Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“Which God: Reality or Rescue?”

Rev. Rod Debs

September 16, 2007

Story: (Mary Ann Moore, Hide and Seek with God, adapted)

Before I tell you a story, I would like you to help me unpack some of the things I find amazing. Would you take something amazing out of this big box, and we’ll place it on the table…. There are so many amazing, fabulous, wonderful things in the world!

Some people see God in nature: the plants and animals, the mountains and oceans, trees and stars. Some people see God in the kindness that people do for one another: our families, friends and even the strangers we love. Some see God in the violence and destruction of war and of hurricanes. Some see God in peace and quietness.

Nobody seems to have ever really gotten a good look at God. It’s like we are playing hide and seek with God. The story this morning is about a group of children who were playing hide and seek, looking for God. They decided they didn’t just want to see a part of God---God in nature or in loving-kindness or in destruction or in peacefulness. They wanted to see all of God.

So the children decided to hunt all summer and fill a big box with stuff in which they saw God. And each summer there was more. They couldn’t find a big enough box to keep everything wonderful about reality. So the children decided to make a collage picture of everywhere they saw a part of God, everywhere they experienced wonder and amazement.

They worked on their picture, pasting in new pieces every year. The children grew up to become adults. They started families, and their children helped add pieces to the picture of God. And their grandchildren helped by adding wonderful and amazing pieces of the picture where they saw something wonderful and totally amazing.

One day the grandchildren saw their grandma and grandpa add blank pieces to the big picture of amazing reality. Blank pieces!? Why would anyone add blank pieces into the picture of God? So they asked.

The wise grandparents who had started playing hide and seek with God when they were children said, “Now that we are older, we realize that the wonderful surprises of reality always have hidden places. No matter how many amazing pieces of God we see, reality always has more mysteries to discover.” And so, they decided to complete the picture of God with blank pieces for mystery.

This is how they “never-ended” their game of hide and seek with God. Reality will always have mystery.

Message There are about 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. “The best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe,” writes Carl Sagan, “is to look up on a clear night…. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky.” “Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.” (Carl Sagan, Varieties of Scientific Experience, pp. 2, 28)

Sagan quotes the poet Tennyson: “I found Him in the shining of the stars, / I mark’d Him in the flowering of His fields.” It seems that God is the topic of much debate today by secular critics of violent, unreasoning religion and by passionate defenders of His dominion over heaven and earth. But Sagan stops us short. He writes, “It depends on who the Him is.” (Ibid.)

Whenever someone speaks about God to you, do they ever tell you who or what they are talking about? Do you ever ask? When I’ve asked, I’ve been told, “the God of the Bible.” If I ask for more description, I’m told “the Creator” of all heaven and earth. But what, exactly, does this God look like?

If you ask, as did Carl Sagan, what or who “Him” is, you won’t be disappointed. Most will admit, you can’t visualize God. God is unfathomable, beyond human imagination.

Anyone I’ve spoken with has never claimed God to be the cosmic king and judge over all creation, the image I grew up with in childhood. The image of God as king and judge comes from the dream-books of the Bible, the books of Daniel and The Apocalypse or book of Revelation. Both books claim to be dreams. That king and judge metaphor for the power, the glory and frightening destructiveness of reality deserves to be respected as legitimate in ancient, pre-scientific days. If Carl Sagan thought the question worth asking, I hope you will too! I bet most folks you talk to will admit the metaphor is dated.

So, what or who is the “Him” of our Abrahamic faiths?

Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, UFO’s caught our popular imagination from the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken, a Swiss hotel owner. With the nuclear arms race, with the Korean and Vietnamese Wars, and with civil rights riots in our cities, Americans were gripped in feelings of impotence and fear.

Sagan writes: “The emotional appeal of von Daniken (UFO’s) made perfect sense. It was the hope that extraterrestrials would come and save us from ourselves. The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960’s and ‘70’s and manifestly clear today in an age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves.” (Ibid., p.129)

Here is the big point that Sagan makes. Sagan says: “I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.” (Ibid., p.129)

This morning I want to ask, “Which God: Reality or Rescue?” and to distinguish the two competing Biblical conceptions of God in competing Biblical Covenant traditions.

While at Boston University School of Theology, Dr. Bernard Anderson directed his students to two journal articles from which I draw the distinctions between contradictory historical and eschatological Biblical covenants, covenants of Reality or Rescue, by J. Coert Rylaarsdam, “Jewish-Christian Relationship: The Two Covenants and the Dilemmas of Christology” (Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 9, No.3, 1973 by Temple University) and by Walter Brueggemann, “Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel” (Journal of Biblical Literature, 98/2, 1979, pp.161-85). I trust you will find the distinctions useful.

