God, Sufficient But Limited
Vann Knight, Parish Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn
October 19, 2003
The purpose of today’s sermon is to enable and encourage you to define God in such a say that during your worst moments of life, when God does not answer your prayer, you can allow God to be with you and to care for you.
To me it matters not what concepts or images of God you have, as long as those work for you at the most difficult times of your life. Whether your concepts and images come from the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, the Pagan or Humanist traditions, the Buddhist or Taoist traditions, or whether you’ve mixed and matched and developed your own unique set of concepts and images for God, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you have a theology of God that will allow God to be with you and to care for you during the most difficult times of your life.
What I’m going to present this morning works for me, but it may not work for you. In fact, what I’m going to present will feel like heresy to some of you. It will feel counterproductive. It will feel like I’m trying to take away the God you have always imagined – the Almighty God. If the concept and image of God as almighty, all powerful works for you, hold onto that. But if, either during this sermon or later in life, you realize that the notion if Almighty God is actually creating more problems for you than it is solving, feel free to adjust your thinking as you need to. Remember, you are the religious authority. I am simply a resource.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that the concept of an almighty God is relatively new when you consider the long history of humans and of religions. My guess is that the notion of a god being almighty is about 5,000 years old. Before the advent of the Hebrew or Jewish religion, they had a theological problem. They could not figure out a way to overcome fate.
According to James Luther Adams, the most prestigious Unitarian theologian of the 20th Century, “The Greek popular view, from pre-Homer times onward, was unable to find a principle of transcendence beyond the tragedy of existence.” (Pg. 37, On Being Human Religiously) In the Greek world view, there were many gods and goddesses. However, none of them were supreme. All of them, including Zeus, were subject to fate. This subjection to fate, even by the gods and goddesses, was a dominant factor in the development of Greek Tragedy. Popular Greek culture had not figured out a way to move beyond the whim of fate.
Into this world view emerged Judaism with its radical concept of one God. Not only did Judaism affirm that there was one God, it affirmed that this one God was almighty, not subject to fate. Like the Greeks, the Jews saw life as tragic, and this is vividly expressed in the Hebrew Bible, most clearly in the Genesis story of the fall of humanity; but unlike Greek Tragedy, Judaism has an almighty god who intercedes in behalf of humanity and overcomes fate, overcomes tragedy. In the historical context of 5,000 years ago, the concept of one God, who was almighty, solved a problem created by the popular world view that life was tragic and that even the gods were subject to fate.
However, we do not live in that time, and that is not how we view the world. For the most part, the popular world view is that of the Jews: There is one Almighty God. Even those of us who say we don’t believe this probably do believe it more than we realize.
Where our problem with Almighty God arises is not as much at church or synagogue as it is at the hospital or funeral home. Each of you can tell stories of your own family and friends going through great suffering and terrible tragedy when people prayed for God to help and no help came.
I have a brother, four years older than me. When he was in his early 20s, he and his wife watched for almost two years as their three-year-old daughter died of leukemia. I have a cousin who watched for five years as her daughter died of a brain tumor. This same brother now has a 30-year-old daughter who has been in excruciating pain - that isn’t touched even by morphine - for over ten years. When she was 16 years old, she was working part time in a department store and a customer who thought he wasn’t being served promptly picked her up and slammed her head against the wall. She has had multiple brain surgeries and nothing can stop the pain. Why, God? Why can’t you stop the pain?
On 9/11, when the airplanes flew into the World Trade Center and people were forced to choose between burning up or jumping to their death, did we not ask, Why, God? Why did you let that happen? Why did you not do something to stop it?
If God is Almighty, and if God loves us, why doesn’t God do something to prevent or at least stop our suffering? One answer by many is that unrelieved suffering is proof that there is no God. Another answer is that even if there is any such reality as God, unrelieved suffering proves that God does not care about us. Yet another answer could be that God does not have the power to help.
Here’s the problem: When we are going through deep suffering, life-changing “tragedy,” or untimely death, we want relief from our pain; we wish we could turn back the clock and do something differently or that God or life would do something differently; and we don’t want our loved ones or ourselves to die before we think it’s time.
When we are in the midst of our deepest pain and God doesn’t answer our prayers for help, how do we feel toward God? Abandoned, angry, disillusioned. In order to allow God to be with us and to care for us during these darkest times, try the following adjustment in your theology.
Allow God to be sufficient, without demanding that God be almighty. Allow God to be sufficiently good, without demanding that God be absolutely good. Allow God to be sufficiently present, without demanding that God be absolutely present. Allow God to be sufficiently free, without demanding that God be absolutely free.
Whenever we ascribe to God any absolute quality, we have probably created for ourselves a theological, emotional, and spiritual problem.
Let me give three examples. If we demand that God is all present, or present everywhere, or absolutely present, by that demand for absolute presence, we deny the transcendent quality of God. In the Lord’s Prayer or the Prayer of Jesus, we have traditionally said, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The Greek word translated into English as Father is Abba or Pappa. It is a term of intimacy and familiarity. The phrase, “in heaven,” is not a postal address. It is a poetic way of referencing the transcendence of God. In the theology of Jesus, God was both imminently present and ultimately transcendent. If we can allow God to be both present and transcendent, then we can allow God to be present with us in our pain, experiencing it with us, without demanding that God do our will.
Likewise, if we demand that God is absolutely good, we deny God’s capacity for evil. I have never heard a passage of Scripture read that references God’s capacity for evil. Neither have I ever heard such a sermon. But in the Hebrew Scriptures, there are several such references. In Exodus 32:11-14, we find these words: “And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath burn against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. And the Lord repented of this evil which he thought to do unto his people.”
As most of you know, I do not see God as a person or as a super person. I understand God primarily as Energy that includes both yin and yang, the polarities necessary to constitute the whole. If we can see God as Energy or as the Life of Life, then we can allow for all dimensions of God. And rather than demanding that God be absolute good, we can allow God to be sufficiently good to be with us at the point of our need, again without demanding that God do our will.
Finally, let’s consider the freedom of God. If we demand that God be absolutely free, we by that demand, require that we humans are not free. If we are not free, but robots programmed to love and obey God, then we have neither the capacity for evil or good. My sense is that we humans and other dimensions of life enjoy some unknown degree of freedom, and that God has chosen, for whatever reason, to honor the boundaries of that freedom. If we choose to pick up a gun and kill our neighbor, God will not infringe upon that freedom. If a storm blows down a tree on a passing automobile, God will not infringe upon that freedom. If we can allow God to be sufficiently free and not absolutely free, we can then allow God to be with us as we are and as God is.
Regardless of our concepts and images of God, it is important that in our times of greatest need, we are able to let God’s presence enfold us and strengthen us. One of the ways that we may be able to do this is to understand that God is sufficiently free, sufficiently present, sufficiently good.