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As people deconstruct and reconstruct their faith in more progressive ways there are a few questions that keep coming up. They tend to be variations on three commons theme:
How can I begin to expand my image of God?
How do I relate to other religious traditions and learn from them?
Why do I keep coming back to Christ as the centre of my faith?
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
So I came into the office and I made myself a coffee and as I was doing that it made me think about a coffee that I had this week. I met with someone which is not strange at all, I do that with people from the community all the time. Oftentimes people come because they have questions about God or theology. It's kind of my job. This person laid them right on the line.
Speaker 1:They had three questions for me. How do I expand my imagination of God beyond the old man in the sky? What do we do with the truth that we learn in other religions and science apart from our Christianity? And if all of that is true, how do I know that Christianity is real, that Christianity is for me? Those were some pretty big questions.
Speaker 1:We had a really great conversation coming out of it, but I thought why not pull together a little video talking about some of the ways that I approach these things. Probably most of us have faced these questions at some point, Probably some of us are still wrestling with them. I know I am as well. So let's talk about it. How do we expand our imagination of God?
Speaker 1:What do we do with the truth we find apart from Christianity? And if all that is true, why do we find ourselves coming back to the Christian story? Well, how do we expand our imagination beyond the old man in the sky? This is a tough one, but there's a couple things that I think are really important here. And first is to understand that you don't have to let go of the old man in the sky.
Speaker 1:That can be a really beautiful image of the divine depending on where you're at and what you need in that moment. That image becomes problematic, it becomes constricting when it's the only way we can think of to imagine God, when it's the only image that we have for God. But you don't actually need to let it go. You don't actually need to wipe it from your memory. What you need to do is add new images, new metaphors, new ways of thinking about and speaking about God to round out your full image of what God is and how God comes to you.
Speaker 1:There are times when thinking of God as a loving father or mother, a parent can be really comforting. That's beautiful. Don't let that go if it's important to you, but continue to add new ways to think about God to it. One of the things I like to remind myself is this phrase transcend and include. Even as I transcend old ways of being, ways of thinking, I still include those stories, those experiences, those old things with me.
Speaker 1:They're still part of me. I don't wipe them out, I don't forget them, I don't leave them behind, I bring them with me into the future, but I add new experiences to my journey, I add new language to my vocabulary, I add things that become part of me throughout my story. And I think that goes the same way when we talk about our imagination of God. So you don't have to excise those images that have been meaningful for you in the past, even if you recognize that they're not necessarily helpful for you right now, you don't need to get down on yourself when that pops into your mind. What you want to do is fill in the gaps in your vocabulary to expand your imagination.
Speaker 1:And when I say vocabulary, that's not by accident because I think actually the way that we speak of God is one of the primary things that informs the ways we think or imagine God. And so here's a small thing, but it's something that's been really helpful in my story, and it might be helpful for yours as well. One of the things that I do is I shift my vocabulary. If you've heard me preach before, you'll recognize that I often shift interchangeably between the language of God and the divine. That's not an accident, it's not just a quirk of my vocabulary, It's something that I do to keep myself thinking bigger, to push back the boundaries of my imagination of God, and to keep myself looking for new ways to imagine God.
Speaker 1:Often when I say God, I tend to think of that old man in the sky with a beard, and that's very limiting for my imagination. When I say the divine, it immediately sort of snaps me out of some of those old ways of thinking into something that's more expansive. I imagine God as the personality that sits behind the universe, as the love that sits behind the creation of all things. I move away from this sort of anthropomorphized imagination of God to something bigger, more beautiful, more expansive than all of that. And that really helps me to do it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you get stuck in a rut sometimes and just shifting from the language of God in your prayer to the divine can really begin to expand that imagination. And again, it's not to get rid of God. I'm never gonna stop talking about God as God or God as Father or God as the Christ who comes and saves me. All of those images are deeply important to me. But when I add new language on top of that, I begin to understand, begin to expand this mosaic of all the ways that I think about God.
Speaker 1:No longer is the divine constrained to just the images that have been handed to me in my journey, but God once again becomes that being that is too big for me to contain, and that's really beautiful for me. So one of the things we can do to begin this story and expand our imagination is just to shift our language in subtle ways to recognize that we're not necessarily trying to let go of anything as much as we are trying to add new things into our imagination. And that brings us to the second question, well what do I do with all of the things that are out there that are true in other religious practices? Well actually, once we begin to expand our imagination of God from just an old man living in the sky, actually begin to find ourselves willing and able to take on all of the different truth that comes to us throughout our experience of the world. Arthur Holmes was famous for saying that all truth is God's truth.
