A friend asked me to preach in her stead as she was ill. I share this with anyone who cares. . .
Sausalito Presby. Ch. 8/7/2011
Scripture:
Gospel of Thomas: Vs. 2, 3
Jesus said: The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.
When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Children of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.
1 John: 4:7-8
My dear friends, let us love each other, since love is from God and everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.
Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.
Korzybski: Science and Sanity, p.35
'Say whatever you choose about the object, and whatever you might say is not it.' Or, in other words: 'Whatever you might say the object "is", well, it is not.
Hotei: (ca. 923)
Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?
Sermon Outline—Sausalito Aug. 7, 2011
Sermon Title:
God:A Meaningless Subject or Object
1. My life has passed through Akron, Ohio. Akron was the home of the evangelist, Rex Humbard and the Cathedral of Tomorrow. Curious, I went to his worship one Sunday. Probably over 1500 people. Pageantry, music, bands, singers. In the midst of the sermon, Humbard asked the congregation to close eyes and hold aloft a bill, a $10 or $20 to symbolize that they dedicate their wealth to God. As they did, the ushers went around and picked the money out of the raised hands.
2. Close your eyes, but keep your money in your pocket. If you believe in God, raise your hand. Good. Keep your eyes closed and put down your hand. If you don’t believe in God raise your hand. Excellent. Put your hands down. Now you can open your eyes.
3. So, who or what is this “god” that you just indicated you either believe in or don’t?
4. I am about to attempt something very difficult—almost impossible, in fact—to convince you to not take seriously the word “God”.
5. The only clear and plain description of God in the New Testament is that in 1 John: God is Love.
6. At least we can say God is Love. That has meaning, doesn’t it?
7. The word “Love”, we are insistently told, is a translation of three different words and meanings in the original Greek: Eros, Philos and Agape. This has become almost a dogma in Christian circles. There were actually a few others, Storge and Thelema were the two most common. But John did use “Agape”—selfless love. Does that really help us to define God? Not really but, in a strange way, it does point to God—but back to this later.
8. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus:
o Sisyphus was a king in Greek mythology. He considered himself cleverer than Zeus and the other gods. Zeus condemned him to an eternity of rolling a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it escape as he neared the top, and roll back down. Sisyphus had to do it over.
o This is our condition. We are born into the world. Thrown from our mother’s warm and comfortable womb into a frightening, unknown, and cold world. Our lives proceed through moments of joy and ecstasy, but a great deal of toil, strife, boredom, pain and suffering. Each moment of life takes us closer and closer to death. Even in the long term, some day, in some future epoch, the earth will fall into to sun and be incinerated—or some other such cosmological end.
o Albert Camus wrote a philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: The only real important question is, “Why not just commit suicide?”
o And his answer, “Embrace the absurd”. Revel in it by living the life of pleasure, theatrical pretense, or conquest.
9. I propose a different response. The answer of the Gospel of Thomas. The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.
10. So what is it that we are to seek? Camus is not entirely wrong. Life lived alone and singular is absurd. So what we seek is a reason not to commit suicide.
11. Or put another way, we are to seek a purpose, a Ground of Being, to bring us away from the absurdity of our singularity. To bring meaning to our lives. And when we find that purpose we will be disturbed and astonished. Not disturbed as anxious, but disturbed as when a pan of water is sitting quietly and you dissolve an ingredient by stirring it with a spoon. The water is disturbed into action. And then we will live a life of astonishment.
12. This, to steal from Cervantes, “this is our quest,” To spend a lifetime, not tilting at windmills, but finding our Ground of Being, the place where we are to stand, a reason for existence. A spiritual reality where we are disturbed and astonished. Let me be cute and coin the word GOB for Ground of Being.
13. I asked about your belief in God, not because I really care whether you believe or don’t believe. Remember that I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you mean by the word “God”. Discussions about God and whether you believe or not are meaningless. I go further, “I don’t even know myself what I meant in that moment.”
14. Words, according to Humpty Dumpty, don’t really have any meaning in themselves, they just have the meaning we give them. They have no life of their own. They are just pointers, or according to Alfred Korzybski, they are the map, but not the geography. If you have a map, there are symbols on it. There may be a bridge symbol for each of the six bridges. But when you arrive at any bridge it may be like the Golden Gate bridge or it may be the small wooden bridge over a chasm in the hills above San Rafael. The symbols may be the same, but the bridges will not.
15. So when you use the word God, it means just the meaning you give it—because it is a metaphor to explain your encounter with the Sacred. It is like the bridge symbol. My bridge will not be like your bridge. In fact, the river may have risen and collapsed my bridge which is no longer there.
16. Do you believe in God? Is there a God? These are meaningless questions. The word “God” is not god. In the words of Hotei, “It is a finger, pointing to the moon.”
17. The real question we might better be asking is, “What is my purpose in life,” “What is worth giving myself to?” And that is a question we continue to pursue for all of life. It is a question for which we can quest. We seek a purpose—or we live in absurdity. And when we find that purpose, if it is worth the price of a lifetime, it will disturb us, move us, astonish us. It may not be our God, but it will be our GOB.
18. The answer can’t be anything less than love, being a Follower of the Way—which is what the early Christians called themselves. Jesus says to love others as we love ourselves. When John writes, “God is love” then he is pointing to the inter-relationship of love. That all beings are related in God, in love. This is our spiritual quest, to discern our ground of being and being disturbed, to be astonished and find God there—not a word but a reality.
19. I have had many mentors and teachers in my life—some I knew and who knew me and some who just taught me via “distance learning”. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the latter. I’ve only been in his gathering a few times, but I learned much from him through his work and life. A key Buddhist concept is “sunyata”. Westerners usually, erroneously, translate it as “emptiness” but Thich Nhat Hanh translates more accurately, as “Interbeing.” He writes:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. The cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too.
20. Another person who has brought this home to me, this understanding of God, is your own Renee Rico. I had the privilege of knowing her when she was in seminary and interning at Westminster. She brought to us her vast awareness of Interbeing in her knowledge and concern for the environment.
21. I return to my question, “Do you believe in God”? The better question is Do you experience God who IS Love, and, if love, then the God who is Interbeing, who glues us all together, because we all Inter-are. I am driven to seek, find, be disturbed and astonished, by Interbeing.
22. A tribe of natives in Brazilian Amazon basin teach their children that to become human we must “make room in oneself for the immensity of the universe.” Unless we do so we will never find our true nature. Fragments of our nature will take each further away from our center.
23. Now breathe. You’ve just heard a lot of words. People who practice Zen are extremely suspicious of words. We take Korzybski and Hotei to heart. So all these words are merely the finger pointing to the moon of experience, not dogma about God.
24. But, if you let all the words just swirl around in your mind like a zen koan, somewhere among them you may find something to inform your spiritual quest.
25. I conclude with a warning Zen story:
Finding a Piece of the Truth
One day Mara, the Evil One, was travelling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up on wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara’s attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth."
"Doesn’t this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a dogma out of it."
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