January 5, 2025

Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples, but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

This Sunday is what has been called Little Christmas, the Feast of the Three Kings, or Epiphany. Technically, it is Twelfth Night, the day before, but I have rounded off for simplicity in sermonizing. “Epiphany” is a word with another meaning, to suddenly realize something, to have an insight or revelation. We can sidle up to something unexpectedly, as realization unfolds in our minds about something profound.

Keep that in mind for later.

This Sunday, I begin a new sermon series. It is about significant topics of religion. These are the central ideas, the cornerstones, the articles of faith that serve as foundations for what we are trying to do here at First Church. Or at least what I am trying to do when I get my act together.

Today, we will be discussing God. Not a minor subject nor one that lends itself to simple answers. Indeed, are there any answers when it comes to discussing God?

If you do some research—and brace yourself before you go onto the internet—there seems to be endless speculation about the nature of God. Theology and philosophy abound with mind-numbing theories and scholarly navel-gazing. And the one thing you can garner from such a search is that no one has a clue. Not that this lack of a clue stops folks from sounding certain and profound about it.

You can read definitive statements about God such as in the Nicaean Creed. Definitive statements that offer exacting language while leaving you entirely confused as to what exactly God happens to be. For any of you familiar with the Nicaean Creed, you might remember these words:

I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible…

I memorized “seen and unseen” rather than “visible and invisible” but things change it seems.

But that is not a lot about God, a description handed down from the fourth century. It does not say much because there is not much that can be said beyond generalities of faith. Statements of faith, not belief, mind you. I will come back to this distinction between faith and belief over the course of the next few months because much of what populates our religious lives is more about grappling with mysteries than it is knowing anything with certainty. And, in my opinion, certainty has little to do with religion.

If we were to sit down over coffee and discuss our images of God, I am guessing we would cover a range of territory. And we would be in good company, because if you read through the Bible, you would also be hard pressed to find any clear or consistent answers as to the nature of God.

Across the Book of Genesis, for example, the description of God changes. We start off with the grand image of God creating—in the beginning, darkness and light, earth and sky, and all the creatures of the earth. We then shift into an intimate setting with Adam and Eve wandering about the Garden of Eden, plucking fruit from trees and living an ideal, or at least idle, existence. And then the serpent comes along, they eat from the wrong tree, and it all ends in tears.

But notice how God is shown in these two quite different creation stories, and yes they were probably written separately. In the first, God is grandly bringing about all of existence. In the second, God is worried about a couple of human beings disobeying simple rules. God is now an active participant. You can imagine God wandering along with the troublesome couple, though there is no visual description of God in Genesis.

There is a description in the Book of Ezekiel, which goes like this:

Sitting on the throne was what looked like a man. Then I saw that there was something like shining brass from the center of his body and up to his head. It looked like fire all around within it. And from the center of his body and down to his feet I saw something like fire. There was a bright light shining all around Him. This light shining around Him looked like the rainbow in the clouds on a day of rain.

If this sounds like something out of a 1960s encounter with LSD, that is not surprising. Ezekiel was an unusual character. My personal favorite translator of the Bible, Robert Alter, referred to the Book of Ezekiel as “God-intoxicated derangement” and directly stated that Ezekiel was probably psychologically disturbed.

How so? Ezekiel describes himself eating a scroll–that would be like one of us eating a book. He also, for some reason, laid down on one side for 390 days only then to roll over and lay on the other side for 40 days. This bodily imprisonment was, according to Ezekiel, imposed by God. However, this behavior bears a striking resemblance to the hysterical paralysis diagnosed by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the last century.

I do not mean to suggest that believing in God is a crazy idea. However, claiming to have seen God in person has a certain diagnostic significance.

Depictions of God shift over the course of the Bible. Abraham has a conversational relationship with God, while his grandson Jacob encounters God in dreams, with the occasional wrestling match with an angel. Eventually, even dreams become the exclusive privilege of the prophets. Obviously, other people can dream about God, but not many treat that as prophet worthy.

In the Nicaean Creed, God is a described as a creator. The creator of heaven and earth and all things seen and unseen. That covers a lot of territory. One thing that description fails to offer is any sort of relationship between God and creation other than the original act of creation. The books of the Bible try to fill that in with commandments and covenants. But again, even that description changes over time as people have been struggling to pin down that divine relationship since the very beginning.

Christianity and its depictions of God vary across traditions. Sometimes God is remote, sometimes quite personal. Sometimes God is in control of the smallest things, while other times God moves in mysterious ways. You might try to distinguish between God’s reasons for doing things and God’s methods for doing so, but that does not offer much clarity. It is simply a better description of a black box into which we cannot see.

