August 31, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
Cam wheedles his way into the thoughts of fellow agnostics and invites them to create a softening so that if and when God suddenly lifts the “exquisitely thin veil” between us, they will be able to perceive it.
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Good morning.
I haven’t preached all month so I am a little rusty.
Cut me some slack if I’ve forgotten how.
I want to begin by recalling the words,
the images really,
of our opening Call to Worship.
Blessed are you…
whose KISS upon us is love…
in whose SHADOW we are surrounded by light…
whose inspiration IN US is justice…
in whose IMAGE we are blessed.
Now those are some pretty doggone intimate images.
They indicate a relationship between
God and humans
that is close enough to be…to be…
well close enough to be almost erotic
or at the very least romantic.
They are not unfamiliar images
to church-goers,
at least not if you are a churchgoer here.
But we say them glibly,
routinely,
not really meaning them…literally.
They are images harkening back to ancient mystics
who poetically remind us
that while we walk around in the mud of every day life
that there is only
an exquisitely thin veil between us and God.
That is all that separates us:
an exquisitely thin,
even sensual veil
that God can lift without warning
and there we will be
suddenly scared and embarrassed
at our own raw nakedness
before the Creator and God of all Creation.
So behind those words
is that startling image of exquisite closeness
between us lowly humans
and the awesome and unimaginable God.
That is what those words point to
but we just say them,
say them as if they were La, la, la;
or worse,
as if they were
“I pledge allegiance to the flag…”
They’re just words.
Words that point to something we do not really see
and that we probably do not really believe
and that we definitely don’t think about much.
Now I know
that some of us do not really believe in God.
That’s one of the things I love about Trinity.
You don’t have to be a true believer to be here.
Some of us are here because we love the community
or even the building
or are deeply engaged in the outreach.
Some of us are what others call “agnostic”
because we don’t really know about God –
which is what agnostic means: not knowing.
So using such intimate language
and pointing to such an exquisite closeness
may simply be part of the price
some of us pay to participate in such a vibrant
spiritual community as this.
And there are others of us
who consider ourselves believers
but actually are functional agnostics.
You see,
for some of us
rationalism and the dictates of logic
prescribe a purely scientific worldview
that prohibits us from thinking of God as anthropomorphic – meaning not like humans.
Such a prescriptive lens
means that we only see
and can only believe
what can be accounted for by reason
and replicated in the laboratory –
or with a mathematical equation or computer model.
Such a prescription limits us then
to a kind of functional agnostism
because God is not discernable nor provable
in those wonderful but limited ways.
Blessed are you…
whose KISS upon us is love…
in whose SHADOW we are surrounded by light…
whose inspiration IN US is justice…
in whose IMAGE we are blessed…
Those are physical, tactile, experiential words
that indicate a relationship
between God and humans
that can be exquisitely close.
These are not agnostic words.
These are not neutral words.
These are not safe words on any level.
Now I don’t mean to be making anyone uncomfortable
by rubbing our noses in words we have learned to slip in and out of without notice.
Because truth is,
I can go along for quite some time
being a functional agnostic myself.
It’s the zone of least resistance for me.
I think that is why some people
like to say I am more of a rabbi than a priest,
meaning more of a teacher
than a spiritual intermediary of some kind.
But I always get jerked back,
like my dog on a leash
suddenly taking off after a rabbit.
And to tell you the truth it kind of pisses me off.
But here is the bull’s-eye I am aiming for today:
We just heard a story
about Moses discovering that the veil between
God and a grizzly tribe of slaves
was suddenly lifted.
Excuse me
but this is not the same kind of a story
as George Washington cutting down a cherry tree
and admitting it to his daddy.
This is not
the same kind of a story
as Abe Lincoln doing his homework
by firelight in an Illinois log cabin.
This story is not Plato’s allegory of the cave
or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
or Daniel in the Lion’s den
or Jesus walking on water.
This story is not a metaphor.
This story is not a legend.
This story is not an allegory.
This story is not a myth.
This story is not a miracle tale.
This story is the sacred core of all Biblical wisdom.
This story is the deliverance of a truth
that is truer than anything else we know.
This story is what we know about God
when we strip everything else away
from the ancient spiritual wisdom
of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This story is what we know
when that veil slips away
and we are left standing there
with a stupid look on our face
and a heart frozen between fear and awe.
And what we know from that moment
challenges everything else we think.
What we know
challenges what we think.
What we know
is God’s name: Yahweh.
What’s in a name?
Everything.
The ancients believed that if you knew the name of a person, place or thing
then you knew its essence…
then you knew its power.
That was because they named things
with such an idea in mind.
Your name was you…
so when you were named
it was a very weighty moment.
My name,
Cameron,
is heavy with meaning.
In Gaelic it means, “Bent nose.”
We do not name one another or things
with that kind of reverence
but they did.
Note too
that the story presumes there is more than one god.
If he’s going to go back to Egypt
where he is wanted for murder
and get in the face of Pharaoh,
who was a god remember,
then Moses insisted on knowing which god
was sending him.
In other words,
he wanted to know what kind of weapon
he would be packing.
If he was dealing with a puny little bush-god
he wasn’t going to take that bait.
But God says,
“I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be.”
I am not a God with portfolio
I am the God,
the very God of your ancestors
about whom you have heard ancient stories.
I am not a God you can define
or prescribe
or explain.
I am not a God you can put in a box and pull out.
I am who I am.
At the sacred core of this religion of ours,
the gold at the heart of all our spiritual wisdom,
is this voice that echoes across the millennium:
Do not try to define me.
Do not try to limit me.
Do not try to prescribe me to others.
I will not be limited by your religious ideas.
I am who I am
and you will find out who I am
in any given moment that I choose to remove the veil.
And then…
there is one more thing in this story that we need to know about this God.
God says to Moses:
I heard the cry of the Hebrew slaves.
I heard the cry…
I heard the cry…
I heard the cry…
I heard…
the cry.
Actually, if you were to go read the whole story
which we shortened for today,
God actually says this:
I saw the misery of my people.
I heard their cry.
I know their suffering.
I have come to deliver them.
I saw…
I heard…
I know…I act.
Now that story creates nothing but dissonance
with the voice of reason and the dictates of logic.
That story is painful to some of us
because we get jerked out of the complacency
of our functional agnosticism
into close proximity
with a God who is in relationship
with us.
It’s okay to be an agnostic,
to say to ourselves and others,
“I don’t really know whether there is a God or not
so I will stay on the fence until further notice.”
It is okay to be a functional agnostic,
to believe in a God that is so totally other and beyond us
that it would be impossible for that God to act in human history or to be in a personal relationship with us.
But here is the thing.
If we want to know instead of not-know
then we have to create a little opening
through which we are prepared to be surprised.
We have to say to ourselves
that reason and logic,
and the scientific lens,
through which we have been trained to see the world and our own lives,
are not the only ways of knowing.
That’s all.
We have to remind ourselves
on a fairly regular basis
that there are other ways of knowing
than the ones with which we are most comfortable.
If we can soften ourselves a little bit,
we may get surprised
and actually be able to perceive it
when God abruptly slips the veil away.
Now before I end,
let me just say to those of us who never have a doubt about the veracity of God,
and who feel as though they can access God
on a daily basis and see God in every twig:
we’ve got problems too –
one’s that agnostics will never have.
But that is grist for another sermon
on another day.
In the mean time,
because God is here on the other side
of an exquisitely thin veil,
let me end where I began:
Blessed are you…
whose KISS upon us is love…
in whose SHADOW we are surrounded by light…
whose inspiration IN US is justice…
in whose IMAGE we are blessed.
Amen.
