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The God Who Invades Our Privacy
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 5, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 139 Romans 8:26-30
Two years ago, Martin Marty, a sociologist and historian of religion now retired from the University of Chicago, inaugurated a lectureship in his name on Religion in American Life at the University of California. Having previously mapped American religion Marty set out to map American spirituality. It is a marvelous lecture that can be viewed online. What caught me most as Marty charted the evening’s course across this nation’s increasingly spiritual landscape was his discussion of what he called “moored and unmoored spiritualities.” The metaphor brings to mind a people at sea: a boat tossed in a storm or a sailor lost in a fog as well as a ship whose course has been set by the unerring North Star. Of the moored, Marty observed they were no less humbled by the vast mystery of the sea than the unmoored. Nevertheless they are those who have set out with ‘a text, a tradition, a community, a deposit of inherited rather than invented customs and a content that nudges and judges.’ Still, mooring lines break, storms come up from out of nowhere, lights in the lighthouse go dark, boats run aground before reaching the harbor of peace and felicity. Humanly speaking, our boat is frail and the ocean is wide. Therefore the moored that go down to the sea in ships go as those who are vulnerable and at risk before the deep in spite of all they carry with them. The unmoored, on the other hand, have set out to seek an adventure on the high seas come what may. It is a postmodern adventure, says Marty, which I take to mean a subjective, eclectic and syncretistic venture (one from column A, two from column B: whatever works for me.) Here human imagination is the primary way of knowing where to head. Moreover the unmoored tend to be highly individualistic rather than tied to a community, are taken with aesthetic rather than moral categories, and are known to downplay the physical in favor of the disembodied. Both of Martin Marty’s metaphors presume a sort of human seeking after God or truth or energy or beauty or meaning. Curiously, the writer of the 139th psalm strikes me not as seeking but on the run from God. “Whither can I go from thy spirit; and whither shall I flee from thy presence?” he asks, and we imagine David in the aftermath of Bathsheba and Uriah or Jonah in the belly of a whale or Job on the ash heap of his former life. But we also meet ourselves coming about at every shift in these spiritual winds, running by any means at hand from the God who pursues us. Though the psalmist does something more. For even as the psalmist flees from the God to whom he apparently is moored, he remains, in the same breath, surprised, astonished by God’s hold on him. In this sense, the 139th psalm is like one of those drawings which, if seen from the perspective of white against black, depicts a man fleeing for his life and, if perceived instead as black against white, reveals a woman kneeling in prayer. On one hand, I read these words and imagine a man running as fast as he can from the God who both haunts him and hunts him. Yet on the other hand, I hear these words as a trembling prayer dared by one who knows herself only as she is known and held in the grasp of a great and gracious God. Stop the action of our lives at any given moment and-depending on the light our life reflects or the shadows our wandering ways cast-both could be said of us all. The psalm, however, is not about us but rather addresses God, who knows all the selves hidden within us…knows the selves we have hidden even from our selves! The God who hunts and haunts us in the beginning is the same God whose grace and greatness send us trembling to our knees at the end. “[God],” said Paul Tillich in a sermon on the 139th psalm “is God only because [God] is inescapable. And only that which is inescapable is God.” Not incidentally, Tillich’s congregation at Union Theological Seminary in New York often included those “from outside the Christian circle in the most radical sense of the phrase”: escapees, in other words, from the clutches of organized religion and refugees from religion’s excesses! “It is safe to say,” he goes on, “that a [person] who has never tried to flee God has never experienced the God Who is really God.” No doubt the pews of the churches are filled with such persons, persons whose socially respectable lives unquestionably coincide with an easy conscience…those who must search diligently for a shortcoming to confess…those whose grief has been bearable or whose fears and doubts respond readily to reason. Once upon a time, these were the confidently elect of God, whereas now in this land of religion and spirituality, they seem to be indistinguishable from good citizens. To wit: “The gods with whom we can live rather comfortably…are the gods of our own making,” Tillich goes on.
Nor are the gods honestly denied by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris--the one-dimensional gods of biblical literalism or the dogmatic gods of religious certainty—God at all. I would be surprised if you did not find yourself saying, at the end of one of their books, “I am an atheist with regard to that god too!” I would also be surprised if they no less than we have ever really wrestled into the night with the God from whom the psalmist fled. For neither the god of our wishful thinking nor the god of our honest atheism is the God who pursued the psalmist, but rather God is the One whom we cannot easily bear, the One from whom we have tried to hide, the One we even may hate, the One whose destruction we have desired. In a brief respite from the depths of an addiction which finally took his life, I do believe the poet Francis Thompson had to do with such a God, had to do with One he called the Hound of Heaven:
I fled Him down the arches of the years; I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurried chase And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat—and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet— “All things betray thee, who betrayest me…. (For, though I knew his love Who followed, Yet is was sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside…)”
Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms, But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms, All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!” …I am He Whom thou seekest!” |