LD 34, Psalm 115 "The God We Know" Scott Hoezee

On the last day of the twentieth century, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis asserted that the single most stunning transformation of the last thousand years is the adoption of the scientific method. Prior to the rise of modern science in the sixteenth century, people thought differently. We now assume that we can make and test various theories. Whether it is a new medication, a new theory on how galaxies formed, or a new method for storing data in a computer, everyone now relies on the scientific method to consider and try out new possibilities. We experiment. We revise.

Further, Lewis claims that this scientific bent affects things far beyond the bounds of science. We live in the age of reason, relying on our intellectual abilities as we question all past ideas. Everything is open to scrutiny, and our reliance on reason assures us that on our own we can find the truth, even if it is different than what had once been assumed.

In yet another column of the Times that same day a university provost said, "Science right now is the most powerful single force in our culture." And that may well be true. It addles the mind to consider the things we all know which no one knew not so long ago. Even my second-grader can come home from school to announce, "Everything is made of molecules, you know." So it is, but a hundred or so years ago not even the world's grandest genius knew what elementary students of today regard as, well, elementary!

Science has affected everything. This is a fact we ought not to begrudge. Each of us lives every day benefitting from science, medicine, and technology. Few of us would dare to say we'd be better off without antibiotics, gas furnaces, and cars. But science has its negative side. Anthony Lewis is exactly right in claiming that a scientific reliance on reason now extends beyond the laboratory. People apply this to everything, including to God.

It may well be true, as John Calvin said, that the human heart has always been an idol factory. We have always manufactured gods according to our own whims. Today, however, this tendency is magnified by the common assumption that any idea handed down to you by a tradition cannot trump what you can come up with on your own.

So many people now refuse to believe that there is any one right way to conceive of God or of salvation. Spirituality revolves around whatever the individual wants, not around any creed or recipe for redemption. In many circles the question "Is there a God?" seems merely passé. The modern approach is to ask "Which god works for you?"

And it's not even a recognition that there is more than one religion in the world. People have known that much for millennia already. Today we go further, however, in not limiting ourselves to choosing between, say, Buddhism and Judaism but instead we blend together Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, and Christianity to arrive at our own homespun faith, unabashedly tailored for the individual by the individual.

Many folks today are "kind of into" a lot of different things. It's not uncommon, for instance, to hear someone say, "Right now I'm into Native American spirituality." (As one writer recently said, the proper way to respond to such a generic statement is to say, "Native American spirituality? Really? Which tribe?") In a recent book on "Generation X" (people between the ages of 18 and 30) author Tom Beaudoin asserts that younger people today believe you don't need any church or synagogue to be religious. Most also add, "Do you think that going to church really makes a difference to God?" Obviously it makes no difference to them, and in our world that becomes a short leap to saying that of course it likewise makes no difference to God. Why, after all, would God be much different from us?

From the days of Psalm 115 forward what people so often want is a convenient god--one already part of the warp and woof of who you are and so a god who will not re-tool your life. Ancient Israel was surrounded by nations whose gods were tangible. Wooden figurines, bronze statues, and colorful totems were the gods and goddesses of the Babylonians, Egyptians, and others. For its part Israel was unique in the Ancient Near East. The Israelites were forbidden to make any images or depictions of Yahweh.

So when foreigners would visit, they would derisively ask, "Where's your God? We can't see him! If you come to our country, we can bring you right up to our gods. So what's the deal with your God that he's nowhere to be seen or found??" Psalm 115 was written to answer such sneering inquiries. "Our God is in heaven," the psalmist writes, "where whatever he desires to do happens. Our God made everything that there is and remains free to dwell where he will. Our God doesn't need to be visible to be with us. He's that strong!"

But then, beginning in verse 4, the psalmist has a little fun pointing out the lunacy of the people who make up their own gods. How can anything that mere people make do any good for those same people? Aren't homemade gods pretty limited? Wouldn't anything you create tend to be even less powerful than you, the one who created it? If you made a ceramic cat and then called it your house pet, wouldn't it be a pretty dull pet compared to a real tabby? Granted you wouldn't have to mess with a litter box, but neither would the cat come when you called it or do much to keep you company! It's just not real!

