THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

DOES GOD EXIST? | SN

September 12, 1999

John M. Buchanan

God is not a supramundane being, above the clouds .. .God is not an
extramundane being, above the stars .. .God is in this world, and this world
is in God, the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute
in the relative. It is precisely as the absolute that God can enter into a
relationship with the world and humankind.

Hans Kung
Does God Exist?

Before experiencing God you thought you could talk about God: when you
begin to experience God you realize that what you are experiencing you
cannot put into words.

Augustine of Hippo
354 A.D.

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LIGHT IN THE CITY

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Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

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DOES GOD EXIST?

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
September 12, 1999

Matthew 18: 21-35
Exodus 3: 1-15
“God said to Moses: ‘I AM WHO I AM.””
(Exodus 3:14)

You come in ways unexpected and unanticipated, O God. You surprise us with your
lively presence; you come in human love and joy, in grief, in passion; you come in art
and music; you come in the wilderness and in the city. So now, O God, you in whom we
live and move and have our being, come now to us, startle us, speak your word to us, in
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

In the church of my childhood God, I concluded, was somewhere behind the small door
on the chancel. I was fascinated by that door. The chancel area of the church was
decorated tastefully in dark wood; a center pulpit with an elegant large bench
immediately behind. In the middle of the wall, just behind the pulpit bench, discreetly
designed so you couldn’t really tell that it was there, there was a door—a secret door! At
precisely 11:00, the door would open, and the minister would emerge, the Reverend
Robert E. Graham, in my childhood, a very impressive man. I loved the moment when
that door mysteriously opened and out stepped Reverend Graham. I kept my eyes peeled
for that moment and was severely disappointed if I missed it. In retrospect, it was the high
point of public worship for me in those days.

I had been told that the church was God's house and so I came to what was a reasonable
conclusion: God was behind that door.

That was pretty much it as far as my earliest theology goes. Later I would connect God
with Jesus; God’s Son, God’s Word, God’s revelation, God’s incarnation. But for years, it
was the space behind the door. And after saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” with
Mother or Dad, in those few minutes before sleep, I recall looking up and trying to imagine
God as a face brooding in the darkness. And a few years later, sitting on a hard bench on
Vesper Hill at church camp—carved out of the most beautiful Pennsylvania mountain pine
forest, I connected God with the magnificence of nature so that I still associate the aroma
of pine with the presence of God.

I suspect each of you could recreate an early memory of God—your first theology. My
memory was stimulated this summer by reading a book by Marcus Borg, Professor of
Religion and Culture at Oregon State and author of the best selling Meeting Jesus Again
For The First Time. Borg is primarily a New Testament scholar—a Jesus scholar, a good,
and sometimes controversial one. His new book is The God We Never Knew and he
begins it with a charming autobiographical sketch of his own early faith experience.

aM,

Borg says he “grew up with God,” and that the subject of God has always been him,
devotionally, but also experientially and intellectually. And there’s the problem. What
Borg learned about God as a youngster attending a Lutheran church actually became a
kind of intellectual obstacle in young adulthood—his childhood notion of God was
actuaily getting in the way of an adult faith.

He describes that childhood faith in a way which sounded very familiar to me, andI
expect fo you as well. He writes:

“I thought God meant a super-natural being ‘out there,’ who created the world a
long time ago and has occasionally intervened in the aeons since, especially in
events recorded in the Bible. God was not ‘here’ but somewhere else. And
someday, after death, one might be with God, provided he/she had done or believed
whatever was necessary to pass final judgment.” (p. 1)

That faith in a God out there, and believing certain ideas now in order to get to heaven
later, a faith that has nourished millions of people, has quite simply, Borg says, ceased to
be persuasive intellectually as the 20" century and second Christian Millenium draws to a
close. “Over the past thirty to forty years, an older way of thinking about God has ceased
to be compelling even to many Christians.” That older faith, Borg describes as “doctrinal,
moralistic, literalistic, exclusivistic, and oriented to an afterlife” (p.2).

