IS GOD FOR REAL?

Every January for about the past forty years or so senior seminarians in the Episcopal Church take a four-day test called The General Ordination Examination. They are tested on what are called the seven canonical areas in which ordained clergy are expected to have some expertise and knowledge: scripture, church history, pastoral care, liturgy and so forth.

Many years ago there was a question in the area of theology that asked very simply “Is God black?” The student was to write an essay of about 1500 words in response to that question. The expectation was that there be enough details within the response that it could be assumed that the student had a sufficient grasp of the theology of the Episcopal Church. Granted, one may debate what “sufficient” means and how that can be determined based on only one theological question; but that debate can and should be left to another day.

That being said, folklore has it – meaning that I cannot prove it as it came to me secondhand – that one seminarian wrote a three-word response and that that response was sufficient. That response? “Yes, she is.” To this day I still marvel at both the brevity and the theological depth of that answer. It requires no more explanation and any explanation that would be given would only cloud the issue. On the other hand, if the respondent replied, “No, he is not?”, the essay would have to go on at great length to define and defend God’s male gender and color of skin and why God has gender and skin in the first place. And that would only be for starters.

The deeper question, however, is this: “Is God for real?” In other words, does God exist or is God simply the figment of our imagination? Or both? On the one hand we cannot prove that God exists. We can and do come close, but we cannot prove it without a shadow of doubt or else everyone would not only believe in God, we would all know God exists because we can prove it in the same way we can prove to another that we exist – by having that person reach out and physically touch us, see with his own eyes.

We cannot do that with God. We cannot prove God exists. We can only believe. And we do. And in our belief God becomes a figment of our imagination just as heaven and hell do. We cannot prove they exist either. We can only imagine what they are like. No one has ever seen heaven or hell and then returned to this life to tell us what either is like. Same with God. So we must imagine what God is like, even imagine what God looks like. Yes, God is Spirit, we say, but we cannot imagine spirit – a bird will not do here! – and so we put some kind of flesh and bones in our imagining of God.

With all that said, can we believers be asked, “Is God for real if all you have is some figment of your imagination about God, your God?” We even have to ask ourselves that question. In the end, we respond that we believe God is real, is for real, because we base our lives on that belief. In fact, God is so real that any words we use to describe God fall short. Better say nothing than to say anything. Better to believe than not or to say simply, “For me God is for real.”

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS

In the court of law there is a provision called “The statute of limitations”. It is placed there to allow the injured party, however one defines “injured”, to have enough time to obtain enough evidence to pursue a case against the party who inflicted the injury. But there are limits to the length of time one has in cases of misdemeanor. Criminal cases often have no limitations set in law.

The origin of the statute of limitations actually comes from biblical times and it was instituted to protect the poor. Deuteronomy 15:1 states this: “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts.” In Old Testament times the poor often borrowed money from the wealthy in order to simply survive. The statute in Deuteronomy was promulgated to keep the poor from a life of abject poverty. It was also a reminder that if the Hebrew community was to survive as God’s Chosen People, those who had an abundance of blessings, especially financial blessings, were to share with those who were not so blessed.

I suspect that there are millions of people today saddled with credit card debt, much of it of their own foolish making, who would love to have such a statute in place. That, of course, would miss the point of the original statute just as it was missed by those for whom it was originally intended. Yes, there were those back then who abused the system just as there are those who abuse it today. But the truth is that the law was written more to help the blessed, the rich, than it was to help the not-so-blessed, the poor.

In many ways the law was a reminder of two fundamental truths. The first is that those who are blessed with abundance are so blessed only because of the grace of God. Why they – and we – have such blessings and others do not is a question only the bestower of such blessings, namely, God, can answer. Their and our response is to be thankful and to share some of our abundance with the less blessed. The law was instituted to ensure that happened.

The second point about the statute of limitations is that it is a reminder that there is a statute of limitations on everything, the most important of all being our very lives. The span of life, everyone’s life, is limited. We only have a number of years to live and no one knows just what that number is. The only truth we know for certain is that someday our number will be called and all we have obtained, all our possessions, all our wealth, all our blessings, will be left behind. We take none of that with us into death.

In essence that truth was what was behind the original statute in the bible. The people were to share their blessings one with another, especially the rich with the poor, now, in this life. as a way for the rich to give thanks for their blessings, none of which they could hoard forever, and for the poor to be able to live with dignity in spite of it all.

The same is true for us. There is a limitation on how long we will keep that with which we have been blessed. Better to share now of our own free will with those whom we know need our help now than to have others do it for us after we have died.

