Why God is Not My King

2015-03-22-Whats-in-a-Name

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Michael Hendricks
March 22, 2015

The Chinese sage Zhuang Zhou, writing around 300 BCE, posed an interesting dilemma.

“The fish trap exists because of the fish,” he wrote. “Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.”

“Where can I find a man who has forgotten words,” he then asks, “so I can have a word with him?”

In more pedestrian terms, how can you talk about that which lies beyond the limits of language?

On the other hand, how can you not?

To take it a step further, what else is even worth talking about?

For the last 16 years, I have been teaching church school to middle-school-aged young people, and the question never goes away: How do you talk about love without diminishing it? Joy? Hope? Peace?

And how on earth do you talk about God without limiting that generative, unifying essence inside whatever terms you call up to even suggest what you’re trying to get at?

The thing is, though, you can’t escape trying.

Language … and God language in particular … is at the heart of our Western religious traditions.  We have a Torah and a Bible and Midrash and Talmud and Church history completely built around God and the impact that God has on the world and the relationships that God forms with God’s world and the people in it.  But for all that talk, it is very difficult to ascertain from these texts exactly what God is.

Of course, since God talk sounds like something most of us don’t feel qualified to do, we create a group of experts to do it for us and call them theologians, then we feel unqualified to understand what they say, so we don’t read them.  We assume that it’s been figured out by somebody or that we can worry about it later.

But maybe, just maybe, that as much in the dark as we are destined to be, we may have some hints that, if we look into them humbly, can lead us to suspect, if not ever know, something about the essence of what it is we’re talking about when we use the word God.

For instance, for thousands of years religious peoples, and even some non-religious peoples in moments of crisis, have found themselves turning to God in worship and prayer.  We don’t really do that to anything else.

So, maybe the first thing to note is, whether or not you’re a person of faith, God is different.  And not just different, more, bigger, beyond.

And that’s actually a second thing, too.  Something that is actually one of the most fundamental of all religious assertions. That we are small.  At least in comparison to God.  Our concerns, our self-centeredness, our anxieties, the things that keep us awake in the middle of the night, are not the most important things in the universe.

Religious peoples will put forward that it is this sensibility that opens the hearts of people like Saint Francis, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and allows them to do more than would otherwise seem humanly possible.

Of course, non-religious peoples would point out that this quality of following God’s will beyond standard human norms is a two-edged sword.  And that for all the Mother Teresas in history, this same quality has also produced a not insignificant number of crusaders, jihadists and Westboro Churches.

But that sense of putting ourselves beneath the call of God does not exist in a vacuum.  There is a corollary in our tradition that should at least be a preventative: love your neighbor as yourself.  Not your family.  Not your friends.  Not your tribe member.  Not your clan.  Not your fellow followers in faith.  Your neighbor.  And, in the Christian tradition, when Jesus is asked, “Who is your neighbor,” he answers with the parable of the good Samaritan, and effectively answers that question with the new question, “Who is not?”

So how do we talk about how big, how important, how powerful God is?

We use the words we have in the times in which we live.

In the scripture readings for today we get a regal metaphor that Paul echoes in I Timothy 1: 17.

“Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever.”

And these words of sacred scripture have resonated for over a thousand years

When Paul wanted to raise an image that would instantly convey to everyone who heard it, a being that mattered, he could have hardly come up with a better metaphor than King.  In that day, the characters of entire nations for entire eras depended on the characters of those who sat on the throne.  Their births, marriages and deaths changed history.  They held the power of life and death, and determined if their rule would be a time of peace or war, justice or oppression.

But the world has changed since then.

The Magna Carta happened.

1776 happened.

Parliament happened.

And gradually, what a king represented wasn’t quite as impressive as it used to be.  No longer symbols of power and importance, kings are now a little silly and old-fashioned.  Almost embarrassing.

Their lives and weddings are more television shows than historic events.  Determining the fates of nations?  Hardly.  All that’s really at stake is how many extra copies of People magazine get sold and what kind of ratings Entertainment Tonight might get.

I’ll leave it to those expert theologians I intend to read – some day – to discuss whether God has changed.  But the fact is we have changed.  And because we have changed, the word King no longer speaks of God’s greatness. At least not as much.  Using the word today might even diminish that same greatness.

History is alive.  Our language is alive.  Our relationship with God is alive.  So God language can’t help but also be alive.

And refusing to change how we talk about God when the world is constantly changing is the surest way to trivialize or archaicize the role of God in the world today.

No, God is not a king.

God is bigger than a king.  Much bigger.

That word was probably always inadequate.  It was meant to suggest.  When its inadequacy grew, it did not diminish God, it just diminished the adequacy of the word.  Then at some point it became no longer a useful way to suggest what God is about.

At least for me.

And it stands to reason, if one word can change its connotations over the millennia, then others might also.

And it also stands to reason that traditional words that might continue to work for one person might not speak to another, with neither being wrong.  How, I remember a pastor once asking, can we expect the words God the Father to convey caring, protection, nurturing or guidance to someone who grew up with an absent or abusive father?

One size may no longer fit all.  Maybe it never did.

Over the years, some words about God lose resonance as social roles and rigid class systems become more fluid.  And that opens the door for other words to gain resonance as we try to express just what it is about God that matters so much.  More than that, just what it is about God that allows anything to matter at all.

Because like Zhuang Zhou we still need words to talk about that which is beyond language.

What words will we use today?

What words work for you?

Whatever we choose, of course, will be inadequate.  We know that.

And even if we get close, it will really only be close for us.  For us today.  In maybe one aspect.

God is beyond.  And that’s what beyond means.

But we still have to try, and that means I have to try – not just talk about trying.

So here goes.  One small suggestion, inadequate as it may be.  How about Love?  Love with a capital L.

Like God, it’s another word whose vastness and importance overwhelm whatever metaphors we use to try to express it.

And it’s supported Biblically.  I John 4:8 says “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

And, while love has been trivialized constantly over the years as Hallmark sentiments, it always seems to recover.  It might show up on Entertainment Tonight, but somehow it still has the power to send shivers up and down our spines when we look into another’s eyes for the first time and dare to risk saying those three extraordinary words, I love you.

So how would that look?

In the beginning, Love created the heavens and the earth.

Not perfect.

But not bad.

It probably wouldn’t pass any scientific tests.

On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t satisfy the State of Kansas Board of Education standards either.

And at least it suggests a universe I would aspire to live in.  Maybe even a universe I might push myself to help bring into existence.

But that’s just me.  Today.

What would you suggest?

Amen