Knowing God, part 2

Text: Mark 4:25-34

In Mark’s gospel the disciples just don’t get it. They desire to know Jesus. They want to understand his teachings. But they are a little thick. You can detect the frustration in Jesus as he says a little earlier in the chapter we just heard, “Don’t you understand this parable? How will you understand [any of] the parables?” And though he explains it then, and though Mark says in the passage for today that he explained everything all over again in private, it never quite sinks in. Perhaps we are to conclude from this that the disciples are dummies. Or perhaps instead that they are just trying to comprehend something that is really hard.

Jesus speaks to his disciples and to others in parables. A parable is a way of coming upon a truth obliquely. The word means “on the side.” Parables are sideways truths. They serve when more direct words fail to convey the idea. They are not allegories (though they are often interpreted that way, even in Mark). They are not metaphors. We cannot conclude from these parables that we are like the farmer, or like the seed, or the plant, or the birds in the bush. We cannot conclude from these parables that God’s kingdom starts small and becomes great, or that it unfolds slowly. These things may be so, but the parables do not teach them.

Parables are like koans, little mind tricks that purposely derail our usual train of thought. In that regard, they are like jokes. They should (and would have when Jesus told them) startle those who hear them. They should make us uncomfortable and thoughtful.

These parables we heard today are two of three agricultural parables in this chapter of Mark, all of which are about seeds. These parables make us think about growth and fruitfulness, about the force of life causing great abundance. About one-hundred-fold yields and giant mustard bushes.

But they also make us think about things that are hidden and about how God reveals God’s self to us. The plant exists in the seed, planted underground, invisible. Then visible. Then blossoming. Then ripe. There is an unveiling here, a disclosure. How does this all work? The farmer does not know. “He does not know how,” Jesus tells us.

We long to know God. We do not know how. Jesus tries to explain things to us. In this passage, he casts about for a way to do that. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God?” Is he speaking to us or is he wondering himself how to explain it? The language here in Mark is strange. What parable shall I use? he asks himself. In one version of the passage, he says “In what parable shall we stand?” In another, older version, he says “with what parable should we parable-ize this?” It is as if Jesus acknowledges that a straight-on explanation of the kingdom of God would not reveal God. “With many such parables he spoke the word to them,” Mark says, “as they were able to hear it.” Each might hear differently.

We desire God. We desire God as essentially as one desires a lover. That desire is as built into us as the hunger for food is or the need to breathe. We wish to court God, to have God near us. We do not know how. God seems partly hidden. Declarations about God (sentences that start out “God is …” followed by some title or characteristic) are unhelpful. So are metaphors regarding God (“God is like …” something; a father, the wind, light).

This kind of language does help us to think about God. And in that way it does help us talk to one another about God. But it is not the language of a suitor, not the language of desire, of longing. The description of God is not the same as God. The word is not the thing.

What happens in the parables is not that the farmer seeks to know the plant, the harvest. The farmer longs for it. He cannot live, cannot survive, without it. Do the disciples want to know about God or do they long for God? Our imperfect ability to know about God has nothing to do with our need to know God, any more than the imperfect knowledge of the farmer has anything to do with the farmer’s longing for the sprout, the fruit, the harvest.

The language of worship is the language of desire. Prayer, and praise, and song are words of desire for God. That is why there is no right way to worship. Martin Luther called most of what we do in worship “adiaphora,” which means “it does not matter” or more literally “indifferent things.” Things which are fine but not essential. There is a lot of room in worship.

At the Synod Assembly last weekend there were a whole bunch of different ways of worshiping. And by a “whole bunch” I mean compared to the limited traditional palette; but really, a smallish bunch compared to the total variety of Christian worship. There were unfamiliar (to many of us) songs in unfamiliar languages, strange and wonderful music, odd ways of praying, visual extravagance and quiet meditation. Some people thought all this craziness was great. And some thought it was untoward, inappropriate, and they were a little crabby about it. They did not like this way of approaching God. It was not their way.

Nonetheless, all the people there, as far as I could tell, desired God. Even though we worshiped in common, in a gathering as we do here, each person was courting God in his or her language (as they were able to speak it, Mark might have said), borrowing words and sentiment as they could from the common pool of the liturgy. I’m sure that no one got it exactly right. Whoever speaks the exactly right thing to one’s object of desire? Perhaps we all got almost all of it wrong. It does not matter. Being too worried about where one sows the seeds is not God’s requirement, if you recall the parable of the sower.

We do not know whether we have our theology right. We do not know whether our image of God conforms to what God really is. We do not know whether we have heard God correctly. We do not know whether our sacred rites are effective. We do not know whether our meditations are pure.

We know anything only imperfectly. We are as much dummies as the disciples were. It does not matter. Like lovers, we speak from our hearts as best we can, in ways that are as true as we can be, to the God whom we desire.

Knowing God, part 1

Text: Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday

Over the past few months people from Faith have been meeting with people from Temple Beth Shalom to talk about worship, theology, scripture, and prayer. The interns at Faith and at the synagogue organized these great discussions. At the last meeting, the topic was personal prayer: when do you pray, what do you pray for, how do you pray, have there been for you any special moments of prayer? In the course of these meetings, people have learned to trust one another, to ask questions openly and without embarrassment and to reveal their own vulnerabilities. So at this, the sixth session, people talked not about how Jews and Christians differ in faith, but about their own personal prayer life.

