A
Reflection for the 6th Sunday of Easter
All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC
May 21, 2017 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Groping For
God
A
couple weeks ago I went to see a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, and since this was a
traveling show, there were some attempts to bring in some local flavor with a
couple inserts about Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, and Kill Devil Rum. The
audience laughed in their appreciation. This is an old ploy used by many
visitors, such as the conductor of the Virginia Symphony the week previously
who noted the slightly off-color ads with plays on the names of some local
restaurants - “Did we really need to know from whom I got my crabs?” This is a
dodge used by out of town visitors to suggest that they are not really
strangers but people just like us who use the same frame of reference. I
remember once when I was a guest preacher in Silver Spring, Maryland and I
threw in that I was happy to visit friends there in Silver Springs.
It seemed like half of the four hundred people started to murmur that the place
was Silver Spring, not Silver Springs. I am not all that sure
they bothered to listen to the rest of the sermon.
In
the Acts of the Apostle's selection for today, the Apostle Paul stops off in
Athens and notes that the people of that city are so religious that they have
all these idols on display, even one who is an “Unknown God”. He suggests that
it is in the nature of all humans that we “search and grope for God”. He drops
in a quote from the Greek 5th or 6th Century BC Poet/
Philosopher Epimenides. In that poem Minos, the son of Zeus, denies that the
God Zeus is dead as has been reported by the Cretans. Minos asserts that “All
Cretans are liars” (a line that the writer of 1st Titus has Paul
quote).
A grave has been
fashioned for thee, O High and Holy One
The Cretans are always
liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But thou diest not, for
to eternity thou livest and standest
For in thee we live and
move and have our being.
He
then adds a quote from the fifth line of Phenomena,
by the 3rd century BC Poet Aratus:
Let us begin with Zeus,
whom we mortals never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of Zeus.
Even the sea and the harbor are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to Zeus.
For we are indeed his offspring ...
Paul
is using these quotes to help the Athenians make the jump from their Supreme
God, Zeus, to the God that Paul follows. “From one ancestor he made all nations
to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and
the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search
for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from
each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ ”. He invites them to look deeper and see God is
not trapped in geography or in culture or limited imagination, but ranges free
in the core of the universal being. All of us are meant to search and grope for
the connection to our reason for existence.
When
Jesus, the Risen Lord, is getting ready for the end of his earthly ministry, he
tells his disciples that he is not leaving them without strength to continue
the journey, for God will send “another Advocate to be with you forever. This
is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees
him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in
you.”
An
advocate is a person who is on your side for each step to open the paths into
new directions, who will give you strength to see and understand things on a
deeper level. In John’s Gospel, this third part of the Trinity is more fully
expanded than in any of the other Gospels. This is the one who moves the disciples
past what they know from their experience of walking with Jesus and leads them
into places which they had never imagined. The struggle of the church, which we
will look at when we get to the book of Acts, is between those who want this
faith to focus on the centrality of the teachings of the Preacher Jesus and to
worship his divinity and those who see that “the world is changed, changed
utterly, a terrible beauty is born”, to steal Yeats’ line.
That
struggle still continues, for we often want to nail down all that we know at
the present and stay stagnant in that place. Yet, the nature of the universe is
that it has been in the process of expanding ever since the Big Bang five billion
years ago, and the studies in 2016 from the Hubble telescope tell us that the
expansion is 5% - 9% faster than originally theorized. Our knowledge of God needs to keep expanding
in the same way that our knowledge of ourselves in the image of God needs to
keep expanding. We cannot stay in the nursery forever.
Last
week Pat and I watched “Hidden Figures”, a movie about three African-American
women in Hampton, Virginia in the 1950’s, trapped in a community mired in the clutches
of cultures of the past and then challenged into action by working for the
Langley Space Center of NASA. They had to grope and search for a new way to
deal with the oppression where laws of culture, norms of morality, the basic
concepts of math and of themselves all had to be open to growth to enable them
to “touch the stars”. It is, at its core, a love story in that they learned how
to love their country rather than to be in fear of it. They had to learn how to
love who they were growing into being instead of staying trapped in timid
souls. They held onto the past things that fed them, like the church to which
they belonged, but they made room for new possibilities. In the same way it is
also, at its core, a struggle of faith in the groping for Justice in this world
as an outward and visible sign of God’s love and our love for God and
neighbor. Reinhold Niebuhr suggested
that our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our capacity for
injustice makes democracy necessary.
It
is good to hold on to the lessons of the past and to study history, but we are
deluded if we think we have finished learning. The church has had a habit over
the centuries of trying to ossify doctrine, to turn it to hard and fast dogma,
cementing it into stone over which we stumble. Institutions like to keep things
the same, and they only change when questions are asked and the old answers
just don’t seem to be adequate enough to sustain life and love.
I
guess what I am asking you to do is to go beyond the creeds and scripture as
the final word about God and enter into the idea that God is telling the story
of love and justice through us and our actions each day in this broken and
changing world, part of God’s continuing creation. I want us to continue to grope and stretch
for the possibilities in our lives that God is offering to us today.
Groping For God
My
Illustrated Bible pictured a Heavenly reign
of
layered beard God and streaming light shone
with
rays like rails while sitting on huge throne
a
tyrant looking annoyed as disturbed yet again.
I
open my heart to let go that inadequate image;
groping,
stretching for God beyond imagination
one
who is not so all obsessed with a damnation
rather
nourishing love from beginning to finish.
Theologs
squeeze divine energy into domesticated
entity;
pocket sized, for a convenient smooth ritual
to
take the place of a messy, unprocessed spiritual
freedom
of loving creator longing to be celebrated
with
our becoming co-creators continuing an open-
ended
relationship marked by our mutual devotion.
