Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, May 14th, 2023
In these last weeks of the Easter season, our scripture readings turn toward seeing the life of Jesus (that we have been following since Christmas) in God. The reason is that for us in our day to experience the life of Jesus means receiving his Spirit with the disciples on the upcoming Feast of Pentecost and on Trinity Sunday seeking to understand how that very Spirit is both truly his and what connects us to the Source of all things. Today we witness our St. Paul standing before the renowned philosophers of ancient Athens, descendants of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who taught in that very city. He preaches to them the God of Jesus Christ.
Paul explained to them as simply and directly as he could, “God made the world and everything in it … so that we would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him– though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’’” That last phrase was not from the Bible. Paul was quoting to the philosophers their own poet Aratus who had written those words about three hundred years earlier. St. Paul recognized that the famous thinking in Athens, usually credited with the invention of philosophy, was God saturated. So much so that all students in the modern world who take up reading the dialogues of Plato struggle mightily to reason with him about how all thinking involves finding the way from the scattered, dispersed, multiplicity that overwhelms our senses to the Unity that binds it all together, a Unity, if it can be seen at all, can only be seen with the mind. Pagan philosophy had become Monotheistic long before Christianity. Four hundred years before Jesus, Plato insisted that his serious philosophical thinking about the one God could be found in the wisdom of even more ancient Egypt (see Timaeus). Our God obsessed St. Paul was on far friendlier territory among the philosophers of ancient Athens than we may realize.
Ours, however, is a day where everyone appears to speak so easily of God. This is true of hardened atheists who are quite certain of what they do not believe in, and believers who often speak of God as casually as one would of a familiar friend who long ago has ceased to surprise or threaten. This certainty has eliminated God as a subject of inquiry in the modern world because everyone already appears to know everything they need to about either what they believe in or do not.
That this has not always been the case is evident by any travel at all around New England. Churches populate the landscape here like few places in the world. It is not at all infrequent to come upon a really old Unitarian church from the colonial era. And also right across the street, or sometimes, right next door, there will be another church called something like Trinitarian Congregational Church. And then not so far away an Episcopal Church that took sides in this argument and always declared itself firmly Trinitarian. It is not at all an accident that the most famous Episcopal Church in our region on Copley Square Boston took as its name, Trinity Episcopal Church, intellectual fighting words in old New England.
The Christian founders of New England had a passionate, centuries long, church dividing, argument that was so intense that it is still enshrined in our buildings and landscape. The remarkable thing about today is how many New Englanders could explain in any way what precisely was at stake in this argument about the nature of God? Could you? As our readings lead us the next four Sundays toward Trinity Sunday, let’s inquire together and do something thinking we may be unaccustomed to doing in our own day, but that pagans and the Christians in the ancient past and not so long ago New England past agree that is worth doing.
Returning to the speech of our St. Paul, he admonishes the Athenians first of all that they must not think of God in any material way. Paul says, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” Paul was likely thinking of Isaiah chapter 55 which says, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” But Paul also from his own secular reading knew that the Greek philosophers were aware of the big problem this divine unlikeness creates. All our words derive their meaning from the material world. Even an abstract word like “circle” refers to a certain common material shape found in a world. Human words are nothing more than weak material sounds and picture images of material objects. There are no words unrelated to our five senses and, therefore, no words about God are fully true.
Yet words are all we have, St. Paul continues, “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does notlive in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything.” Notice here that St. Paul, serious intellectual that he was, when using words, largely says what God is not rather than who God is: “does not live in shrines made by human hands, neither is he served by human hands, nor in need of anything from us.”
Several of you have spoken with me about your moral concerns about language about God that merely project hierarchies of values onto the screen of the universe. St. Paul is on your side here. Words never have the same meaning when applied to God and to human beings. When you hear any word about God, even the ones used in our Christian liturgy (such as Father, Lord, and Almighty), it is very important that in your mind you strip it of all material content. This means when we say “Eternal God” please remind yourself that God does not travel through time with you cheering on your unfinished self while hoping for a good outcome. No, God your creator knows all the yous spread out over time as a single whole. Our experience of ourselves is like a shattered window and we never see who we are apart from this sliver or shard that we refer to in this or that moment as “I”. The same is true of everyone and everything else. We can’t even think of that to which all the shattered pieces point to when it comes to ourselves, how can we have any confidence to speak boldly when invoking That to which all things past present and future refer, the Singular Reference point of all otherwise known as God?
Jesus says when you address God, say “Our Father.” What he does not say because he assumes everyone (including the pagans) knows, is that anyone calling God “Father” is to strip that word of all materiality, including gender. Jesus never invokes the rule of a great man in the sky. He, along with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, knew that was nonsense. To say God is One as monotheists do, means that no words involving multiplicity have any meaning at all when applied to God. God does not change God’s mind (that would be two gods). God has no gender (because gender implies two or more), God does not vacate one place by moving to another, God does not dream because there is no gap between what God imagines and what happens. I could go on, but it turns out that it is good news that God is not like us at all. The Lord God does not rule as human monarchs do, thank God! God’s goodness is not the best human goodness we can imagine. It is something else entirely. God’s justice is not the best human justice we can imagine. It is something else entirely. God’s love is not the best human love we can imagine. It is something else entirely.
No human words about God are ever fully true. They are only a form of gossip, the kind of thing we say about those not present. Even when we strip our words of all material content, the most serious form of address to speak of the omnipotent omnipresent God is the direct form, where words become confessional, and confessional words become prayers, and prayers become praise. Plato, St. Paul, the Book of Common Prayer, and contemporary philosophers such as Derrida agree on this.
Finally, in our day and in the ancient world, speaking well about God sits very awkwardly with human politics. While it is only natural that we would want our worship to map onto our highest ideals, where our liturgy and our voting patterns neatly align, it is precisely in those situations where we frequently hear the cry, “God is on our side.” Most wars have been fought with participants on both sides assuring their own that God is on their side.
Whatever our ever changing politics may be, and however sincerely they may be held, and whatever good we may hope to achieve, we (and our enemies) are better off not sanctifying or sacramentalizing the negotiations between human beings otherwise known as politics and instead secularizing that say the way the American constitution does, and instead have our worship be a sacred place where we honestly struggle together to become the kind of people who can worship a God whose name is above all names, who, unlike us, is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8) everywhere all the time for everyone.
If you find yourself in a place of total incomprehensibility when it comes to God, you at least have reached a beginning point because without that knowing unknowing, you have yet even to begin. When it comes to God you find by first unfinding, where the goal is not to capture your Uncontainable Subject in words, but to purify your mind so that at least the obvious obstacles are cleared aware that prevent you from seeing with your mental vision what can’t be seen with physical eyes. And come back for Pentecost and Trinity Sunday to strengthen your mental and spiritual thinking so that you can experience a joy that exceeds anything capturable by human words.
May the Almighty God, who abides in light inaccessible to human eyes, free us from the limited, shadow-like, images that hem us in and confine our hearts, and create in us a yearning to aspire to what eye has not seen yet is promised to us in your Son Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit unto ages of ages. Amen.