Jews from the East.  The concept of epiphany is significant for the idea of being open to revelation from divine sources however it is made manifest.  I was intending to explore a different topic this morning but was inspired to write on this subject after hearing the homily preached yesterday by Rev. Sherry DeJonge.  Rev. Sherry, who is the new incumbent in my parish, explored the Epiphany of the Magi in a way I hadn’t heard before.  She noted that there were two groups of wise men in the story.  There were the Magi from the East bearing gifts.  There were also wise men in Jerusalem where the magi stopped to inquire of king Herod “where the “Messiah was to be born.”    This did not please Herod at all.  He called together another group of wise men, the chief priests and the scribes to find out about this event that would threaten his rule.  They answered that it had been written by the prophet, that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea.   

The question raised by Rev. Sherry was why didn’t these scribes and chief priest go with the magi to find he long-awaited Messiah?  They knew their scriptures and knew what had been foretold by the prophet.  This is a very good question and one that has implications for us.  On reflection, I believe that one of the reasons that the other wise men  - those clergy and holy people of the day – did not go to find the Messiah was that they believed it was beyond the realm of possibility that the Messiah,  who would rescue the Jewish people, would be born in such an insignificant place as  Bethlehem.  He would have to be born in a palace or at least a great house.  They probably didn’t know that he was born in a lowly estate in a stable.  But that would only have made it more impossible.  So, they missed their opportunity to seek and worship the Messiah and bring his gifts as the Magi did.

So, what is the lesson for us today, or one of the lessons for us?  IT is very easy for us to fall into the trap which caught the Jerusalem wise men.  They missed the manifestation of the divine – that epiphany which had occurred right on their door step – almost right in front of their noses.  They had the knowledge and information necessary to know and respond to this divine event.  However, they dismissed the possibility that the prophecy was being fulfilled because it didn’t fit their concept, their belief in how it would be fulfilled.

How often do we close ourselves to the way that God is speaking to us today?  We can believe that God is not going to be in our lives in this way – God would only do it with fanfare and drum rolls and trumpets blaring.  It must be a Road to Damascus experience al a Paul in which we are figuratively knocked off our horse and blinded for three day.  God probably does work in that way sometimes but in my experience not often. God speaks to us in ways we don’t expect or can’t imagine.  And we dismiss those ways just as the Jerusalem wise men could not imagine the Messiah being born in little, insignificant Bethlehem.

God speaks to us in more ways than we can imagine.  Our mistake is to put limits on God – to create God in our image rather than the other way around.

Blessings on your Journey to find the Messiah wherever he or she might appear.