Fundamentals: God, Part II

I lived in South Dakota on 9/11.  I’d like to think I was in shock at the time, but long term ramifications sometimes take a while to seep into my brain, anyway, so the idea of war and retribution, let alone invading a third-party-uninvolved country just because it was possible, etc., never occurred to me that day.  I also never thought about the religious conversations that would soon follow.

            Two days later the people of that little town in South Dakota started talking about Islam.  Their conversations ran between the deep ignorance and bigotry to profound nuances, brimming with the kind of wisdom that percolates through limestone decades of living.  Several times someone asked me if Muslims pray to the same God as “we” do, a simple question that sparked days of debate.  I used to tell people in response to questions like that that it’s important to look not only at the words people use, but how they use them.  If I say “God” and you say “God”, and then we describe that God differently, are we talking about the same God?

            Now I’m not so sure about my own answers.  Does anyone pray to the “right” God? 

            Do Muslims pray to the same God as Christians do?  It’s a different question than “Does the same God hear the prayers of Christians and Muslims (and Hindus, Jews, Animists, Buddhists, atheists, and Pagansd)?”  I suspect that that’s the better question.  “Do they pray to our God?” puts us on the right side and them on the wrong side.  But if the gospel teaches us nothing else, it ought to first teach us that we’re all on the wrong side, that each of us opposes God in our own ways, and that the incarnation is about God crossing over and taking our side, not against our human enemies, but against sin, death, and true evil. 

            My brother Eric recently reminded an email conversation (I know, email!  How late ‘90’s of us) that Jesus doesn’t say in Luke that some people never knew him, but instead, “I never knew you.”  Where does that fit?

            At any rate, I suspect that no two people on the planet conceive of God in the same way, so one might as well ask if any of us pray to the same God.  In a sense, we all paint little pictures in our hearts.  Sometimes those pictures become idols, walls preventing us from glimpsing the true God behind our crude drawings.  But sometimes those weak images become icons, doors and windows and portals and ragged holes through which the true God, the one who is and is, can climb or step or pour or filter or blow or wander or whatever it is the true God, the one who is and is, does.

When my dad used to drag me to AA meetings, I was annoyed by the phrase “the God of my understanding.” 

“What about how God wants to be understood?” I’d think.  It’s still a valid point, but one that very much misses the nuance.  God is.  How I perceive God is vastly different from how you perceive God, but maybe the little God of your understanding might expand the little God of my understanding.

At one of those AA meetings a man told a story about a woman he heard respond to questions about the God of her understanding, “Well, first of all, she’s black . . .”  It’s a beginning.  And it’s only funny and unsettling because no one says but many people feel, “Well, first of all he’s white . . .”  Rather than say those things are untrue (which they are), it might be more helpful to start expanding my own picture of God, allowing those pictures to be icons rather than idols for me.

That’s not to say that everything we can say about God is true.  How could it be?  An ancient way of doing theology (god-conversing) is sometimes called the Via Negativa, the Negative Way, or Apophatic theology.  We describe God in terms of what God is not:

God is not me.

God is not limited.

God is uncreated.

And on and on.  As in, God isn’t good or evil because good and evil are dependent on God, not the other way around; God doesn’t exist or not exist, since, again, existence hangs from God. 

Another way of expressing apophatic theology is through transcendence.  God transcends existence, creation, good and evil, etc.  Like all theologies of transcendence, apophatic theology is helpful for big thoughts, but immanence, nearness, and intimacy must inform the other piece of our thinking.

            At least twice a year I’m struck by the humility of God.  It isn’t popular in many Christian circles to speak of God’s humility, weakness, brokenness, and loss, but here it is, twice a year in the church calendar: once at Christmastide, once during Lent.  God condescends to us in every interaction with humanity.  Condescension is kind of an ugly word for many of us.  It implies arrogance and power plays.  But condescension is about a relinquishment of power, a giving over of oneself to a weaker person for the sake of relationshipÅ.

The mere description in Genesis of the LORD walking in the cool of the day with Ad’am should make me think of walking with my children when they were babies.  I’m crouched over, holding a chubby fist in my own, snail-pacing it across the yard.  And, when patience inhabited me from beyond my ken, I paused every time a leaf or rock or grasshopper distracted those little eyes.  That’s the LORD walking in the cool of the day.  That’s condescension, corny though it be.

Christmas, despite its family friendly schlockiness¶, is about the humility of God.  God in diapers, God nursed to sleep.  We get little glimpses of it in the crèches and the songs, but it’s rarely pointed to so explicitly.  In fact, conservative pundits have coined a phrase so contrary to the concept of Christmas that I’m surprised that can say it with a straight face: The War On Christmas.  Jesus is under attack, and it's up to them to defend him.  In 2010 they said they were winning the war.  They had forced merchants to say “Merry Christmas”.  Christmas is, after all, ultimately about power over.  But the Christmas tale is about power under.  It’s a story whose power runs like a subterranean river under the walls of might, under the armament factories, under the prisons, under the propaganda centers and slowly sinks them.  But, as the New Testament says, this world doesn’t understand that, and tries to use the sleeping baby as a bludgeon against its perceived enemies.

How in God’s Name Does One Win a Christmas War?

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d No, I’m not sure why atheists don’t get capitalized.  They just don’t, alright? 

Å Right, it reminds me of that line from True Romance: “Don’t condescend to me, man.  I’ll fuckin’ kill you, man.”  That’s how most of respond to condescension.

¶ I rather like the pagan elements to the midwinter season; I just wish it weren’t so closely associated with Christmas.  What I really can’t stand is movies about the last minute salvation of Christmas by smart-ass elves.  Not only are they boring, they ruin even the pagan elements of the season.