Sermon 7-9-06
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church
Holy Unknowing
Ever had the experience of being unknown? When people know your name, they may know some other facts about you, they act as if they know who you are, but they really have no clue about how you think, what makes you tick, what your life is all about. They’re real sure of their opinions and can’t imagine that those opinions could be untrue, but the person they think you are is somebody you don’t know. It’s a strange experience. You feel like you’re invisible. You wonder: how could they fail so completely to know who you really are?
I’ve been on both ends of such encounters, as I’m sure many of you have been, as well. I’ve learned from these disturbing moments that I must strive always to stay open to learning more about people. I spent a week with my best friend from childhood. We went camping, hiking, and writing together in northern New Mexico and had a great time. We have known each other since we were 6 years old. We went to school, church, boy scouts, little league and everything else together all through childhood. It’s very reassuring to be known by my friend Bruce Urbschat. We both feel a constant sense of security in life, I think, because we know that at least one other human being really gets it about who we are.
Or at least has some idea of who we are! It was fascinating for me, and I think for him, to spend a whole week together, because we had not spent more than a day or two together in 30 years – and even then, those times only happened every other year or so. We live on opposite sides of the country, and we’ve both had full lives with families, kids, and careers. I spent the week learning more about who Urbschat is – this person I thought I knew so very well, about whom I have still so much to discover. Friendship is as much about discovering more of who each other is, as it is enjoying what we already know.
I suppose the same is true with God. I don’t know God to have a head, but if he or she did, I can just picture God shaking it in disappointment as “true believers” of various religions, and “true disbelievers” who reject all religion, propound with absolute certainty about who God is and isn’t, what God does and doesn’t want, what God does and doesn’t have to say. What a sad thing to be God, and be unknown and misunderstood by the very creatures God created! But the worst of it isn’t the ignorance, it’s the disinterest, the lack of curiosity and wonder that there might be more to God than they know – that’s what really hurts.
Who is God? Perhaps this is an answer: God is the One with whom we are most intimate, yet whom we know the least. God is the one closest to us, about whom we always will have infinitely more to learn.
So I have always admired this story in the Bible about the Areopagus in Athens, where the Greeks displayed statues of their gods. And there was one spot for a statue that they left empty, and dedicated “to an unknown God”. The Greeks were wise and they understood that their religion didn’t have all the answers. Along comes St Paul and tells the Greeks that he knows their unknown God. That’s the God he worships, made known, he preaches, by Jesus. Paul preached as if he had solved a riddle for the Greeks. But the riddle remained. Jesus points us toward God, reveals a lot about divine love and compassion, but the mystery of who God is remains. On the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus wasn’t sure who God was or where or what God was anymore. Jesus’ ideas about who God was died on the cross. On the other side of the cross, there was yet more to know. That’s what is so powerful about the gospel myth of the resurrection. The worst thing that can happen happens. Your religion and your faith gets wiped out. And yet there is still more. There’s another dimension to God on the other side. A universal presence that goes beyond all your images and expectations, from which you can draw strength and inspiration.
We’ve been there, have we not? Thought we knew who God is, and found out we didn’t know so well after all. Thought God was our Secret Service agent, always ready to take the fall for us, ready to take the bullet for us. Then we get hit with a terrible disease, we lose a career, or we lose a relationship that matters the world to us. We pray to the God we thought we knew, expecting results. And things don’t turn out the way we thought God would guarantee.
But like a friend we thought we knew so well, and for so long, but has so many more facets to them, ones we have yet to see, God turns out to be more and different than we believed. Indeed, that’s why I often tell people that I don’t believe in God, I just experience God. I encounter God, I feel God, but far be it for me to say that I know enough to have any beliefs in or about God. Beliefs sound way too certain and fixed, when I am in awe of God, when I am dumbfounded by my own ignorance about God, when I am on a lifelong quest to plumb the mysteries of God.
But our ignorance of the divine is a divine ignorance. That is, our humility before the mystery of God is itself a holy thing, something that ennobles us, makes us more of who we are meant to be as humans. I think that if the human race is to survive, it is going to require us to be profoundly humble, confessing our ignorance of who God is, and always staying open to further revelation of who God is. It’s a scary world largely because of fundamentalists of every religion who are absolutely certain about the nature, purposes, and laws of God, who aim to impose their certainty on everybody else. It’s happening right here in America – not just with mullahs in Iraq or Taliban in Afghanistan ordering women to hide themselves in burkhas because they are so sure it’s God’s will. We’ve got our own mullahs in America who are sure they know who God is and what God wants you and I to do. These Christian absolutists are busy dismantling our public school system, either home-schooling their kids or getting public money to run religious schools that teach that the earth was literally created in six days. We’ve got our own mullahs who are sure they know who God is, confident of how Jesus is going to come back at the “end times”. They are so eager for their predictions to come true that they are hastening the end of the world. These folks have more political power than ever. They are influencing America’s foreign policy. In their view, the sooner the Middle East melts down completely, the sooner Jesus will come back and rapture the fundamentalist Christians into heaven.
We need to offer a humble alternative to this kind of prideful, know-it-all religion that has gained such power in our country and elsewhere in the world. There’s something divine about humility, and by exercising this spiritual quality we can share something of God with others. It may seem paradoxical but I think it’s true: our ignorance of God is a gift we have to offer to the world. Our willingness to know more than we know, to experience more of God than we so far have touched or felt or seen – this itself can help to save the human race from the hubris that threatens us with extinction.