An important part of Borg’s childhood theology was his minister, Pastor Thorson. This
subject, the way children sometimes identify clergy with God, makes ministers very
uncomfortable. A member of a former congregation told me that she too had explained to
her four year old that the church was God’s house. When they settled into their pew for
his first visit and the minister stood up—which happened to be me—he said, in a voice
heard for several pews around, “Wow! Mommy, is that God?” “No,” she said, “that’s just
Mr. Buchanan.” “Well, where is God?” he persisted. “He’s not here yet,” she answered.

In any event, Pastor Thorson is part of Borg’s theology. “He had gray hair, wore a simple
black robe, was a big man.. “my earliest visualization of God.” That’s called
“anthropomorphism,” by the way—a human image of God. Pastor Thorson was also stern
and judgmental. Borg remembers:

“He was a finger shaker. Literally ... he actually shook his finger at us when he
preached. Sometimes he shook his finger at us while pronouncing the forgiveness
of sins . . Almighty God, hath had mercy on us, and hath given His only son to die
for us, and for His sake forgiveth all our sins.

Those words, accompanied by a chastising finger, carried a message: Though told
we were forgiven, we knew it was a close call” {p.17).

And so Borg’s remote God was basically a lawgiver and judge, a childhood theology which
Borg believes, and I agree, continues to dominate the image of God in the minds and
hearts of many people. Anne Lamott describes one of her early images of God as “your

high school principal, leafing through your files and not being very pleased with what he
finds there.”

A recent Presbyterian survey on the subject of preferred images for God, conducted by our
research department, asked ministers and members to rank, in order of preference, 112
different images of God. The overwhelmingly favorite mode of address is “F ather,” even
though the respondents also indicated that they knew that God is not male. Clergy, the
survey revealed, are more likely to call God Mother and Lover. Lay people are more apt
to imagine God as Father, Judge and Master.

Regardless of the relative sophistication or naiveté of our images and names for God, Borg
thinks we are haunted by God. Classical culture always has been and modern culture
most certainly is.

Two books, recently published, are being widely read and discussed. Reynolds Price’s
Letter to a Man in the Fire; Does God Exist and Dees He Care? a correspondence with a
young medical student who is dying of cancer, puts the question directly. Annie Dillard's
For The Time Being , reflects on the eternal puzzle of evil and suffering in a world created
good by a loving God. And right on time, the school board of the State of Kansas brought
this matter of religion and God and God’s relationship to the creation into center focus in
a curious decision about science curriculum in the Kansas schools which reflects a
particular conservative, literalistic theology.

My first professor of theology, a lively Englishman by the name of J.S. Whale, told us
about a young Anglican priest who went to his bishop for advice about preaching. The
wise old bishop said, “Young man, preach about God and preach about twenty minutes.”
Professor Whale went on to say, “The Christian preacher has many opportunities, but one
theme—the reality, nature and purpose of the living God.”

And our friend, Jack Stotts, “One of the most important tasks before the church is toe learn
how to say ‘God’ in the modern world.”

Scripture does not deal with the existence of God. “A fool says in his heart ‘there is no
God,’” the Psalmist wrote, but nowhere in the Bible is there an argument for theism—the
existence of a supreme being.

What there are, of course, are stories about people—meeting God, talking to God, praying,
pleading, begging, praising, and arguing with God, and sometimes even negotiating.

One of these stories—one of the oldest and best, is about Moses and the Burning Bush.

Moses, you will recall, was abandoned by his parents to save his life, rescued by
Pharaoh’s daughter, raised as Egyptian royalty, a rising star in the Egyptian establishment,
murders an Egyptian slave master who mistreated one of his fellow Hebrews, runs for his
life, meets his future wife, marries and settles down far away from Egypt, and goes into his
father-in-law’s livestock business.

Watching the sheep one day, he sees a bush, burning but not consumed, takes a closer
look, hears a voice—remove your shoes—I'm the God of your ancestors,’ and then a plan,
an outrageous scheme to free the Jewish slaves in Egypt. “.. I have heard their cry,” the
voice says. “Come, I will send you to bring them out.”

Moses, finally safe, happy and secure, responds as most of us would, I suspect.
“Why me? Who am I, that I should go. . .?”

“I will go with you,” the voice responds

That wasn’t the question, but it’s the only answer he gets so Moses tries again.

