First, Pastor Ray asked the children if they like swimming and received an enthusiastic yes from all. A few volunteered they were taking or about to take swimming lessons. Our pastor admitted he liked swimming too but was a bad swimmer. He asked if anyone was ever afraid of the water. The children said no. Pastor Ray talked about how he tended to sink unless he had a water noodle to help him float. He proposed that God helps us to like a water noodle which the swimmer can trust keep the swimmer afloat - to be able to just rest in God, to float, to not have to struggle to float.
The children however, with recent swimming lessons behind them, thought this cast aspersions on their ability to handle themselves in the water. In their minds they had graduated from using noodles as a crutch and insisted they were not scared of sinking. The congregation laughed because this was not going the way Pastor Ray wanted. Two of the girls were a little put out by the congregation's reaction at that moment.
The insight came gradually and quietly from our God of surprise and reversal in contemplating this with the gospel reading. Certainly Jesus was not portraying the God who acts as a spiritual noodle to us in this passage.Although this metaphor is one part of how God is revealed in the world, here the words of Jesus are, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." Jesus, as it were, is commanding us to be spiritual flotation devices for others. He did not call us servants but friends. Jesus exhorted us to act, not only from a position when we were weak and when we need to trust God to help us but rather to understand and act when we were in a position of strength to help others.
Even the swimming / drowning brought up in this spiritual context is rich with other associations. In many songs and poems God is associated with water, the ocean of love, or the source of life we cannot do without. Certainly how someone would be saved from going under if this is the association we have would be significantly different than simply insuring that they could float.
In his sermon Pastor Ray centered in on the father-image of God that may be problematic to some. He asked about the images others in the congregation had of God. He wondered if any people thought about the Sistine Chapel gray-bearded old guy-in-the-sky. Truthfully we didn't stray far from the other Biblical images, for example mother-hen and God as an image of love.
The apophatic / cataphatic argument immediately came to mind. Do we talk about our knowledge of God through affirmation of the properties and qualities we know (cataphatic) or by not speaking of God directly or defining what God is not (apophatic)? The Parable of the Gardener told by Antony Flew is an illustration of a few of the issues driving the importance of the argument:
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves. At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?
Like any good parable this operates on many levels and, because of the Children's Time, a new level came in the services as another insight. How is the apophatic / cataphatic argument changed if God is a God of surprise and reversal? It became clearer to me that the God attributes we normally use to understand God are, by definition, inadequate. Instead, imagining God as event may be helpful as another method of understanding. Our liturgical practices may be the ways that human beings organize experiences of the event called ‘God.'
The parable suddenly opened up with new meanings. At first, perhaps, the same issue remains. How do we know if an event is God revealed or not? Now, however, the clearing itself takes on a new importance. The very existence of the clearing could be the physical revelation of the breath of God in the world. Normally the gardener and the plot have separate existences apart from one another. Imaging God as event begins to open new possibilities.
Together we are the reflection of God. We live within God's world. When we breathe in our life together deeply we follow the way Jesus commanded in these verses from John. We become the breathing life in Christ's body, however we want to create that vision in our thoughts.
OS - Breathe in Deeply
ReplyDelete