Speaker 1:And really what he's saying here is that if something is true, then it must be connected to the fundamental truth of the universe. The God who creates and sustains and upholds all things. The God that we are reaching towards in our Christian faith, the God that we are reaching towards in all of our different images and metaphors we use to speak of the divine. So all of a sudden it becomes of course okay to encounter the truth that our Muslim friends bring to the table when we dialogue with them. We become enamored with the truth that we learn in native spirituality as it speaks to us of a God who is present and invested in all things in all creation in the very ground that sustains us and gives life to us.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden we recognize that if it's true about God, it is something that the Christian story can grab a hold of and take hold of. This is actually one of the really interesting things about the history of the Christian story. We actually grew, we actually became one of the most celebrated religious stories in the world, particularly in the first few centuries of the Christian story by grabbing hold of truth wherever we found it. Wherever we found something beautiful, we would recognize the beauty in it. We would recognize our experience of God in it.
Speaker 1:We took things like the winter solstice and we said to recognize the shortening of the days and the darkness that's coming and then at the darkest moment to recognize that light reappears and comes back to us and that reminds us of the story of the Christ child coming into the world. This is an experience of recognizing truth around us. And we've done this all throughout our history as we've adapted to different expressions, cultures, different languages throughout the Christian journey. One of things that we have done from the very beginning is believe that the message of God is embedded in the story of Christ, not in the particular words of our sacred text. So Christianity has always translated the Bible into all kinds of different languages because we recognize that truth cannot be contained in just certain words, just certain tellings.
Speaker 1:It is always there for all of us to discover in all kinds of new ways. Even translating our sacred text into different languages is a way of recognizing that truth is bigger than just our version. Truth is out there and wherever we see it, we grab hold of it, we learn from it, we incorporate that in to the Christian story. Now there are ways that you can do that that become a real problem. In the early centuries of Christianity, syncretism was actually this really beautiful interplay between the Christian story recognizing the beauty and truth in other stories.
Speaker 1:At some point along the way Christianity became a dominant story. And now syncretism becomes something a little different. It's actually ways that we appropriate and we colonize different stories. We have to be really careful about that now that Christianity is such a dominant story in the world. I think we have to recognize that grabbing a hold of someone else's story, recognizing the beauty in it is good, but taking it, calling it our own now, incorporating it into our religious practices actually can be something that diminishes that voice in the world.
Speaker 1:So there's a really tricky balance here where early when Christianity was growing, when it was finding its footing in the world, to find resonance with other practices, traditions, rituals, and incorporating them into our story was good and true and beautiful. Now we have to be careful with that so that we can still recognize truth and beauty in other stories. We can still celebrate what's good there, but we don't diminish the voice of those other stories in the world the way that we sometimes can and let's be honest the way we have in the last, say, to fifteen hundred years of the Christian story. But the bottom line is, to worship a God who expresses themselves in the Christ is not to say that we can't recognize the beauty and the truth, the stories around us that communicate the divine to us. Every person you encounter is made in the image of God, and therefore every person you encounter has something to teach you about God.
Speaker 1:I really truly believe that this is one of the superpowers of the Christian story that we have at our disposal all of the learnings, all of the beauty, all of the truth that we encounter in every single person we meet. We can learn from everyone and that makes us more able to encounter the God who is in and through all of us all the time. But again, if all of that is true, if God really is bigger than our language and we need to constantly push back the boundaries and find new ways, new vocabulary, new images through which to think about God? If God is present in literally every human being who lives and breathes and we can learn something about God through them, why do we still hold on to the Christian story? Why am I a Christian minister?
Speaker 1:Why do I call myself a Christian in the tradition of Jesus? And this one is going to be a little different for everyone, but there are things that are important to me about the Christian story and keep me holding on to a very orthodox understanding of the way that God steps in the history and the way that God comes to us in the Christian tradition. That said, I'm not so naive to pretend that I am an unbiased reader. I didn't necessarily grow up in an environment that was particularly religious, but just being a Canadian, Christianity is the water in which we swim, it's the air we breathe, and those stories have a way of dominating our imagination of the world. And I'm not gonna pretend that I am unbiased, I'm not gonna pretend that I'm not influenced by that.
Speaker 1:However, I do think I'm open minded enough to challenge and interrogate some of my assumptions, and still come back to the Christian story as the one that I choose for myself. And for me, the reason that I do that centers around two main ideas. As I understand it, all of human history is predicated on the idea of sacrifice. We form our social groups, we found our social cohesion in the designation of an other or an enemy. As human beings, we have this drive to know who we are over and against someone else.
Speaker 1:In some ways, this is our original sin that has tainted every human being and every human culture, the need for an outsider. This is how we know we're on the inside. It's how we know we're a group by knowing that someone is not one of us. And so what we do is we sacrifice people. I don't mean this necessarily in the religious terms of a sacrifice to a god, but we push someone away in order to define the group.
Speaker 1:It's what we've been doing since the very beginning. Religion comes along as a way of ritualizing that. Now there are insiders, there are outsiders, there's us, and there's them, and we create rituals that sacralize this idea of pushing someone or something aside to know who we really are. In some ways this is what every religious system is doing, including the entire story that leads to the Christ. However, in the Christ what we see is the inversion of that story.
