Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Killer God”
Rev. Rod Debs
November 28, 2010
This morning we sang a Thanksgiving hymn (#67) with lyrics by the late Edwin Buehrer:
We sing now together our song of thanksgiving,
rejoicing in goods which the ages have wrought,
for Life that enfolds us, and helps and heals and holds us,
and leads beyond the goals which our forbears once sought.
We sing of the freedoms which martyrs and heroes
have won by their labor, their sorrow, their pain;
the oppressed befriending, our ampler hopes defending,
their death becomes a triumph, they died not in vain.
We sing of the prophets, the teachers, the dreamers,
designers, creators, and workers, and seers;
our own lives expanding, our gratitude commanding,
their deeds have made immortal their days and their years.
We sing of community now in the making
in every far continent, region, and land;
with those of all races, all times and names and places,
we pledge ourselves in covenant firmly to stand. (Singing the Living Tradition, p.67)
Our Thanksgiving hymn celebrates “Life that enfolds us,” “martyrs and heroes,” teachers, designers, and workers, concluding with a pledge to stand firmly in covenant community. The original Dutch hymn written in 1597 by Adrianus Valerius celebrated the Dutch victory over the oppressive occupying Spanish forces in the Battle of Turnhout.
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!
We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be.
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
What is the character of God? What is the ultimate character of reality? To an oppressed people who have suffered murderous and destructive war parties and years of occupation, the power of liberation, fate, ultimate reality is “our God with us joining, ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine,” triumphant Leader, Defender “at our side, all glory be Thine!”
When King David’s scribes compiled and for the first time wrote down their history of the Hebrew people, 1000 BCE, their God was a warrior God liberating them from slavery in Egypt. Their Ultimate Reality was of necessity an imperial conqueror who ordered his generals to destroy enemy cities in their Promised Land, killing every man, woman, child and every beast, a God called the Fear of all nations. This Hebrew God known for his mighty deeds in the history of The Hebrew People, after the Babylonian exile, became known as a cosmic warrior, judge and king, above and beyond all time and earthly history. For slaves who knew brutal occupation and oppression, the ultimate divine reality could only be conceived as a conquering king. No farmers’ fertility goddesses for the oppressed! No turtle lifting people from the water on her back and digging up mud to create land! Slaves need a God that would kick butt!
In large part, Evangelical Christianity today celebrates God as Almighty King and Lord, demanding obedience and threatening Hell of eternal torture and death for those who do not bow and confess and accept his son as Lord and Savior.
John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar scholar in writes in Tikkun Magazine about the private spirituality that is so popular among those who have lost hope in both religion and in secular society.
Crossan writes: “Is there anything, at the moment, that spirituality does not or could not mean as long as it supports spirit over flesh and individual needs or desires over social systems or structures? But how, exactly, in such a situation, do you distinguish between spirituality and sentimentality or, indeed, between spirituality and Prozac?” (Tikkun Magazine, November/December, 1998)
In a world of international chaos, disease, depravation and brutality, in a society of selfish consumerism and competitive egoism, both secular and religious, for many, God, their Ultimate Reality is found in those interior islands of private tranquility known as spirituality—or Prozac. Crossan seems to consider such spiritual sentimentality to be without faith.
I grew up in the Evangelical branch of the Friends Church. In addition to believing in God as Almighty King and Lord, we believed in discipleship, following the life and teachings of Jesus. Evangelical Friends believed that one could follow so closely to God that one would grow into union with God. When the human will is so obedient to God that you no longer even want to do anything other than God’s will, such union with God is called Sanctification or Sanctity.
Crossan raises this question. If we humans should seek sanctity or union with God, it matters very much the character of our God. What is the character of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of David who waged a war of extermination against the Amalekites, and of the Prophet Samuel who received God’s command ordering their genocide: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:3).
Crossan writes: “By using the term sanctity (that state in which the human will is in union with its God), the focus is shifted immediately and initially to one’s God. The question is this: What is the character of your God? Our sanctity, after all, could make us but the killer children of a Killer God.” (Tikkun Magazine, November/December, 1998)
What is the character of Ultimate Reality to us, our God?
John Dominic Crossan writes: “There are constitutive events or documents that make us who we are and there are even core moments or phrases within them that become normative criteria for all the rest. Such moments or phrases may, whether we like it or not, come home to haunt us. … As I read the Bible of both Judaism and Christianity, such a privileged text is Psalm Eighty-two.
“This psalm presents us with a magnificently and serenely mythological scene as God sits down in heavenly council to judge the gods ruling the nations here below. The divine CEO meets with upper management to discuss downsizing. But, in this case, downsizing means that they are all fired for malpractice in office, for mismanagement of earth. `You are,’ God concedes, `gods, children of the Most High, all of you,’ but you will now be allowed to die just like mortal princes. The indictment is as clear as the judgment. You have `judged unjustly and shown partiality to the wicked’ or, more precisely, you have failed to `give justice to the weak and the orphan, to maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute, to rescue the weak and the needy, and to deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’ Therefore, God has taken personal charge to insure justice for the nations of the earth.
Crossan continues: “Certain conclusions flow from that extraordinary psalm. First, unjust situations do not simply create a world less kind and gentle than it should be. They entail cosmic catastrophe since, by their presence, “all the foundations of the earth are shaken.” Second, the reason they ensure catastrophe is that they are not just individual or personal cases but systemic or structural processes…. Third, this now-in-charge God of all the earth is a God of systemic justice, or, put conversely, that which stands against systemic injustice is the God of all the earth.
“But that does not seem to be a matter of decree or decision, of law or command, of choice or option. It is more a matter of character, being, and nature. This God could not be other, and just as the law of gravity is not what gravity decides but what gravity is, so the law of God is not what God decides but what God is. Neither, therefore, can the Land, the People, the Covenant, the Kingdom, the Son, or the Gospel of that God be other than manifestations of divine justice on earth.