Eyes that you paint onto a hunk of wood can't see you! Hands you mold from even the finest of gold are still just metal hands. Your hands have more going for them --that's why you were able to fashion the statue in the first place. So how could something you invent rule your life or guide your thinking? It doesn't make any sense to the psalmist.

Or perhaps in one way it does make sense. The key line of Psalm 115 comes in verse 8 when the psalmist says with great savvy, "Those who make such idols will end up being just like them." Make your own god and you become like that god. But that's not too surprising in that, left to our own devices, we create gods who are already a lot like us.

Very few, if any, of the folks who these days cobble together their own faith systems (and then write best-selling books about them) end up saying something like, "Once I mixed together elements of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Navajo spirituality I suddenly heard my new god telling me that everything I had once thought was wrong, that I had to change my life, reform my ways, or face eternal consequences!" No, that's not the drill. That's not what rolls off the assembly line of the average idol factory.

Instead people gush all over the pages of their books about how the real god whom they discovered on their own actually loves them just the way they are. Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the best-selling series of books Conversations with God, is a lapsed Catholic with five divorces and a troubled career in his past. But then one day he decided to share a cup of cappuccino with God. And once he and God started to swap jokes and engage in folksy chit-chat, Walsch found that God likes him just the way he is.

But what's the wonder of that? Those who, in Mr. Walsch's phrase, are seeking "alternative answers" to religious questions do so because they do not care for the demands of typical religion. They don't want a God to tell them they are not OK. They don't want to hear that the way to salvation is through Jesus' cross. They don't want to hear that the path to the divine requires Buddhist meditation or learning the Jewish Torah, either.

So they concoct a god who requires nothing of anybody. Mr. Walsch's God doesn't confront him with anything and so Mr. Walsch doesn't do this, either. No matter how "in sync" Mr. Walsch thinks he is with God, he refuses to assert he's onto anything. "I don't care what you believe," he says. "I'm not trying to convince people of anything. I'm just sharing." And Psalm 115 rings in our ears yet again: those who make false gods will be like them. Create a god who is blind, deaf, and dumb and you act the same way in front of others. Mr. Walsch has made piles of money on his books. But ask him what is really the truth, he turns blind, deaf, and dumb with nothing to say, no advice to give, no real concern for what anyone else thinks or does or believes. He may as well be a wooden totem pole.

If horses could imagine a god, the god they'd imagine would be a big horse, a Greek philosopher once predicted. In other words, we all make God into our own image. None of us is immune to this temptation. American Christians tend to picture God as likewise an American, probably a Republican, and the invisible signer of the Declaration of Independence. Feminists tout "the God with breasts" and replace the idea of Jesus as the Word of God with Jesus as the Wisdom of God, since in the Old Testament wisdom is symbolized by Sophia, a woman. Those, like James Dobson, who are in the trenches of the culture wars repeatedly elevate Old Testament holy war imagery and so depict God as the divine warrior, the Lion of Judah, the ultimate military captain. Those who do not share that political agenda key on the pacifist Jesus, the slain Lamb who rides on a donkey, not a tank.

So where does all of this leave us? If even those of us within the church can adopt some of the same methods of those outside the church, how can we know that we worship, serve, and live for the true God? Let me make a few closing suggestions.

First, consider this thought from C.S. Lewis: "My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. God shatters it. God is the great iconoclast. Could we not say that this shattering is one of the marks of God's presence? Most are offended by iconoclasm. Blessed are they who are not." I want to hold up Lewis's idea but in doing so I want to steer well clear of even a hint of relativism. Lewis did not mean that God is the great "we know not what." Lewis did not mean to convey that there is no fixed reality to God. Instead, Lewis wanted to say that God will always burst our abilities fully to conceive of him. The God of the Bible resists neat formulations or easy packaging.

Really to hold in creative tension the full display of God which the Bible gives us requires at least a balancing act sometimes a dumping of the one-sided picture of God we used to carry with us in our hearts. To pick up on something I just mentioned: the Bible does reveal to us a God who is at once the Lion of Judah and the slain Lamb. He's both. He is at once the fierce judge whose holy word is like a two-edged sword and he is the God of all grace who inflicted that sword on himself as a means to our being saved.

