Sermon – May 16, 2010: All One
Sermon for Sunday, May 16, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
All One
Psalm 97, Revelation 22: 12-14; John 17: 20-26
There is an open space above this sanctuary, between the ceiling above you and
the roof. It has catwalks across it and access to the chandeliers for raising and lowering them,
and that’s the path which will take you up into the tower and steeple. There’s a long, steep
stair up to that area, behind and above the wall to my right. When you take the stairs, the
street side wall is off-white plaster, and along its top are plaster moldings, at regular
intervals, painted brown. They are part of the original interior wall of the sanctuary, and its
being where it is serves as a reminder, for the older members among us, and as news, for
the newer members, that the sanctuary of the church before its remodeling in 1963
extended further back in this direction than the sanctuary does now.
There are lots of survivals into the present of things connected with a past reality
which no longer exists except as a lingering trace. Many of us have scars which mark where
we once were injured but have healed. We use expressions which refer to what once was
commonplace but which no longer obtains, like “lock, stock, and barrel” meaning a totality,
based on the type of gun used a century and a half ago. In the home in which I grew up
there was a plate fixed to the wall where a stove pipe once had entered a chimney. We
don’t take much notice of any of these things, the vestiges of old construction or the halfforgotten
origins of common sayings, because they have continued into the present in
ways which don’t draw attention to themselves.
Scripture doesn’t only influence experience, and shape history, but itself has been
influenced by experience, and has a history. We usually read devotionally. The most
important thing said by today’s psalm is that there is no other being as mighty as God, and
that God will prevail over anything which might present itself as opposed to God. From
that broad assertion we, who live in the presence both of God and of evils of all kinds, can
trust God to overcome what is wrong. Psalms are not written to be history, but to be
illuminated by God’s Spirit for the benefit of faithful hearts. That’s the reward of faithful
reading.
Psalms still have a history. Today’s psalm reveals a stage of reflecting upon God
midway between the folk-tale depiction of the God who strolled around Eden, surprised to
notice, when he bumped into them, that Adam and Eve were dressed, and the exalted and
ethereal God we meet in the New Testament. The New Testament God has been freed
by the Divine’s incarnation in Jesus Christ to have an essence beyond mortal
comprehension, and is hinted at by assertions like “God is love” or “God is Spirit and Truth.”
More to the point, for this sermon, is the fact that the New Testament God is the only God
of all of Creation, and that even if Paul credits the existence of what Paul terms “powers and
principalities”–by which Paul encompasses all spiritual realities which may also exist–there
is no other God at all. The commandment to have no other Gods before the God of the
Biblical tradition has to take on a poetic sense, and idolatry has to be understood as a
matter of misplaced faith, because by the time the New Testament is written, Judaism has
settled on monotheism as a core belief.
Today’s psalm shows us this was not always the case. The God of the devout Jew
is a great king above all gods. By the time of Isaiah the prophet the gods of foreign
peoples will be dismissed as no more than the statues representing them, and Isaiah will
ridicule the idea that people worship man-made objects. When Psalm 97 is written,
however, the way God is conceived is that there is no better God than the God of the
Jews, and the Jews’ God is, in a way probably not realized by other peoples, the chief of
all the deities that there are. Other gods as spiritual beings, however, are regarded as real,
if inferior and forbidden.
Most of us know that polytheism is a system of having lots of gods, and
monotheism is the belief that there is only one God. What we meet in Psalm 97, the
instance of our God’s being thoroughly more important, powerful, and effective than all the
other gods that there are, is called henotheism. Other gods haven’t faded away entirely,
which will happen with monotheism–they just have become inadequate rivals or
superfluous servants of the Most High God.
Jewish religion differs from other ancient faiths in that it doesn’t think of time as circular.
The logic of time beginning at a point in the past and continuing forward is implicit in what I’m
saying about how God is presented at different points in the development of our faith. We
regard it as progress that people outgrew thinking about God walking around or worrying
about heaven being invaded by a really high tower, and came to know God in more
sophisticated ways.
Jewish faith, perhaps because of its prejudices about the linear nature of time, lends
itself to attention to the past and the future. It is historical, and in its history it tries to grasp
and project its future. God becomes a God of promises, who eventually delivers on
promises, and each instance of salvation becomes a new basis for hope.
It is not surprising, given the Bible’s notion of time, that the form our Bible has come
to take is that it has a beginning and an ending. It doesn’t just have a beginning and ending
because books must start and conclude somehow. Genesis is about the origin of
everything, and Revelation is about the end of everything, and they frame between them
all the poetry, prophecy, history and theology of the Bible. The logic of the way the
Christian Bible is laid out is that however literally or figuratively you take it, Genesis
introduces the world we all live in, and however literally or figuratively you take it, Revelation
introduces the world we all have before us. God makes a moral judgment about Creation
at the start, and the final fate of everything likewise is in terms of good and evil being
assigned their destinies.
I referred to other ancient religions conceiving reality as circular. The recurrence of the
seasons and the predictable pattern of so many parts of life encouraged them to think of
repetition as paramount, and variety as incidental. Life looked like a wheel, and its rolling
from the past into the future was seen as one long progress through many little cycles, with
death not a final end, but one more part of the pattern, to be repeated again in reincarnation.
We are familiar with that model of how the divine and human interact from faiths like
Hinduism and Buddhism, and we think of those as in some sense rival religions. I don’t
mean in terms of there being many adherents of them to disagree with us, but in terms of
the whole model of reality represented by that tradition. Creation as an endless round of
repeated realities is a very different take on experience than creation as a finite progress
from one stage to another.
You may know that in these Eastern traditions a goal is to escape the cycle, and one
can do this by such a degree of spiritual enlightenment that one partakes entirely of the holy
spiritual milieu in the midst of which souls continually recycle through their destinies. That’s a
way to break out of the unending alternation of lives, and unite with the divine.
I’m aware that this kind of talk is hard to follow, and I apologize. What I want to say is
that we have a religion which instinctively expects to develop into something better, and
we know we’ve done that because monotheism is more true than its predecessors. The
way improvement comes is for God to act, and introduce new versions of chosen peoples
and promised lands, each instance encompassing greater numbers and more perfect
places–so that all the peoples of the earth, at the end, have the possibility of a blissful
home with God, whether conceived as heaven on earth or in some kind of post-Judgment
Day future.
Whether that’s how you think about it or not, that’s the logic of this religion of ours.
But we share with the eastern faiths, with traditions like Hinduism, a weariness of the
between-time. In their case it’s because life tends to return to the starting point and go
through its old patterns. In our case it’s because God’s decisive deliverance can tend to
become long ago in the past and seem far away in the future. In both cases the problem is
now. How do we live with God when we have not yet achieved our ultimate end, when
we’re still on our way, whether we think of that way as a line toward the future or a turn of the
wheel? What do we do with our spiritual hunger, and our hope to be worthy of God, in the
midst of this life which now is ours?
That’s the business of Jesus’ prayer for the disciples which we have in today’s
gospel. Jesus prays that disciples can be part of him, as he is part of God, already. It is not
a matter of escaping a trajectory or arriving at an end– it is a way of solving the problem of
being neither here nor there by becoming different wherever we are–becoming connected
intimately in the spirit to the source of our lives. Being one with Christ is a deliverance from
the tyranny of time, and since it is Christ’s prayer for us, we all may hope for moments of
knowing that it is true–that we are not left alone to drift toward some decision to be imposed
on us, but that we may breathe each moment with God living within us and giving us life
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