“Sanctity, in such a context, is terribly if not terrifyingly obvious. It is the submission of human justice to divine justice, of human will to divine will, or, better, of human being to divine being. If spirituality focuses on individual problems rather than social structures and on personal struggles rather than cosmic systems, it can never be equated with sanctity and will never encounter the biblical God of Psalm Eighty-two. And the foundations of the earth will go on shaking.” (Tikkun Magazine, November/December, 1998)
I’ve been reading a book entitled Intimacy with God (1996) about “centering prayer,” written by Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk. Keating’s work on Centering Prayer is inspired by the 14th century work of an unnamed monk entitled The Cloud of Unknowing and by post Viet-Nam War era interest in Buddhist meditation. Thomas Keating writes: “Growth in faith is growth in the right perception of all reality.”
Thinking about the Hebrews’ “perception of reality” as slaves in Egypt, and of Jews’ “perception of reality” during Babylonian exile, then oppressed by successive Roman occupation, and modern Jews’ “perception of reality” after the holocaust, I also wonder at the growth of modern Christian, Muslim and secular, fearful “perceptions of reality.”
I have a little book entitled George Washigton’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation (1988), including 110 Rules of Civility. I’ve been trying to document, without success that President Washington wore white gloves and that he refused to shake hands with anyone without them.
Some people’s “perception of reality” is shaped by fear, phobia of germs that they dare not touch anything in public, door knobs, hand rails, money, let alone shake someone’s hand. I remember being afraid of the dark as a child, and of being cured when I realized that my back yard had nothing to be afraid of in dark of night that was not there during the day—the same hill, tree, clothes-line poles and steps as illuminated by daylight!
PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is just such a warped and fearful “perception of reality.” I believe we see PTSD in both individuals and entire nations when we observe exaggerated fears, hyper-security consciousness and militant over-reaction to perceived threat. I suspect that God conceived as a Conquering King, Almighty Lord and Savior mirrors this fearful “perception of reality.”
Thomas Keating writes: “The Christian spiritual path is based on a deepening trust in God…. Because trust is so important, our spiritual journey may be blocked if we carry negative attitudes toward God from early childhood. These negative attitudes of God, which are implanted in us largely as a result of early religious training, are in fact a legacy of past generations and a pervasive set of religious attitudes that represent a distortion—sometimes a 180-degree distortion — of scriptural and gospel values….
“… the destructive teaching called Jansenism, a distortion of the gospel and one of the heresies that insinuated itself into seminaries and the mainstream of Catholic teaching, Jansenism taught that the body is totally corrupt and that the salvation brought by Jesus Christ was not universal. …. This pervasively distrustful attitude toward human nature, together with a pathological fear of God, dominated most Catholic educational institutions prior to the Second Vatican Council, long after Jansenism was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities.
“Well-intentioned but ill-conceived religious instruction can make God seem like a tyrant demanding instant obedience to his will, however arbitrary. Through myths and fairy tales, children know what tyrants are. A child who sees God as a tyrant is not going to want to go anywhere near him unless forced to do so.
“Another attitude… is that of God as an implacable judge whose gavel is ever poised to bring down the verdict of guilty. Here again God is presented with intense overtones of fear or even terror. A third attitude is that of a policeman always on our trail, always on the watch to catch us in the least fault. Whenever this child thinks of God, off goes the emotional judgment that says, `This God… is dangerous. He is a tyrant, a policeman always on my trail, and a judge, ever ready to condemn me to eternal hellfire.’
“These attitudes persist. Even theological training may not affect the emotions that have recorded the programming of early life…. These unhealthy ideas… could have been avoided if children were encouraged to develop a relationship of trust toward God….”
“… fear is useless, while faith expanding into boundless confidence in God is life-giving. … The emotion of fear tends of its nature to keep one as far away from God as possible. Trust grows through efforts to serve God out of love and to deepen the relationship. This cannot be accomplished if we are afraid of God.” (Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God, 1996)
Using the criteria of “dissimilarity” (that a particular Biblical passage does not reflect the sentiments of the authors or of other contemporary interests of the day) there is one passage attributed to Jesus that Jesus Seminar Scholars have judged as among the most likely authentic sayings of Jesus. It is that Jesus addressed the Almighty King and Judge with the language of familial intimacy, calling God “Abba” or “Daddy.”
Thomas Keating writes: “… the work that we can do now to develop mature Christian attitudes, especially a relationship to the Ultimate Reality whom Jesus calls Abba, `Father.’ Abba is passionately concerned for every creature, especially human beings, who are called to manifest God’s goodness more than any other aspect of creation.”
He writes: “… a distorted personal mysticism… loses touch with Christ’s vision of the Kingdom as grounded in compassion for the suffering and the poor.”
The historic challenge I see for us Unitarian Universalists who have left behind a “perception of reality” based on fear and terror, is to distinguish between the Biblical distortions of Ultimate Reality as Killer God, our defender and protector, and to affirm the Biblical “perception of reality” articulated by the Hebrew prophets and by Jesus who saw Ultimate Reality as loving, kind, universally gracious, bountiful, healing and intimately affirming of our worth.
Do we see Reality as out to get us? Or out to get our enemies? Are we surrounded by earth’s bounties, by good and worthy humanity? Or by lions and tigers and bears, oh no, germs and terrorists and unemployment, oh no!
My prayer for this religious community is that we valiantly live our covenant, our promise to be a safe and affirming place for everyone without regard to religious sentiment or personal condition, and that we will grow in our faith, grow in our “perception of reality” as a world of bounty and of loving-kindness.
Because, we become like our perceived Reality, our God.