GOD IN MATTER
Scriptures: Psalms 104:1-9, 14-15
Hebrews 1:1-14
I’m going to take a calculated risk for three Sundays this summer. Normally, when it’s THIS hot outside our minds are kinda tuned in to a lighter pace, a more relaxed, laid-back approach. But the fact that the adult Sunday School class wanted to keep meeting this summer, the response that several of you had to the content of the Confirmation Class, the hungering that I sense for serious theological engagement, all of these have pointed me toward wanting to lay on you some fairly heavy thoughts about the nature of God during these middle three Sundays of July. I do this freely – even joyfully – out of the felt conviction that from time to time we need to review the basics of our faith – to look at the theological grounding and insight which give us our reasons for being living, practicing Christians. We need to do this kind of seeking in the light of our scriptural traditions but also in the light of present-day scientific and spiritual knowledge. And this is probably a particularly significant time to do this kind of exploration with the recent spate of anti-God books by self-proclaimed atheists such as Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and most especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion.
Now, I’m not going to try to respond to Dawkins and these other authors in these sermons, by attempting to put forward a proof for the existence of God. Many, much more learned that I, have done this. Rather, we will be seeking after the meaning of God for ourselves as believing Christians, already affirming that God IS – and is there for us. Moreover, as Christians we will be thinking about God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ; this is the pivotal datum, as the author of the book of Hebrews shows us so well, around which the meaning of God revolves for us.
It’s important to note that what I say here may not square with your image of God. These sermons are not intended to be exhaustive about the meaning of God for you, but rather to open us up to dialogue which can be continued over in Gudmundsson Hall at the coffee hour and beyond. I invite each of you, through this process, to think through the meaning of God in your own life and to be open to respond to one another.
OK – take a deep breath – here we go.
God is a materialist. That is to say, God exists in and expresses Godself through this world of matter in which we live – this world “or rocks and trees, of skies and seas” (as we love to sing in This Is My Father’s World), but also, as we’ll sing at the end of the service, of the sparrow and the whale and the swirling stars, and moreover this world of machines and buildings and computers and people. The building-blocks of creation, that which we know most readily because we experience it with our senses, is of the very essence of God and is the means through which we most clearly come to know our Lord.
Now, this may seem self-evident on the face of it. But to declare that the very essence of God becomes known through matter is to run counter to two dominant strands of contemporary religious practice and belief. The first is the “spiritualizing” of God, which has come about from the nature of God being perceived as pure spirit: some ethereal “something out there” that cannot be experienced by our senses. To perceive God as pure spirit is to put distance between persons and God in such a way as to deny the vitality of, say, Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship or the legitimate intimacy of Jesus’ “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” It is fine to offer such scriptural affirmations as “God is love” and “God is spirit”, for these help to give us some feel for God’s spiritual reality even in our limited human language. But when such affirmations are raised to the level of encompassing the whole nature of God then we have spiritualized God into an abstract principle which has little bearing on our everyday lives.
The second unfortunate trend in contemporary belief is a separation between the material and the spiritual. For most religious people to be called a “materialist” is a bad thing, and you’ve probably heard many a sermon about the evils of a materialistic society (especially around Christmas-time). Usually what ministers are trying to get at here is that too much concern for the material world (especially the hoarding up of possessions and wealth) leads people away from the development of their spiritual resources. Obviously, there is truth here – as in the classic instance of parents who feel they can buy their children’s love by giving them all matter of things – but it is a truth which becomes distorted when the material and the spiritual are separated into two distinct compartments. The Biblical tradition tells us that the material and the spiritual are parts of a whole, and that God is not present in one but absent from the other.
The Hebrew Scriptures see God as actively entering the process of creation. The created world is the means by which God expresses Godself. In the 104th Psalm God is glorified through the things of creation: light, waters, winds, fire; and also cattle, plants, bread, wine, oil. Later on in this Psalm the author exclaims: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” (vs. 24) This paean to the things of creation is possible for the Psalmist because God is understood as being fully a part of the creative order. The 20th century paleontologist and Christian mystic Teilhard de Chardin affirms this same understanding of creation when he writes that Christ came to clothe himself in holy matter, to save and to sanctify it, and that God shines in glory at the peak of matter into which spirit has been brought.
Our culture has tended to downplay the importance of matter in creation – resulting in what we are increasingly coming to discover is an ecological unwholeness and the need for a renewed attention to the “greening” of our planet. Possibly the reason for this is that much of matter is inanimate, while God, we have been told, is concerned with life and especially human life. At this point science is beginning to help us see that the sharp distinction we once held between life and not-life is no longer valid.
