The Peripatetic Preacher
I obviously having absolutely nothing genuinely new to add to the discussion of God in 2020, save that I am the one adding. That is to say, each believer, I think, has a responsibility to state as clearly as possible just who or what she or he thinks God is. This is especially important at this charged moment in human history, as the entire world is engulfed in the COVID-19 pandemic that has to date claimed over 1⁄2 million lives, has sickened over 20 times that number, and has devastated economies, particularly hitting the poor and disadvantaged hard. Even here in the US, by some analytics the world’s wealthiest country, the virus rages nearly out of control, as attempts to open up our culture have led to increased illness and death, forcing many states to reinstitute earlier measures to try to curb the virus’s destructive paths. And while the virus has its way, police brutalities against African-Americans have been spotlighted by the very public deaths of Black person after Black person, demonstrating once again that our society is deeply racist still after 400 years of Black oppression. Just how can we speak meaningfully of God, especially of the goodness or grace of that God, at such a time?
Of course, we are hardly the first community to face catastrophes of various natural and human induced varieties. Plagues, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, storms, along with wars both regional and planetary, have confronted humanity from time’s beginnings. And whenever one or more of those events have occurred, many humans, albeit perhaps a decreasing number of them, have turned to God for answers, for succor, for actions that might deter, defer, or mitigate the terrible effects of those disasters. In our own time, with the precipitous rise of those claiming no belief in deity, these God questions have not garnered the wide circle of attention that previous generations accorded them. When COVID-19 began its rampage, the first persons questioned were scientists, those acquainted with the workings of viruses, followed by leaders of government whom we expected to offer consistent guidance to us as we tried to live with and finally conquer the beast. Surely, many believers turned to their God in prayer, asking for strength and perseverance, along with the deep desire that the thing would simply go away. In fact, certain fundamentalist Christians imagined that louder praying, especially in unknown tongues of angels, could defeat the virus. One can witness these attempts on television, at nearly any time of day or night, as white-robed or white- suited evangelists turned up the volume to pray the beast away, all the while continuing to ask for money to continue their world-wide ministries. Full marks to them for sincerity and sweaty energy, I suppose, but success has so far eluded their efforts.
The God these persons are trying to elicit in the struggle against the virus is obviously to them a God who can intercede at the call of the people who show need and devotion. As a pastor, I once witnessed a loudly praying and singing group of Christians, pushing through the halls of a local hospital a patient whose cancer had progressed past the stage of medical help. It was a raucous scene, and was soon stopped by a very angry hospital staff, but it again demonstrated that their God they imagine can do all things, even stop the deadly course of cancer, if people only believe enough in that power and pray fervently enough to call that power down to earth to work its miracles.
The Bible is loaded with similar scenes wherein God, at the behest of God’s people, acts powerfully on their behalf. The central claim of the Hebrew Bible is that under the leadership of Moses and his unique relationship to YHWH, Israel miraculously vanquished the world’s greatest military power, headed by that era’s most awesome potentate, Egypt’s pharaoh, by parting the waters of a certain sea in order that YHWH’s chosen might pass through dry, while pharaoh’s chariots are all drowned in the returning waters. Amos bluntly says that though YHWH sent famine and pestilence into the land of Israel, still the people did not heed the warnings of YHWH and continued to oppress the poor, the widow, and the orphans in their midst. Those persons who careened through that hospital, crying out for a miracle, and the evangelists shouting that God would make the virus disappear find ample biblical support for their theological ideas. That notion of God has been very common throughout the centuries of belief. Such belief in the God who intercedes, however it has been parsed and nuanced over the years, just will not do any more for me in 2020. If God does intercede in the affairs of human beings, then where was God during the Shoah, the vast and horrifying destruction of European Jewry under the monstrous Nazi regime. The Jews were long known as God’s chosen, yet when they particularly faced annihilation, God was painfully silent, as Elie Wiesel portrays so movingly in his memoir Night, when a young boy is hanged and the rest of the camp made to watch. “There was God hanging on that tree,” he wrote, and that meant for him the death of the God of intervention. That God no longer had meaning for him, and I agree with Wiesel; that God simply bears no meaning for me any more, if that God ever did.