What we found out was that people pray for all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. This should not have been a surprise, but it was, sort of. Occasionally our relationship with God gets into a rut, put there sometimes by our own laziness or unwillingness to take the energy to experiment.

But more often its put there by our fears. Fear that we are doing it wrong, or that God is judging the quality of our prayers. Or fear that we are asking for the wrong thing (either something too trivial or too big). Or often fear that there is some official teaching about prayer that we do not know, that we would benefit from going to a class on prayer, or reading Prayer for Dummies. This is not a new fear; when Jesus first recites the Lord’s prayer, it is because the disciples have asked him: “Lord, teach us to pray.”

If we were each individually in ruts, we were not as a group. People prayed for all sorts of things. People prayed for world peace. People prayed for peace of mind. They prayed that the airplane they were flying in would not crash. They prayed for a good meal. They prayed that they would lose weight. They prayed for a good night’s sleep. For comfort, safety, help for others, healing.

People prayed at all sorts of times. At bed at night, or first thing in the morning. While they were driving or on the T. At Sabbath worship and at meals. Walking down the street. They used prayer books, no books, prayer beads and rosaries. According to a schedule or when they felt like talking to God.

And they prayed in all sorts of ways. They asked God to do things or to keep things from happening—petitions, in the jargon of prayer. But they also told God things that were happening with them, in their lives or in their hearts and thoughts, their worries and their hopes—declarations. They thanked God for good things or life itself—thanksgivings.

They also just sat and listened for God. For God to talk to them, or show them something. Or to detect God’s presence around them in the physical things: sights and sounds and smells of the world.And they chastised God, complained about things that happened to them, their friends, the world. Or about what seemed unmet promises, or being abandoned.

Our prayer and the identity of God for us are intertwined. In Faith 101, which meets after coffee hour, we’ve been talking about theology. Lutheran theologian Richard Jenson (whom we will be talking about in today’s session) says that the primary religious question is “which is God?” Meaning of all the images of God, which has the most claim on us? Another way of asking that question, he says, is to ask “to whom may I—do I—pray?” It is a clue that the huge variety of prayers and prayer life among us means that the identity of God is complex and variegated.

You may find the readings today seem a more or less random assortment. There is a story of the calling of the prophet Isaiah; there is a wonderful psalm about God’s power; something from Paul about being adopted children of God; and a story of Nicodemus coming under the cover of darkness to speak to Jesus.

The readings are as varied as our prayers, which is perhaps the point. There is no clear unity in them of the characteristics of God. In the psalm, God is mighty, powerful, and splendid, stronger than all the elements, cosmic even. Yet at the end, God blesses individual humans with peace.

In Isaiah, God is heavenly and huge—the hem of his garment barely fits in the Temple and his presence fills the universe. Seraphim fly all about him, mysterious and strange. God is kingly. Yet at the end, God wonders aloud whom to call. And Isaiah has the courage to say “Me! Send me!”

In Romans, God is familiar enough to call God “Daddy!” or “Papa!” God has adopted us as children. When before we were like slaves—who in Paul’s time had no claim to their own children nor claims on their parents—now we are children, deserving as much—and the same—consideration as Jesus. God is our parent.

And in the Gospel, God is a teacher in the flesh of Jesus. And a gift to the world.

What we have here is a basketful of contrasts, contradictions, and paradoxes. God is timeless, yet comes in particular times (the year that King Uzziah died, for example). God is elemental yet is called in the psalm by name. God is almighty yet asks for help from people. God is secret yet known. God is singular yet plural. God is huge yet people-sized (or smaller). God is ethereal, spiritual, and earthy all at once. God is father and child at the same time.

Last Sunday on Pentecost we heard the story of many people, moved by the Spirit of God, who began to speak all at once. And the people around them were amazed, because though the speakers were all from Galilee, the visitors were from all over the world. How is it, they asked, that we each of us hear the words in our own language? Though this seems at first glance to be a miracle of speaking, it is instead of miracle of hearing. They each heard differently. It adds nothing to know what the folks were “really” saying. It is a miracle not of tongues but of ears.

God’s identity—the character of God—is like that. It is not so much that God has lots of different modes or guises, but that we have lots of ways of seeing and hearing God. This does not mean that anything goes, or that God is so vague that God could be anything. That we see God in many ways and forms tells us little about whether God is unified or fragmented. It tells us a lot about our relationship with God, which changes as we and the world do. And it tells us how strongly we need that relationship, our demands, expectations, and hopes for God, and how much we are fed by God’s presence.

Theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel begins his theology with the notion that God is ineffable. That does not mean that we cannot approach or understand God. God is awesome, he says, and “Awe is a way of understanding.”

We have been given means to know God. Scripture and scholarship and friends and the living experience of our lives. And knowing God in itself changes us. We begin to see God through God-colored glasses, so to speak. We hear God through God-enhancing headphones. But they are still our eyes, still our ears. We see and hear many things in the one God to whom we pray.