“If I go, they’re going to ask me ‘Who sent you?’ What shall I tell them? What's your
name?”

And the voice says, in the most enigmatic sentence in the Bible, “I AM WHO IAM. .. .Tell
them ‘I AM has sent you...”

Bill Cosby, I believe, was doing a routine once on this story, and when the voice rumbles
“I AM WHO I AM,” Moses responds, “What kind of name is that?:”

It is one of the most perplexing phrases in scripture. The name of God is the verb, “to be”
repeated in the first person singular.

It can be translated:

“1 AM WHO I AM,”

or
I will be who I will be

or

I am the one who is
or

I will cause to be what I will cause to be.

Some of the most careful linguists prefer:
I will be who I am/[ am who I will be.

What is going on here? What is the Bible saying about God—about the fundamental
question of God’s existence? The great 20" century theologian, Paul Tillich, advised
caution when talking about the existence of God. Part of our problem, Tillich said, was
that we talk about God in the same terms we use for ourselves, or a tree or a house,
existing. Tillich said, God doesn’t exist in a technical sense. God is. God is not a Being.
God, Tillich said is “being as such.” God is not part of reality. God is ultimate reality.”
God, Tillich taught, in a famous phrase, is “The Ground of All Being.” And so theology
students used to have great fun and demonstrate their erudition by praying, “Dear Ground
of Being.”

"So there is something about this peculiar language, “I AM WHO I AM,” that says be

careful here. We’re talking about something absolute, unlike anything else; something that
cannot be totally described by human language, nor compared to anything else. What
we’re really talking about here is the very essence of existence—“being as such,” not a bad
way to say it.

And that leads to the second thing this passage says about God, namely that in order to be
God to us and for us, God must remain a mystery. The ancients knew that there is a sense
in which if you know the name of something you have some control over it. Jesus names
the demons and casts them out. The ancient Hebrews had such a sense of God’s otherness
and holiness that they never pronounced God's name. In Hebrew it is four consonants.
YHWH, which we do pronounce as YAHWEH, the Hebrew name for God. But they never
said it. They knew what St. Augustine meant centuries later when he said, “If you think
you understand God, it is not God.”

Paul Tillich warned against reducing the dimension of God by talking about God’s
existence. Karl Barth argued for God’s “wholly otherness,” God’s transcendence.
William Placher has written a wonderful book about modern religion under the title The
Domestication of Transcendence.” Placher is afraid that awe become too cozy, too
familiar intellectually, too sure of ourselves when it comes to our theology. We
“domesticate transcendence.”

A lot of evil—interpersonal and international, results from people, religious people,
possessing absolute certainty about God and God’s nature and God's will. Absolute
certainty about religion leads frequently to intolerance and then oppression and finally
holy war, genocide; the absolutely sincere zealot committing acts of violence and terror to
rid the world of the enemies of God.

So this passage holds out for the mystery of God, but it also says three things about God
which brings the matter in close.

The first is that God takes the initiative and comes to us, not exclusively, not even
particularly in religious ceremonies or religious places, but in everyday life, everyday
activity, everyday work and play. Moses, after all, wasn’t expecting this. He wasn’t out in
the wilderness on a spiritual retreat looking for a burning bush. He was doing his job,
carrying on, and then, tending his sheep, the bush caught fire and the voice spoke. So the
word here is that Ged can and does come in the ordinary, that the dailyness of your life,
your work, your relationships, your community, your passion, your giving of your life to
people and causes you care about—that’s where God is and will be present to you and for
you.

So the passage asks: when does that happen for you? where is your Burning Bush
experience? Have you missed it? Have you missed it because you were distracted by
looking the other way, or searching in the wrong place, or were you simply so
overwhelmingly busy and preoccupied that you didn’t have time for it?

I have always loved something Frederick Buechner wrote:

“At its heart, I think, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha
under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of the Jordan .... Religion as
institution, as ethics, as dogma, as social action, comes later. Religions start, as
Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with a bush
going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky.”
(Alphabet of Grace, p- 74)

So what is it for you? When and where does the hidden depth of life reveal itself, the
added dimension, the holy, the other, the sacred—the “Ground of Being?” When does the
bush burst into flames?