KNOWING GOD

There are times in my life when I try to remove every thought from my head, rid myself of every distraction and simply concentrate on God. Those times are always few and far between, and always, always, always fleeting. I try in my imagining to grab hold of God, the concept of God out there somewhere before anything and everything began. I get that far and then get stopped dead in my tracks when I ask myself how God got there. I have no answer for that and so I quickly move on to whatever was occupying my mind before I foolishly thought about thinking about God.

And yet, even though I cannot even in the slightest way imagine who God is, how God is or anything about God that might be intellectually satisfactory, I still believe in God. There are those, we call themselves atheists, who will say that I am foolish. “Why put any faith in a being you have no way of understanding,” they would ask. “Just move on and deal with the reality that you can prove exists instead of wasting your time on some being who cannot be proved?” they would argue.

I would have no logical response but only a faith response; and that would be that I simply believe in God even if there is no possible way that I can know for certain that my God exists, Even more, there is no way I can prove that my God loves me unconditionally, created and still creates everything that was and is and will be or that my God always forgives me even when I do not deserve to be forgiven. I simply believe all that and more and do not need proof that any or all of it is true.

Father Ron Rolheiser says that we believers know God as a light so bright that the light is perceived as darkness. In other words, God so overwhelms us with what we can see and perceive that we become blinded by the light of it all. We end up seeing only darkness when we want to see God and so we give up on that intellectual pursuit and allow ourselves to get back to being disturbed by whatever it was that was distracting us from thinking about God.

That sounds, seems, crazy, I know. And it probably is. But that is what atheists, non-believers, do not see. They see God as darkness, as not being there or anywhere, and thus not being period. What has happened is that God’s light is so overwhelming, so bright, that they have been blinded by it, blinded by God’s reality, that they believe their only response is to assert that God does not exist. It is akin to not seeing the forest for all the trees, is it not?

In the final analysis, I think, the only difference between believers and unbelievers is that, although both have been blinded by the light of God, non-believers look into the darkness and see nothing, while we believers look into that same darkness and see everything; we see God. We see God with the light of faith. We can’t explain it. We can’t understand it. And we hardly ever want to go down the road of trying to understand it.

I know all this sounds crazy to those who fail to see the light within the darkness. I also know that it is only faith that allows us to see when we are blinded by the light.

THE WEDDING

Last Saturday I was honored and privileged to walk my daughter Tracy down the aisle at Trinity Cathedral, to “give her away”, and then witness and bless her marriage to Da’Mon Brooks. It is a memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life, as all fathers do when they give their daughter in marriage to someone who they believe will never be worthy enough, fathers being fathers, but trust that he will love and cherish her until they are parted by death.

As parents that’s all we can ask of the one who becomes the spouse of our child who will always remain our child even as she is a grown woman. That is all we can ask of our child as well; in this instance, for Tracy to love and cherish Da’Mon until they are parted by death, no matter what life brings. Neither they nor we know what life will bring. What we do know is that there will be ups and downs, good times and bad, successes and failures – the whole gamut that is a part of life and marriage.

As a priest I had the additional privilege of bestowing the church’s blessing on Tracy and Da’Mon. That is an awesome privilege but one tempered with the knowledge that the church that bestowed that blessing was the group of family and friends who gathered to celebrate their becoming husband and wife. We all witnessed and blessed. We all gave Tracy to Da’Mon and Da’Mon to Tracy.

Marriage is never just between two people. For any marriage to endure, for any love to last until death, the love and support and blessing of others are an absolute must. Yes, marriage begins with the realization of the man and the woman that life is not meant to be lived alone. In fact, as the parable in Genesis reminds us, God even says as much: “It is not good for wo/man to be alone.” And it is not.

And then when the man and the woman find that person each wants to share the rest of his or her life with, love between the two begins to grow until, united in marriage and growing through all the ups and downs married life brings, the two eventually become one. That oneness does not come all at once, overnight or even in a short time, even as much as each wishes it could and would.

The walk down the aisle, the exchange of consent and vows, the giving of rings, the blessing bestowed are just the beginning. Becoming one in love takes time, hard work and patience. And it takes the love and support of family and friends – their church, if you will – who will be there to hold up, lift up, stand up for when needed; who will be there to laugh with, cry with, celebrate with when needed.

Each wedding is a reminder to all married couples present, as one of the prayers in the ceremony makes abundantly clear, of the vows they made perhaps decades ago, and asks that, having witnessed the vows just made, they “may find their [own] lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed.” Weddings are a reminder of just how much we need one another in this life and in this world, of the truth not only that it is not good for us to be alone, but that we cannot go it alone either.