Speaker 1:The God who comes as the sacrifice that we need. The God who allows God's self to become a sacrifice to humanity. And this is really important for me, to understand that God is not sacrificing God's self to God in order to appease God, it doesn't really make any sense philosophically to me. Why would a God ever need a sacrifice? God can do whatever God wants.
Speaker 1:That's sort of the definition of being God. Yet God allows God's self to become a sacrifice to humanity, to expiate this need within humanity to drive someone out and to know that we are welcomed and forgiven because we have pushed someone else away. And in that God shows us what we've been doing throughout human history all along, all the time. Every other time we scapegoat someone else, every time we sacrifice someone else, we can always justify that. We might push Muslims aside and say they're the problem with everything in our society and as crazy as that is, can justify that by pointing to some Muslim somewhere who has done some terrible thing.
Speaker 1:When we push someone aside who is different than us, we can always find something in them to point to that's broken or twisted and that allows us to justify what we're doing. But when we sacrifice the Christ, someone who owes no debt to violence in the words of Rene Girard, When we see our violence up on the cross and what we've done to Christ, what happens is now we see what we do to each other all the time. We see all of our religious systems for what they've always been. We see all of our systems of in grouping and othering and fighting and tribal warfare and nations and pushing other people aside. We see it all for what it is and we repent.
Speaker 1:And that story then begins like a virus to infiltrate us and work its way backwards. It begins this long process of sanctification where once I realize what I've done to Christ, I begin to see what I do to my neighbor. I begin to see what I do to those I push aside. I begin to see what I do to those who think differently than me, who are different politically than me, who are different racially or ethnically from me. And I begin to set that aside and repent of it, and I become more like Christ.
Speaker 1:This is what's happening in the Christian story. The inversion of all of our religious stories, all of our social stories, everything that has created all of the violence and strife and competition in humanity. That is being overturned by God, because God allows God's self to become the sacrifice to appease all of our need for another, and we are then freed from it. The other thing that I find really compelling in the Christian story is the humiliation of the God character. God steps into the human story in Christ, and Christ allows himself to be crucified.
Speaker 1:A humiliating death at the hands of humanity. He's stripped naked, he's nailed to a cross, he's left there gasping for breath until he finally dies in the view of everyone. And all throughout human history, in all of our religious systems, it's always this pyramid of humans elevating other humans who speak on behalf of God or represent God, and then God at the very top of that tower. But now in the Christ, everything is turned upside down, and God shows us that God is so strong, so powerful, so infinitely above humanity that the only thing left is give all of that away. This is not a needy God who desperately wants our adoration and affection, our worship and our sacrifice.
Speaker 1:This is a God who says, I need nothing from you. I am completely self sufficient. I am truly a God unlike anything you can imagine. And therefore, I am so powerful, so loving, so good that the only thing left for me to do is to give it all away. To humiliate myself before you, to show you that nothing matters to me other than my love for you, and you have nothing to do in return but to receive my love and accept my welcome into fellowship and at my table.
Speaker 1:This is a God who asks literally nothing of us because this God needs nothing of us. This God is only one who gives God's self away, who loves, who sacrifices, who will even go to the extent of humiliating God's self to let us know that we are completely loved. In these two ways for me, Christianity is different than all of the different religious systems that I have come across. And while I recognize the beauty in different religious systems, I recognize things that I can learn from and incorporate into my story. It's that inversion of the human expectation of God.
Speaker 1:It's that inversion of the human expectation of what it means to have social grouping and social cohesion that keeps bringing me back to the story of Christ. And that ironically is then what allows me to see the truth all around me everywhere and that's the story that allows me to push back the boundaries of my imagination of God to see God in new ways around me all the time. These three questions are this really interesting link. The more I expand my imagination of God, the more I see God around me in other systems and structures in science and religion. The more I do that, the more I recognize the uniqueness of the Christian story.
Speaker 1:The beauty of the God who comes to us and needs nothing from us. Who only wants to save us from ourselves and lead us into a new way of being. That drives me back to seeing God in new systems and structures and religions around me. That helps me see God in bigger, more beautiful ways all the time. All of this is part of what it means to follow the way of Jesus.
Speaker 1:To keep Jesus at the center of my imagination of the divine. To know that no matter how far I push back the boundaries, everything that the divine wants me to know about God is present in the selflessness, in the self sacrificing, in the infinite grace and peace of Jesus. And this is what I'm trying to live out in my life, in my interactions with each other, in the politics that I espouse, in the ways that I carry myself in my neighborhood, in my transactions, in my relationships with this world and those I meet in it. In all of these ways, I expand my energization of God and I keep myself centered on the way of Christ who is the one who saves me and welcomes me into relationship with that God.