Re-Imagining God (Lent 3, March 11 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 3, March 11 2012, St. Albans

Ex 20:1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1:18-25; Jn 2:13-22

When I say “God”, what picture or image comes to mind?  I expect that we all conjure up various images, pictures and names whenever the word God is mentioned.  Most of us have a default mode that we go to when we imagine God.  Perhaps it’s the old man with the long white beard sitting on a throne and acting as judge.  Perhaps it’s the mysterious force that we hear about in the Star Wars movies when they say “may the force be with you”.  In our psalm today, the psalmist imagines God as both Creator, the great artist and architect of nature, and as the Giver of the Law, the one who gave the law to humanity.  For good measure he also throws in the image of God as a rock.  We may have our own images of God.  We may think of God as huge like a galaxy, or God as tiny as a sub-atomic particle, or as invisible like the wind.

How do you imagine God?  What image or name or word comes to mind?  Take a moment, turn to your neighbours and tell them about your images for God.

Our tradition and our Scriptures are full of images.  It is a way of acknowledging that none of our images can fully capture what God is.  When St. Augustine, the great bishop and theologian of the 4^th century, was asked what God is, he replied “God is Mystery”.  It was his way of saying that none of our names for God and none our images for God can contain all that God is.  God is, if you like, too big for our words and pictures.

And that’s why it’s good that we have so many images and names for God, a multiplicity of metaphors that can at times contradict one another and at other times open up new inspiration for our imaginations.  Paul Ricoeur, a French theologian, called this a “polyphonic naming of God”, and considered it a good thing.

But whatever image or images you use, when is the last time you set them aside and re-imagined God?

Even though there are many images available to us, we often tend to get stuck on a particular one.  Maybe it’s God the omnipotent being.  Maybe it’s God the king, sitting on his throne.  But whatever it is, we can sometimes focus on this one image and make the error of mistaking our image of God for God herself.  And we can wrap all sorts of theology around that, and years of tradition and history until the image becomes so strong that it becomes very difficult to give up and takes on a life of its own.  Our image becomes an idol.

We are warned about the dangers of idolatry in our first reading from the book of Exodus, the reading of the Ten Commandments.  Right near the top of the list, God tells the people of Israel, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or on earth below or water under the earth.  You shall not bow down or worship them.”

Now idols can come in many forms in our modern world.  The love of money, self-centredness, pleasure-seeking, materialism, these are all idols that are worshiped in our time and place.  But it is also idolatry when we think we have God all figured out, if we think we have God by the tail.  When we get stuck on any one image of God and build our religious practices around that we run the risk of idolatry.

Which is why it is very healthy spiritually to re-imagine God from time to time, and allow ourselves to consider new pictures and names for who God is.

However dealing with a new image of God can be a very difficult thing.  Paul writes about that in the second reading that we heard this morning, his letter to the Corinthians.  In Jesus* we have been given a radically new and disturbing image for God:  the God who in Jesus hung on the cross and was crucified.  It is an image of humiliation, of suffering, of vulnerability, of weakness.  This is the message about the cross that Paul proclaimed, the image of Christ crucified.  And people were disturbed by it.  To the Jews, who were expecting God to send a triumphant Messiah to defeat the Roman oppressors, this image of a Messiah crucified by the same Romans was a stumbling block.  To the Gentiles, their image of God was inspired by Greek philosophy.  God was the supreme being, omnipotent, omniscient, impassible and all those other fancy words the Greek philosophers used to describe God.  The God of Greek philosophy couldn’t possibly suffer at the hands of human beings.  The image of God as Christ crucified was utter foolishness.  And yet, that is what Paul proclaimed*.

In our gospel today we have the account of Jesus clearing the animals and money-changers out of the Temple.  This too is an instance when people were forced to re-imagine God.  The Jewish authorities thought that they had things figured out. 

  

Yahweh was the law-giver whose presence on earth was in the Temple in Jerusalem.  When people broke the laws that Yahweh had given, they had to come to the Temple and offer sacrifices in order to atone for their sins.  A well-defined religious system had been built up around this image of God.  And yet, it had gone wrong.  Religion had become a business, the temple a marketplace.  Money from the poor ended up in the pockets of the rich.  Worship of God was being confined to a single place.  In the gospel, Jesus takes a public stand against the materialism that had become part of worship and against the idea that God’s presence was confined to the Temple.  If this is what you think God is all about, then it’s time to re-think.  A re-imagining is needed.  God’s presence is not to be found in the Temple, but rather in the actions and person of Jesus.

It is spiritually healthy for all of us to re-imagine God from time to time.  A few years ago I went to a conference on Evolution organized by the Vatican in honour of the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of the Species.  Now, as you know, there are some Christians who are disturbed by the theory of evolution.  The account that evolution provides of how the various living things on earth came to be conflicts with their image of how God created the world.

One of the dominant images of God the creator in our tradition has been that of an omnipotent father-like figure who lives in heaven, who reaches down into our world and crafts the various plants and animals at the beginning, and from then on intervenes from time to time in our affairs as necessary.

Immersing myself in the story of evolution for a week provided an opportunity to let go of that image of God and to do some re-imagining.  If we take seriously the idea that the world was created through the processes of evolution, what image of God can emerge?

Nature reveals certain things to us.  As Psalm 19 tells us, nature declares the glory of God.  It reveals that the world is in continuous creation, that new species are emerging as others disappear.  Creation is not static, but rather dynamic.  Nature also reveals that there is an impulse towards life on this earth.  Life is found in the most unlikely places, in the driest, coldest deserts of Antarctica and in the super-heated water of undersea volcanic vents.  The trajectory of creation on our planet is towards abundance of life.

  

And not just abundance, but variety.  The variety which is found in the millions of species that have lived on our planet is stunning.  However, there is a shadow side to this dynamism and variety, and that is that the same combination of order and chance that produces the variety of life also results in the disappearance of life forms.  Suffering, at least in this sense, seems to be an intrinsic aspect of a dynamic creation.

Another surprise that awaits us as we study evolution is the importance of relationships.  Whether it is the molecular relationships created by finely balanced electro-chemical attractions or the symbiotic relationships created by different life forms living in close contact, relationships have emerged as central to our understanding of how life evolves.  All of the major transitions of evolutionary theory, the origin of life, the first nucleated cell, the emergence of humans, all of these transitions have happened because of relationships, either through symbiogenesis or the emergence of behaviours that are for the good of the group rather than the individual.

And so what is the image of God the creator that emerges from all this?  It is the image of a God who loves life in all its abundance, who loves variety and diversity, for whom relationships are central.  It is a God who is dynamic rather than unchanging, who is present rather than remote.  It is not a God who acts by overwhelming power and control, rather it is a God who acts from within, as a subtle presence within creation, inspiring, sustaining, nudging things along, a God who favours relationships, a God who suffers along with her creatures.

This image of God may sound familiar.  In our Christian tradition, this is a lot like our image of God as Spirit.  In our Trinitarian understanding, we tend to focus on God the Father and God the Son, but maybe we should allow ourselves to spend time with God the Spirit.  The week I spent studying evolution gave me that opportunity.

However you do it, and whatever your image of God is, I hope that from time to time you too will have the opportunity to do some re-imagining.

Amen.