That God, characterized by theologians for centuries as a God of omnipotence— complete power—omniscience—complete knowledge—omnipresence—available anywhere, cannot for me be the God to whom I worship. I am not saying that that God cannot be your God; it may still be possible for you to pray to such a God. Of course, one might at this point turn to a thoroughly mysterious being, one conceived as the supreme and ineffable principle of truth, beauty, and goodness, the one about whom nothing could finally be said, but who remained the timeless origin of everything. That God of mystery might solve the problem of too much expectation of human intervention, since God can only act in ways beyond our capacity to understand or categorize in our tiny humanity. However, for me, that removes God from access nearly altogether, and makes God’s work capricious, unexpected, so mysterious as to be unavailable to my human striving. This God could easily become a God of deism, that belief that God winds up the clock of the universe and stands back to watch it run. That may offer a way to speak of how things started in the cosmos, but it says nothing about God as partner in the running of said cosmos.
The only view of God that finally works for me is that one often called panentheism. Panentheism is an attempt to reconcile the ideas of pantheism on the one hand, the notion that God is in all things, and deism in the other, where God and the created world are separate entities. In panentheism the world is included in God’s being in the way that cells are included in a larger organism, though importantly the world does not exhaust either God’s being or creativity. In the same way that a person is at the same time the sum of all his or her experiences and parts, and yet more than that, so God too has all of finite being as part of God’s being and experience but transcends that finite being. Thus, it must be said that God is not unchanging and impassable, but rather changes along with the changing finite beings that make up that part of God. In other words, as we change so too does God change. God takes up in God’s being our sorrows and joys, our desires and hopes, but God is not fully defined by those attributes, since God is also infinite in person and being in ways that we are not. Hence, God cannot know the future, because the future is the conjoined actions of finite and infinite parts of God, and because there must be real freedom and spontaneity in the world, God must remain in some sense temporal as well as infinite. Thus God may be seen as both absolute and personal at the same time.
Interestingly, I find some biblical support for this view in an unlikely place. At the burning bush at the base of the sacred mountain, Moses is confronted by a justly famous revelation of God, that God who calls him to service in the world. Moses is very reluctant to return to pharaoh for the sound reason that he is a murderer, and has escaped Egypt to begin a new life with wife and child in Midian. Still, the bush calls him, and when Moses asks for the name of the one who is calling, the bush replies, in the usual translation, “I am who I am,” perhaps the most common and obvious translation of the Hebrew. However, because there is no distinction in Hebrew grammar between the present and future tenses, the text might also be read, “I will be who I will be,” or even “I am who I will be.” If this not a great divine dodge, in effect denying Moses any traditional name of God, it could well be a useful and proleptic response for our purposes. YHWH is both who God is now and who YHWH will be in future. God may thus be seen as present with us and also continuously part of us as we move together into the future. We are God, yet not all of God; God is us but more than us.
As we then ask God to be with us during the pandemic, and during our search for a just society, we are in effect asking ourselves to act responsibly, justly, equitably as we struggle with COVID and racism. We may not ask God to act for us, intervene to make it all right, because that is plainly not what God does. God is fully here, and richly divine, hearing us, acting with us, and pleading with us to be the people that God has always wanted us to be. What God says to us in this moment is: care for your brothers and sisters by wearing a mask, keeping social distance, and staying out of large crowds. In addition, God says to us white folk: admit your own engagement in your racism, your complete involvement in white privilege in order that you may hear more clearly the anger and frustration of your Black sisters and brothers and become their advocates rather than their masters. Prayer to this God is thus equally a call to self as it is a call to that part of God that transcends myself. For me, that is the God I embrace and the one I worship.
(Images from Wikimedia Commons)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In