He is at once the God who truly is "above it all" dwelling in light inaccessible and he's the God who really is close enough to his beloved creation as to be seen in your flower garden. He is at once the God who tenderly answers our prayers and the one who sometimes simply does not come through the way we begged him to. He is both the God who enables the wonderful things we do in the ministries of this congregation and he is the one who ultimately provides the common grace which in some form or another lies behind the abilities of even the non-Christian folks who make it big on Wall Street.

The Bible itself constantly challenges our ideas about God. So perhaps one way of trying to make certain we are worshiping the true God and not one of our own manufacture is to again and again humble ourselves before the Bible. Instead of always trying to tidy up and make black-and-white the Scripture's portrait of God, maybe we sometimes need to bow before the mystery of a God who, within the course of the Bible, says and does so many different things. You all know how much I have preached grace. But I, like the rest of you, regularly run into parts of the Bible which require that we see God as not only the decanter of grace but also as the source of judgment. That doesn't get rid of the grace, of course, but it adds to the portrait of a richly complex God.

As I pointed out in a sermon last year, when people see some public sin such as we had with the president a year ago, those who want to dismiss the issue tend to say "Well, Jesus said, 'Let those without sin cast the first stone.'" Those who want to hold the guilty party accountable for multiple failures in the same area tend to say "Yes, but Jesus also said, 'Go and sin no more.'" But as we realized in that sermon last year, both of those sentences are spoken by Jesus in the same passage and about the same situation! Being true disciples of our God and ardent students of his Word require us sometimes to dismantle, certain simple images of God. Again, this does not mean there is no final truth but only that really worshiping God requires humility.

And just that leads to another idea: maintaining the holy Other-ness of God. How often do we describe God to others, or think about God ourselves, as holy? How often do we realize that despite the process of sanctification which we believe helps to make us day by day a bit more like Jesus, the fact is that God will always have a purity and a sanctity and a moral beauty which in this life we flat out will never have? It is not an overweening sense of guilt or a desire to be morose that leads Christians regularly to confess their sins, it is simply the glimpses we get of God's holiness which lead us to the realization that we're not home yet in terms of being all we were created to be. So the more we tend to think that God is just generally pretty much like us, the more we have likely lost sight of his holiness.

Of course, some of the very people whom I have criticized in this sermon would probably turn the tables on us to claim that we also simply project our own God, molding him to be compatible with how we want to live over against the lifestyles of those with whom we disagree. We can claim to have the Spirit of the true God speaking to our hearts, but how can we show that this is any different from the claims of Mr. Walsch?

Perhaps we cannot finally prove that the voice we hear is real whereas what others have are homemade notions. Yet we do think there is finally just one God. And we believe that it is possible to think incorrectly about this God. In religion, as in all else in life, it is possible to get things wrong. But we also believe that God wants us to get things right. He has not left it up to the self-deceptive logic of us. There cannot be as many versions of God as there are people to imagine varying versions of the divine.

God wants us to know him and has taken steps, over thousands of years, to convey himself to us. And the fact that the biblical portrait is rich and varied, textured in ways that startle and unsettle everyone; the fact that the God we find loves us fiercely enough not to approve of everything we do; the fact that even the defining image of our faith, the cross, presents at once a simple truth but also an unfathomable mystery--all of this says to me that the God of Scripture is the true God. We may apprehend him with varying degrees of accuracy, but what it means to shun idolatry, as the Catechism says, is deeply, truly, and utterly to desire only this true God. As Psalm 115 knows, we tend to become like what we worship. Our dearest desire is to become like Jesus. So that's who we worship!

You see, the complexities and cross-currents, mysteries and marvels, judgment and grace, death and resurrection of the Christian faith are the very features that turn some people off from so-called "traditional religion." Yet in a shallow world of convenience and watered down simplicity it may well be those richly textured characteristics which show that we're really onto something--no, Someone. Or maybe it shows that Someone is onto us. Amen.