When you hear music so heartbreakingly beautiful it transports you?

When you witness the extremities of our humanness; human birth, homan
reconciliation, human reunion, human death?

When you hold your beloved in your arms?

When you see pictures of the children, hungry, tortured, abused, and feel in your
heart the violation of something that is ultimate and fundamental, something holy,
sacred?

When you walk on the beach at sunrise; salt air, breezes, waves, gulls, a kind of
symphony, or walking in the woods , look up in wonder and see, as poet Wendell
Berry sees?

“Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in the air
Tier after tier, a timbered choir

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed,

O Light come down to earth, be praised!”

A Timbered Choir (p.83)

God will come to you in ways you do not anticipate or expect—surprising ways.

The second thing the passage says about God that brings the matter close is that this is a
two way conversation. God speaks—Moses has to answer. God calls, Moses responds.
Moses equivocates, God won’t take “no” for an answer. So expect a job to do, a task to
perform, a people to be set free. If you experience this God, when God comes into your
life, expect things to change, expect your life to have new meaning and purpose and
direction, new frustrations, new vulnerability, new passion, new hope, new love, new
tasks to do.

aM,

=

Pa

And the third thing is that God will be God for you.

“I AM WHO I AM. ..I will be who I will be,” I think that means: I will be the God
you need.

If you need someone to nurture you, to bind your wounds, and to hold you
close, I will be there; I will be a mother for you.

If you need kindness and patience and strength, I will be your father.

If you need someone to talk to, to tell your secrets, your burdens and joys, I
will be with you, like a sister.

If you need someone to stick by you, I’ be your friend.
If you need someone to share your hopes and dreams, I will be your brother.

If you need someone to hold you to account to all you could be, I will be
your judge; a judge who loves you and wants you to be whole.

If you need someone to accept you and forgive you and affirm you, value
you and esteem you and treasure you, I will be your lover.

And when you need someone to walk beside you through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will be there; I will be your savior.

I AM WHO I AM.

God came to Moses on a hillside tending his sheep, as God once came to shepherds on a
hillside with news of a birth, news which forever changes the conversation, bringing it as
close as the child—the man—who lived and died and rose again—God with us.

Amen.

oth

Prayers of the People
September 12, 1999
John Wilkinson

All beautiful is the march of days, loving God, when seasons come and go. Your
imagination called the world into being and called it good, and your mercy nurtures each
moment of each day, and each living thing in it. We thank you for the sense of a new
season, filled with kickoffs and fresh boxes of crayons, filled with good memories of
summer gatherings and hope-filled anticipation about the tasks ahead. We thank you that
as we gather in this place, that a diverse rainbow of your people gathers across the
country and around the world, praising you with many voices, in many tongues, from
many traditions. We thank you that as such a symphony raises its voice, you call it into
unity, common ground, a sense of shared mission and purpose, a call to serve and share
and celebrate. And so for the gift of song, for the gift of poetry and drama, for painting and
photograph, we thank you, for the creativity of artist and the ways which the arts deepens
our relationship with you and our understanding of your world. Enhance our
understanding, therefore, of a world that seems on the brink of so many challenges. We
thank you for people who help us understand the difficult questions about how we get
along, and ask that through our understanding we might make a difference. Where there
is warfare, help us to sow peace. Where there is hatred, help us to sow love. And instill
in the hearts of all those who would hate a sense of transformation, that their lives matter
and are valued and therefore worthy of love. We pray for all those who feel unloved this
day. We pray for those who are hungry, those who are addicted, those who are lonely.
We pray for children who feel unwelcome, for men and women who feel excluded. May
we live as baptism people, healed by flowing waters and therefore called to be
ambassadors of yeur redemption. We pray for the church in all times and places, the
global church, and we pray for this congregation—for children and teachers, for
volunteers and committee members, for house staff and support staff and program
directors and musicians and ministers. As this season now commences, give us ance
again your sense of vision and vocation, that at the intersection of faith and life this
church may be a lively, faithful, loving adventurous outpost of your kingdom, in word and
in deed. And now bind our voices as you have bound our hearts, with brothers and sisters
who in many voices and in one voice have prayed the prayer taught by your son so long
ago .. The Lord’s Prayer.