In his novel The Andromeda Strain Michael Crichton has a group of scientists trying to find a definition for life. After throwing out all the old definitions because one could always find exceptions, they decide that energy conversion is the hallmark of life. But bacteriologist Peter Leavitt challenges this definition by presenting what he calls “three living things”: a swatch of black cloth, a watch, and a piece of granite. The cloth, placed in sunlight, becomes warm – converting radiant energy to heat. When it is objected that this is not purposeful, Leavitt responds, “How do you know it is not purposeful?” The watch has a radium dial which was decaying and thus light was being produced. And finally the granite: “This is alive,” Leavitt said. “It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years…. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan.” (Maybe the fad of pet rocks of several years ago wasn’t so crazy after all!)
Well, even if this fictional argument invites incredulity, the point for our purpose is that as science expands its horizons the facile definitions of the past become less definite. Nor, in dealing with the cosmic God, can we as Christians be facile in our definitions of life and creation.
God enters our world – this matter – this life and seeming non-life – through the Christ-event. This is what is meant when we talk about incarnation. Having established through creation that God is expressed in matter, God does not stop there but takes the next step by expressing the essence of God through human form. Because God is incarnate in Jesus-who-is-the-Christ, we are given to know that the world is, in Teilhard’s words, a “holy place” or “holy matter”. That very material thing – the cross – has come to symbolize for us God’s involvement in this material, secular world. Toyohiko Kagawa, a famous Japanese Christian, affirms this same thought when he writes, “The religion of Jesus affirmed that God experiences humanity in the very midst of the secular and thereby sanctifies the whole of everyday life.”
It is precisely because of the incarnation that we are Christians and not followers of Moses, Socrates, Buddha, or any other great spiritual or philosophical leader. And we are enabled to believe in that incarnation – and therefore the sanctification of “holy matter” – because of the Bible’s affirmation that God is revealed in history. History is the recorded acts of human beings and of matter, and it is into this physical record that God comes – seeking a covenant with God’s people. Because God is revealed in history, we cannot deny the reality or the meaningfulness of this world; and this means – among other things – that we must work against principalities and powers to improve it.
Edmund Jacob in his Theology of the Old Testament sums up what we have been talking about in terms of creation, incarnation, and God revealed in history. Jacob says, “…the word of God in the Old Testament directs and inspires a single history which begins with the word of God pronounced at creation and which is completed by the word made flesh. Therefore, it is in history that the word is revealed…..” The building-blocks of creation – the personhood of Christ – the empirical data of history – these are the fundamentals of our belief which reveal to us a God who comes to us through our material world.
Now, what does all this heavy theology have to do with the way we live our everyday, on-going lives? There are many obvious applications to our concerns for ecology and the need for “greening”, which I won’t belabor, for the meaning of God revealed in matter shapes our concern for the whole of creation and not just for human life.
Perhaps most pointedly, the idea of God revealed in matter gives us new insight into how we view “materialistic” in the more narrow sense of that term. (If you remember Madonna’s song of a few years ago, “I am a material girl”, perhaps you can now find a subtle theological truth hidden behind these lyrics…..or maybe not.) To say, as this line of thought would logically lead us, that God is revealed through, say, our money, our possessions, our “things”, is not to sanctify what is for some an unconscious search for salvation through ever greater possessions and status. But it is to say that we need not feel guilty about possessions and material things out of a false separation of the material and the spiritual, as long as we are aware that is it God who lives and works through our possessions, and that therefore we use them in the Lord’s name. In the final analysis, the idea of God revealed through matter means that none of our possessions are “ours”, just as this world and this cosmos are not “ours”. Rather, we are entrusted with their use – not out of guilt but out of the love of God in all things.
This realization can also give us a different feeling for the reality behind a catch-phrase like “persons are more important than property”. The need for such a phrase arose as looters were shot on the spot – a reaction out of all proportion to the action – and property rights, in many cases, were deemed more important than personal and civil rights. Yes, it is true that in terms of the value of human life “persons are more important than property”, but the very fact that such a slogan had to be coined means that material property had become an end in itself rather that a medium through which God is expressed. Creation and incarnation mean that both persons and property have a significance, but this is a significance given by God and not by our owning of property or our using of other persons.
God in matter as revealed in history also means that actions in this world are important. Kagawa, who could say that “the world of matter is a manifestation of the Word of God,” was heavily involved in social action in his native Japan because this kind of action could not be divorced from his mystic spirituality. If we see God in all matter, then we must work toward the improvement of this material sphere and not compartmentalize our Sunday spirituality from our weekday activity.
God expresses Godself in all matter – in scenery and in Stratospheres, in clouds and in computers, in persons and in property and in possessions. To so realize the scope of the God we worship is to imbue all of this world with the highest spirituality, and thus to affirm the Creator – the revealed God incarnate – in whom we live and move and have the very essence of our own being.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
July 8, 2007