Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Sunday Worship Service

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 October 12, 2008

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9

Most of us, in this room, have come to the conclusion that Feuerbach was right. You may not know the name, but he was a philosopher in the 19^th century, a student of Hegel, and the “father” of liberal philosophy. He went to seminary and after two years of study became disenchanted with the theological thinking of the day. In his most famous work, “The Essence of Christianity,” Feuerbach sought to humanize theology.

He declared that “man, so far as he is rational, is to himself his own object of thought.” Religion is consciousness of the infinite, he said, and “God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man’s inward nature.” In other words, we make God in our own image.

Our theme for this month is, “Can we say Yes! To God, Yes! To our neighbor, Yes! to ourselves. How can we say Yes! to a god who is the mere reflection of us. Would you follow a God like you? Every once in a while a young child, when asked - “What does God look like?” - draws a picture of me in my preaching robe, and I am horrified to think that I am the image of God for this child. That is something I can never live up to.

One of the main reasons people do not, or cannot say Yes! to God is because the God they imagine saying Yes! to is not perceived as unconditionally loving and trustworthy. Look at how the Hebrew tribes experienced God. They were culturally conditioned to think that gods were angry and capricious spirits that needed to be appeased with sacrifices and rituals.

Last week we heard how God spoke to the people from the mountaintop, established a covenant with them, handed them the rules, and the response of the people was to be afraid, and they said to Moses, “From now on, you talk to him for us.” And so Moses stayed on the mountain and conversed with God, while the people got about the “business of religion.” That is, they got to work reducing God to a manageable figure. They collected gold earrings, and bracelets, and brooches.

This sounds, eerily, like the TV ads these days in which people are encouraged to cash in there jewelry for instant cash, because the value of gold is at an “all time high.” The people give their jewelry to Aaron, who I guess, was still frightened they were going to stone him to death, and he melted the gold down and fashioned an idol, a little golden calf.

This image of a calf-god was something that came directly out of their experience in Egypt. The goddess Hathor was in the form of a cow with the disk of the sun held between her horns. She was the goddess of life and fertility, which was what the Hebrew people wanted. It is what we still want. And peoples of the land to which the Hebrew tribes were going worshipped the god Baal, who was formed in the shape of a strong Bull.

One Bible commentator made the humorous reflection that while the idol created by the rebellious Hebrews was resonant with the surrounding cultures, the resulting outcome was something underwhelming. The people, forsaking the very God who had delivered them from slavery, that provided for them in the wilderness, and gave them the “law,” attempt to fashion “gods for themselves” and end up with, not a mature, fertile cow of Egypt, or a powerful bull of Baal, but only a little, mewling, calf. When we attempt to reduce the awesome power of God to manageable, human limits, our results are often pretty puny.

Contrary to popular opinion not all paths lead to God, at least not to a God of love. The question before us is: “What do we put our faith in, a relationship with the God of unconditional love, or is it in some thing else? The word “thing” here is important. In Latin it is res which is the root of the word reality. Is reality the sum of all things? Or is it the relationship of all things? God is no “thing” but that to which all things relate. There it is. I have just created a Christian koan.

In order to imagine God as transcendent spirit and at the same time within the very fabric of life we need to make a leap of faith to believe something about the nature of the universe and our existence. Pema Chodron helps us understand this, writing, “When you begin to touch your heart, or let you heart be touched, you begin to discover that it is bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.” Faith is not just wishful thinking, but trust, trust that gives us the courage to step out into the future, even if it is only to trust in the amazing, limitless mystery of being.

We live by faith alone. Some of us have faith in ourselves and live by our wits. Some of us live by faith in free market enterprise. Some of us have faith in government oversight. Some of us have faith in the constitution, or the flag, or family. The issue is not whether we have the true faith, or the right faith, or right beliefs, it is whether our faith is adequate for the demands of life.

Faith in the markets has made a lot people wealthy, but it has its limits as we have been experiencing. Faith in one’s physical attractiveness only lasts so long. Faith is one’s best abilities has an expiration date.

The last years of my father’s and mother’s lives were great teaching moments for me. My father had a keen intellect and, yet, he developed Alzheimer’s. My mother was a dancer and choreographer and yet she lost her sight and the use of her body. In the end all that was left to either of them was loving relationships. No “thing” was as valuable as the love that you cannot give or take away.

To live this life, to die our death, we need an adequate faith. An adequate faith is one that imagines a relationship in which we can put our absolute trust. This act of faith is what the Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner called “the fundamental option.” Geffrey B. Kelly describes Rahner’s thought, “God’s grace is an inspiriting of the world of God’s making, stirring in people a restless drive to be fulfilled in their humanity through a variety of options and movements, all subsumed in the fundamental option, the choice to accept and act out their orientation to the Holy Mystery of God.”

This is what Paul is saying to the Philippians as he strives to leave everything else behind and yearns to be more like Christ. In this way God is not the projection of human image, but it is God’s spirit moving the human to be more Godlike. Paul says (Peterson’s -The Message): Christ is, among much else, the revelation that God cannot be contained or hoarded. It is the ‘spilling out’ quality of Christ’s life that accounts for the happiness of Christians, for joy is life in excess, the over flow of what cannot be contained within any one person.

Joy is life in excess. I’d say Yes! to God if I could have that experience. But more often than not we reduce God to a creed, or a hard set of beliefs, a tradition where faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain.

What kind of God would you say Yes! to? Don’t confused by the variety of gods in the world, not just in other religions, but within Christianity as well. God described as a tyrant, capricious, inaccessible – in other words a god you would easily say No! to is not an adequate image of God. All gods are not equal. Jesus said, “God is love.” This is the litmus test. We seek the God of love for only the God if love is worthy of our love. It is only the God of love who says Yes! to us so that we in turn can say Yes! to God.

If the God you imagine does not pass this litmus test than I suggest you become an atheist. I have. I encourage this with young people, especially. Often times someone will come to me and say, “I don’t believe in God.” And I say, “Tell me about this god you don’t believe in.” After describing their image of god I often say, “I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god, neither do I. Get rid of it.”

In fact, one of the exercises I use for a confirmation class is to have the members write a description, or draw a representation of God, as they imagine it. We talk about it for a while, then I tell then to take their piece of paper, ball it up, and throw it away.”

If your image of God is tyrannical, angry, detached, bored, a silly old guy in the sky, a monster, get rid of it. In the ten commandments we are told not to make images of God – that includes images between our ears. The early Christians were often called atheists because they didn’t carry their gods around with them. So, become an atheist by discarding any god to whom you have to say no.

The enemy of faith is certainty. The servant of faith is humility. It is arrogant to think we can completely understand God, the nature of the universe, and our place in it. As it is arrogant to think that we can completely understand our spouse, our significant other, our children, any one really. My wife gets frustrated with me sometimes and she says, “After all these years, you still don’t get it, do you?” I just have to shrug my shoulders and say, “Honey, we have been married for 38 years, and you know, I never get it. But, I love you, trust me, I want to be in relationship with you.”

Genuine faith requires that we use our God-given abilities, our rationality, our inner wisdom, questions and uncertainty, yearnings and desire to hold lightly onto what we know to be true and remain open to learn more of the mystery of God’s love and purpose.

Listen. I hear God is still speaking.