Many theologians have tried to bypass this uncertainty by looking around at creation, the clearest example to them of God’s presence in the world. They try to discern God’s nature from nature. They then attempt to backtrack from the natural world to God.

And I, for one, think this is a useful way of thinking, if we realize that it is a lot of guesswork. I do not offer that as a criticism because most of life is a lot of guesswork. We simply need to acknowledge that rather than make any declarations of certainty or absolute pronouncements about the truth.

One key question about God is whether God is everything or if God is more than everything. Is God the entire universe, sometimes called pantheism, or is God the creator of the universe of which God is not a part, sometimes called panentheism. Do not forget the “en” in the middle.

Now this theological question I have more firm opinions about – it is a waste of time. It is a distinction without much purpose except to support arguments human beings endlessly try to make about other human beings. For you see, if God is the universe, that means we are a part of God. We are therefore more than made in God’s image, but we are of God directly. That means that if human beings are evil by nature, we can trace that evil back to God.

Even if you try to say we are fallen creatures or broken products from a perfect source, that again places evil at the feet of God. And so, the idea of panentheism, that God is more than the universe, more than all of creation, allows for some theoretical distancing, even if it does not help to explain why there is evil in the world. It simply makes us feel better about not badmouthing God.

I have come to the conclusion that studying theology and philosophy all these years has not helped me to develop a better understanding of God. I have special words to describe things, like pantheism and panentheism, but that is inside baseball like the infield fly rule. I have jargon without greater understanding.

In fact, if I were to go back in time with the purpose of better understanding God, I would never have gone to seminary. Instead, I would have studied physics. I would have studied mathematics. I would have studied science. Not that those subjects provide final answers to questions about the nature of God.

Some might even say that they undermine belief in God. And they do undermine belief in God. Because, in my estimation, no one should believe in God. Meaning having a fixed and unchangeable image of God. Meaning being utterly certain about God and God’s ways.

Instead, we should have faith in God. Faith is not the same as belief, even though those words get used interchangeably. Having faith is a way of orienting our minds toward something hard to pin down, something incredibly difficult to imagine in the commonplace thinking of everyday life.

Why then turn to science and mathematics? Because they also orient themselves toward things currently unknown. Questions in need of answers. Hypotheses yet unproven. But what happens when there are answers? You move onto the next questions. Because there will always be more questions.

Let’s consider physics for a moment. Physics which tries to study the infinite and the infinitesimal, the grandness of galaxies and the mysteries of the atom. Once you pass beyond the basics of high school physics, things get weird. The nature of the universe has little to do with how we blunder around day by day. You have to contend with the seeming impossibilities of unseen subatomic particles whirling about and exploding stars all around us. All things visible and invisible as set forth in the Nicaean Creed.

If you take a moment to zoom out to the vastness of the universe and all its mysteries, it is not so crazy to shift your thinking toward the divine. But you might then object. You might object as a religious person that that perspective renders God down to the forces of nature, that human beings are more than evolved monkeys, and such. You might object as a scientific person that science has done nothing but disprove religious thinking time and time again and how dare you try to twist science into bolstering your religious fantasies.

I find this all terribly amusing. I once described this difference as atheists thinking God is lazy and fundamentalists thinking God is stupid. God is somehow too lazy to take a few billion years to do something. Or God is somehow too stupid to function on a level of scientific subtly beyond the scope of the average American high school student. Again, there is a difference between faith and belief and the arguments between atheists and fundamentalists are often about trying to defend or to knock down beliefs.

And I frankly do not care. I do not care about beliefs. Because there is absolutely no way of knowing anything about God.

In the 1960s, there was something known as the “God is Dead” movement. That phrase comes from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who could give Ezekiel a run for his money in the crazy department. But in both cases, the prophet Ezekiel and the philosopher Nietzsche, we can obtain glimpses of the most profound things through their very different ways of viewing the world.

Nietzsche thought that science and reason coming out of the Enlightenment era had made belief in the Christian god unbelievable. And he ventured to say that European morality itself would collapse as a result. And it did. The two world wars demonstrated the failures of that brittle moral system that allowed brutality to become normal and genocide to become possible.

After the wars, theologians questioned the trite morality of Christian love in the face of the harsh realities of fascism. Bear in mind that fascism and other strands of nationalism often warmly embrace Christianity, even if what they are embracing bears little resemblance to what Jesus taught. That is because religion can become a means of controlling others using commandments and covenants shaded to protect the people in power. All you need to do is to ignore everything Jesus said.

Under this way of thinking, capitalism can be considered a religious outlook, one in which God blesses those who are successful, with Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the markets guiding the economically righteous forward into prosperity. One of the fundamental problems with religion is that it can be used for selfish and even evil purposes.

