St Mary's

St Mary’s-in-Exile 5/10/10

Last time I was actually invited to read the gospel in a catholic mass was actually in Rome – I was at an Ecumenical institute run by a rather radical group of Dutch nuns.

As I stepped out this morning to buy a newspaper because I am concerned about what is happening in Christchurch, I was reminded of a true story in Christchurch – a mother and her children had gone into the city centre shopping – a little girl about 5or 6 and a baby in the pram.  The mother suddenly spotted something in the shop she was interested in purchasing so she said to the little girl “Now hold the pram I won’t be more than two or three minutes and don’t you dare move from this spot”.  She came back within three or four minutes and the little girl was nowhere to be seen. She looked everywhere and then she spotted that she was on the opposite side of the street – so she hurried over when the lights allowed her and she began to scold her when she had strictly instructed her not to move at all, and the little girl said “But God told me” at which point she began to scold her ever further – “What nonsense you are saying, don’t tell lies”.

At this stage a bystander stepped in “I think I can explain, you see along came a traffic inspector with a loud speaker – he said “The little girl with pram and baby may now cross the road”.

So there was a natural explanation for the ‘voice of God’ – and that sort of thing has been happening more and more – just think of the earthquake itself – until about 100 years ago God would have been blamed for that earthquake, the insurance companies would have had it in that such things were an act of God.  We don’t think that way anymore – most of us don’t think that way anymore, because so many of the things or more and more of the things that happen in the physical world have a natural explanation.  Even so many people argue that you have to believe there is a natural God that created the world otherwise the world would not be here and in America a lot of conservative Christians speak of intelligent design – there is so much intricate design in the world, admittedly awe inspiring, that there must be some intelligence behind it. Even if we can trace the evolution of the cosmos right back to the big bang, who caused the big bang – God – well if you were listening or saw television on Friday you would see reference to a book by Stephen Hawking, now he wrote a book a while ago called “A Brief History Of Time” – it was very widely read, perhaps not so widely understood.  In which he saw the cosmos going back to the big bang and then he explained the four basic forces the physicists have found in the world and he said at the end of the book “If only we can find the way in which these four forces work together, we will understand the mind of God”.

Well in his new book he maintains that it is no longer necessary – to think there was some reality called God that caused the big bang – even the big bang, he says, can now be given a natural explanation – now I don’t have any expertise in that area at all, what I am interested in is the use of the word God – you see that was the first time I had heard the word God on television – apart from one or two services God is never talked about.

In the world today, until roughly two hundred years ago, God was on the lips of people everyday, when they parted they said ‘God bless, goodbye’, indeed the word goodbye simply means ‘God be with you’, ‘God bless’, ‘Good day’, ‘Have a good day’.  Why has the word God been retiring from ordinary speech, what has happened?  Well the best way of explaining all that maybe is to turn to what may be called a History of God.  Only in the late 20^th century were we in a position to actually write a History of God.  Karen Armstrong, whom I suspect some of you have read, has written a marvellous book “A History of God”, but I am going to do it very simply in three phases, in a few words.  God has never meant the same through history, indeed he doesn’t mean the same within history – if I were to ask you in one sentence what you mean by the word God you would probably present a variety of answers – that’s the thing with this word God – when it actually started not with a capital it started with a class of beings – beings who were created in the human mind in order to explain natural phenomena – the running of the water, the clouds, the storms, the drought, spring – there was a god associated with each one, and indeed those of us of European extraction do well to remember that our ancestors believed in those gods up to only about one thousand years ago.  So much so that they have never disappeared from the days of the week – Sunday is the day of the sun god, Monday the moon god, Thursday the god Thor, Wednesday, it was the day of the god Woden – you see how close we are to that era.  But about 2 ½ thousand years ago a radical cultural change took place historians now call it the axial period – Karen Armstrong  called it ‘The Great Transformation”, now I am going to simplify it – it is when the gods came to the end of their day, indeed the Israelite prophets laughed them out of court and they were replaced by one god that is the human mind was trying to see how all the phenomena in the world can be traced back to one thing, to one force, one reality, but there was a big difference between this one god and the gods who had preceded them – he was not only one but he was completely invisible and what is more it was strictly forbidden ever to attempt to draw a picture of him or to make a statue of him or to portray this god in any way at all that was like anything on the earth – in other words if you attempted to do that you were turning god into an idol.  But of course it is very hard for us humans to talk about god without having some sort of image in our minds, so the images that came about predominately  were that of an old man in the sky, or at least some superhuman being who created and continued to control and to that person everything was to be related but there was one further thing very important that happened in that the gods were wirely creatures, that often did a lot of evil to people, but this god took to himself the attributes of love, of goodness, of justice, of compassion – these were the things which clothed this new idea of god, you see god is an idea, it is a wonderful idea, it has been a very important idea but  it is an idea, the gods were originally supposed to explain natural phenomena and when they were replaced by god this concept still explained everything, so much so that into the recent past we would say only god knows everything – god is the key to all knowledge, and then starting with the renaissance, then on to the protestant reformation but coming to a turning point in what is known as the enlightenment – a second axial period occurred and it is now spreading all around the globe in effect it is moving us out of that period of monotheism into a period which we recognise we were the ones which created those ideas in the first place.  So that’s why god, as traditionally understood, seems to be disappearing from our news; no longer do we use god language quite that way.  What have we got left – now the interesting thing is that as that god has receded into non-reality – that god has left behind his attributes.  Even the new testament was beginning to feel that when it said god is love, so the attributes remain, and these are but now, for us to thing about – justice requires that we do this or love commands us to do this – it is the attributes of god that are contained in a continuing god as a world symbol, as a word symbol, a wonderful and important symbol.

That is why in the 20^th century there was a big stir when Bishop Robinson wrote his “Honest to God” and it was followed very quickly by a few radical theologians talking about the death of god.  The idea of god, the image of god that has been within Christdom for nearly two thousand years was dying, the image was dying but as the image died the attributes came to the fore and indeed in the 20^th century as traditional Christianity is in fact receding, they were coming to the fore with  these values. I would say, we ended the 20^th century more ethically sensitive than we were at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Think only of the way in which we have come to terms with the equality of the genders – think of how we now condemn racism, we were not even aware of racism at the beginning of the 20^th century.

So these are the values, this is god speaking to us today.  One final thing – I turn to the Gospel of St John, which does not start off like the Bible, the Bible says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” – John’s gospel puts it somewhat differently – “In the beginning was the word” – now the word used there was logos it does not quite mean what we mean by word.  Logos is a little difficult to translate but think how it is in the word logical – think how it is in all these words theology – the logic of god, the logic of anthropology and so on.  Logos is perhaps best translated as meaning – in the beginning there was meaning and it is meaning that was god and god was meaning, so god is a symbolic term in this new phase of human culture which bears all the supreme values which make a claim upon us, and it is god who finally helps us to find meaning in our lives.