The Abrahamic Covenant of the Hebrews (1250-1000 BCE) is to be contrasted with the later Royal Davidic Covenant (1000 BCE). The promise to make of Abraham a great nation was that agreement whereby the religious confederacy of Hebrew tribes defined themselves as a single people protected by God to whom they owed allegiance. This Abrahamic covenant depended on the on-going presence of Yahweh in Israel’s life and on Israel’s faithfulness to Yahweh. There were annual ceremonies of “Covenant Renewal” affirming the mutual obligations of faithfulness and responsibility if God’s saving presence was to continue in Israel’s on-going history.

The subsequent Mosaic Covenant to bring the children of Israel to a land that flows with milk and honey, was likewise a promise depending on the faithfulness of God’s people. The Hebrew Scriptures are full of stories of God’s saving presence with the Israelites when they are faithful, but also, of God’s withdrawing of his saving presence when they are disloyal and disobedient.

The Mosaic Covenant or promise that they will inhabit the Promised Land depended on Israel’s righteousness and justice. Moses’ father-in-law Jethro instructed him to create a Tent of Meeting wherein the elders of the people deliberated justice thereby insuring the divine presence. The divine presence traveled with the people along with a movable Ark of the Covenant. This was different from being identified with fixed holy site, no matter who came to worship, no matter whether they were loyal or self-serving.

Based on Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants, the Hebrew Prophets cried out that Israel “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” As the book of Deuteronomy declared, “The land is the Lord’s” (no one owns the land) and you are but sojourners on it. Hospitality required generosity to strangers, welcoming them as family members sharing equally in rights and responsibilities. Jubilee Justice required charity for widows, for orphans and the poor. The prophets cried out “Woe!” to those who lived in luxury and who lay in their beds dreaming of how to take land from the powerless.

Jesus stood in this Prophetic tradition, calling for universal loving-kindness to be extended generously to the marginal and outcast: to women and children, to the diseased and insane, to prostitutes, to corrupt tax-collectors and to the occupying pagan Centurian, of whom he said that there was no greater faith in all of Israel!

But in contradiction to the Covenants of Abraham and of Moses, and of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus, in contrast, the later Royal Davidic Covenant promised perpetual dynasty to the anointed king of a chosen people. After the model of other nations, and Egypt comes most clearly to mind, King David set himself up as king, established himself a palace in Jerusalem complete with harem and marriage alliances, with a permanent Temple. He conscripted laborers to fortify his cities and modernized his conscript army with horses and chariots. And King David’s scribes wrote Israel’s sacred history declaring David the Son of God. Read it in the Psalms.

Here’s the point: rather than God’s saving presence accompanying the people as long as they remained faithful to right and just relationships in Israel’s day-by-day history, instead, the Royal Davidic Covenant promised external intervention by a cosmic deity on behalf of David’s Royal dynasty and God’s chosen people.

Here’s the contrast: The God of Abraham and Moses, the God of the prophets and of Jesus, was a God of Reality: real consequences for real choices in real history. The God of King David was a God of cosmic Rescue of a helpless people who bow down and sing praises and offer sacrifices and cry for deliverance, but who overlook the weightier matters of mercy and justice and compassion.

The Royal Davidic Covenant greatly diluted the prophetic witness of Jesus. The example and teachings of Jesus, his non-violence and universal loving-kindness have been overshadowed by the redemption story. Jesus has become the Christ/Messiah, the Royal Davidic son of God, king and savior promising to rescue helpless humanity---or rather, the chosen few. His death on the cross has been interpreted as a blood sacrifice washing away the sins of the world in the eyes of a cosmic God. Christ paid it all.

The real Jesus, rather than setting himself up as the Son of God (as he was tempted to do in the desert), Jesus taught his disciples to incarnate his spirit of loving-kindness, his universal acceptance and generosity, in their own lives. Followers of The Way of Jesus were not to bow and pray and worship Jesus. They were to become like him. They were to change the Real world of their relationships and to know the joys of loving community.

The Gospel of love worked for Jesus’ followers who lived in the war zone of Jerusalem after it was destroyed by the Romans, thousands massacred or enslaved, the survivors destitute. Jesus did not offer cosmic Rescue, but the saving Reality of sharing what they had among all who joined at “the common table” of fellowship, no one excluded.

The dilemma you and I face is this: fear and feelings of helplessness are widespread in this dog-eat-dog competitive society. Those who lose suffer, and those who win live in fear of losing. Christians feel that they need to believe in the cosmic father who will Rescue them in this time of violence and suffering, each against all.

We who celebrate Reality as awesome, unfathomable and holy, is it too much for us to say with Carl Sagan, “science is, at least in part, informed worship.” (Ibid.,29) When conversation turns to Christ on the cross, will we be able to avoid caustic comments and say: “Let me tell you about the Jesus I love”--- the Jesus who calls us to the Reality of loving community, universal in its embrace, generous and kind.

Will our language of awe and wonder direct those around us toward Reality or toward helplessness and Rescue?