It can justify terrible acts, like war or slavery. Like the subjugation of women in the name of tradition. Like the ostracizing of people because they are different. Different in what they believe. Different because of who they love. Different because someone down here gets to decide what God wants up there. How very convenient for those who get to decide.

And honestly, if someone does not believe in God, especially after the events of the 20^th century, I am not going to blame them. If they question the existence of someone who is supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good when terrible things happen every single day, I am not going to tell them they are off the mark. Because those ideas about God being all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, are not so obvious.

Which brings me back to my desire to study physics. Because using my amateurish understanding of physics, I can imagine God as being both real and unreal. Real as in there is something out there. And unreal as in what we traditionally imagine God as being has nothing to do with what God might be.

One historical reason for religion is that it served as a way of understanding the world around us and how to respond to the dangers of that world. Bad things happen and people theorized that there were reasons for them. At first, those reasons were attributed to the changing whims of the gods. Human beings had to learn the patterns of those whims and figure out how to appease them.

For example, you might then make animal sacrifices to appease the gods, a practice that existed in the Bible. When Jesus is presented at the Temple after he was born, Mary and Joseph sacrificed two turtledoves on the altars. You might ask yourself, why after creating those turtledoves, God would want them sacrificed in his name. Keep asking yourself that question.

As the prophet Micah put it, God does not seek burnt offerings but acts of loving kindness. But such offerings at the Temple did provide blessings—blessings to the priests. And the people saying that you needed to make such offerings were, again, the priests. Note the conflict of interest.

Religion can become an exercise in trying to harness the blessings of God. That is a terribly crass way of putting it, but historically that is a common pathway of religious leaders. Jesus criticized the Temple for this. It was one of the main reasons for the Protestant Reformation, the idea that the Vatican could dictate the laws of God upon earth. And even now, there is a trend in American Protestantism known as the Prosperity Gospel that you only know if God loves you through wealth and success in your life. Again, nothing to do with the lessons of Jesus.

So, if these are all problems, what should faith in God look like? In the Bible there is a phrase: the fear of the Lord. I have never liked it because it seems to suggest that we should be afraid of God. And that was part of what was meant, to be sure. But fear in this sense also included being awestruck. The word “awesome” has slipped into common use for common reasons, but it truly means to be overwhelmed by the grandeur of creation and the works of God.

When I imagine God through the lens of physics, the incredible vastness of space, the unbelievable complexities of even the tiniest pieces of matter, that is what I mean by being awestruck. That sense of God is beyond our usual ways of thinking, just as we do not go around pondering the nature of the atom or the billions of galaxies in the universe. Well, maybe you do.

I would characterize traditional Western religion as a way of understanding God as an all-powerful being to whom we are supposed to pray and to seek forgiveness from. I do not have any problem with those expectations, but I worry about seeing God as either a jukebox for our wants and needs or our co-pilot riding on our shoulders steering our every move. That is not how I see God, though I know some would disagree with me.

Rather than God as all-powerful, I see God as the creator and preserver of the world. That does not mean that we cannot mess up our world, which seems to be a fundamental human desire. And rather than question whether God is perfectly good, I am amazed that we do not instead wonder about why human beings can be so perfectly awful.

All the evils of the world somehow get placed at the feet of God, and yet I think almost all the evils of the world can be placed at the feet of us. Because we allow bad things to happen and then blame it on God or the devil or capitalism or some other depository of blame. We often feel that we are the victims of fate rather than the unintentional or intentional authors of our problems.

God created the world of which we are a part. Why do we then expect God to take care of this incredible gift we seem determined to ruin? Isn’t that our job?

What about God being all knowing? There is a notion in physics that information cannot be destroyed. That is a very technical definition that it would take a seminar to unpack, but I think about it in this sense. God sees everything and everyone, always and forever. God knows all because that is the nature of God and, in many ways, that is the purpose of this grand experiment known as existence, to know us and to know all.

As Matthew wrote: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid…”

God is the creator and the preserver and the one who knows all. And we as participants in creation should reflect upon what that means. What it means to be a part of nature rather than endless trying to overrule the natural world. What it means that God and the universe itself are eternally and completely mindful of us and all that we might do.

What it means to stop for a moment in our hectic lives, to look up to the stars, to imagine our very bodies down to our atoms. To ponder the mysteries of existence even as we try to peek behind the curtains. And once we finally learn something, to look on and on and on for new horizons of what we do not know.

Because that is faith. Faith that there will always be something we must strive for. Faith that we are placing ourselves on a pathway of discovery. A pathway in search of God. Aways and forever. Amen.