|
“Does God Have A Wrist-Watch
Introduction to Scripture Our first reading today is the 23rd Psalm, from the King James Version of the Bible. By way of background, you will recall that the New Testament was originally written in the language used throughout the Roman Empire – no, not Latin, but Greek. The reason for that was that Alexander the Great, who was Greek, had conquered much of what then was the known world to folk around the Mediterranean, and if you wanted to get along in the new empire, you learned to speak Greek. Later the Romans came along and took over the Greek empire, but by then everyone was fed up with learning new languages, and so the Greek stuck.So if we are to read the Bible, we who for the most part don’t speak Greek, we need it translated. Back round the year 1600, King James of England ordered a new translation to be made, one that would be in the common language of the day. Many of us grew up with the King James Version, and so assumed that God has always spoken in flowery, Elizabethan language – lots of “leadeth”s and “begats” and “verily”s. And while the King James Version might not be in the language of the common folk of this era, it still has a remarkable beauty all its own. So let’s say together the 23rd Psalm in the King James Version, and then say a modern paraphrase, penned by another James, Sweet Baby James Taylor…. Our second reading is from Paul’s First letter to the Thessalonians, a letter that the Apostle wrote to a church he had founded in the decades following the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Faith is often thought of as something static and unchanging, a destination that is fixed more than a road to be travelled. And yet for most of us, faith is something that grows as we do, and we find that as we look back at some of our earlier ideas about faith and God, sometimes we are amused by what we now see were misconceptions. I certainly know that this has been the case with me. For instance, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a couple friends who lived across the street from us when I was very young, probably in 4th Grade or so. They were Roman Catholic, had to go to church every Saturday evening, and told us all sorts of things about “mortal sins” and “venial sins” and having to go to weekly confession in something that resembled a phone booth with a sliding window in it. All this talk made them sort of God-experts, at least to my impressionable mind. Then one day they told me about something called “purgatory” and “limbo”, and while I never could figure out exactly which was which or why, they sure sounded unappetizing. But where I really had trouble was when they told me that thanks to Jesus, everyone who was born after that first Easter long ago could go to heaven, because Jesus saved us. But those who died before Jesus – no matter how good they had been, no matter how much faith they had, no matter how famous they were in the Bible, no matter even if they were Moses or Miriam, or Abraham or Sarah – well, they were just out of luck, and they ended up in one of those other places, at best. At worst, as a child recently told me who knows that swearing is a bad thing, it was capital “h-e-double hockey sticks.” And then sort of related to this thing was how it works when someone you love dies, and presumably they go to heaven. I mean, what do they do when they are waiting around for the rest of the family to show up? My grandparents, Nana and Pop-Pop, they were so close, they were inseparable, and when after 60 years of marriage she died first, Pop-Pop was devastated. We couldn’t imagine Nana being happy in heaven without him. But we were told everyone is happy in heaven. So in one way, what my friends had told me about what happened to people who died before Jesus arrived made sense. It was like God had a wrist watch – and in 4th Grade I was the proud owner of my first wrist watch, with bezel ring and a glow in the dark dial, and I knew all about how time worked. But in another way, it just didn’t seem fair. It is not like those people had any choice when to be born, right? Same thing with Nana and Pop-Pop. How to square the sense in the first one to die having to wait around in heaven for the other to show up, with the knowledge that there was no way either could be truly happy without the other being with them? I think children often have a sense of justice that naturally causes them to rebel when injustice appears – perhaps that is why we often hear our youngsters say, “But that’s not fair….” I think it was this part of me that reacted against what my friends had told me about people who died before Jesus came to us, that had to reconcile how heaven could be a place of ultimate happiness with the fact that we just cannot be happy without those we love – it just didn’t seem fair. But then there came a time, many years later, when the light bulb went on for me – why do we assume that God’s time is like our time? Why do we think that the rules of time that bind us bind God? Maybe God doesn’t even have a wrist watch! If we can imagine not being bound by time, then surely God, who is vaster and more mysterious than our wildest imaginations, could manage the trick. And if this were the case, then all those unfairness problems go flying out the window. In John 3:16 we are told that “God so loved the world” that he sent Jesus to us, and there is nothing there that says that God so loved the world only after Jesus was sent. So if God loved the world pre-Jesus, then God could, and certainly would, find a way to save those who came before him. I think we all probably have had some ideas about God which, in hindsight, we laugh about. In response to an email I sent to the congregation this week, some of you shared your own earlier ideas of God. Some of those ideas they now find amusing, but others they now see where horrifying, even damaging. But what I hope we take away today is not a sense that we are being laughed at, or that the conceptions other people might have are laughable, or that, even worse, our children’s ideas are laughable. A wise theologian once said that humility must be the starting point for all our theologizing, for all the tentative stabs we might make at this ultimately unfathomable mystery of the divine. So at the same time as we might rejoice that in our lives and through our experiences and learnings we have grown in our faith, let us also remember that the road is long and we are in essence just taking our first steps along the way, and the one thing we can count on, and hope for, is that there will be many surprises and unexpected turnings up ahead. What we need to be about, as Paul counsels the Thessalonians, is to constantly be testing our faith, holding fast to what seems true, and discarding what seems false. And so perhaps the advice Rabbi Harold Kushner gives to parents whose children ask them about God, is good advice to us as well, as we struggle with questions, and as those around us struggle with questions of their own: “We do not start by pretending that we stand with God and calling our children to climb up and join us. We start with our children and try to see the world through their eyes, try to share with them the two most important ideas we hold: the commitment that man’s greatest adventure is to be found in the never-ending striving to become fully human and the faith that if they look at the world and look into themselves deeply enough, they will find God in both. (When Children Ask About God, Harold S. Kushner, 1989, p. 176). To be people of faith, then, is not to pretend to have all the answers, and indeed, is not even to have all the answers. As theologian Daniel Migliore puts it, “Christian faith invariably prompts questions, sets an inquiry in motion, fights the inclination to accept things as they are, [and] continually calls in question unexamined assumptions about God, ourselves and the world.” (Faith Seeking Understanding, p. 2). And in that spirit of questioning assumptions, and just in case God does have a wrist-watch, I am thinking it is time I sat down! -------
|