THE TRIVIALIZATION OF GOD A Sermon by Paul R. Powell St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, New Orleans Sunday, January 22, 2012 Donald McCullough, then President of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote a book published in 1995 with the intriguing title, The Trivialization of God: the Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity. On the dust jacket is a big gold campaign sort of button with GOD on it. If I had thought of it in time, I would have had one made up for each of us to wear this morning. One of the book s reviewers claimed that what J. B. Phillips Your God Is Too Small did for his generation, McCullough s book has done for the generation at the turn of the 21 st century. And I would not disagree with that assessment at all. Over several Sundays during the coming months, I will be preaching a series of sermons based somewhat loosely on this remarkable book. On any given Sunday all over this and many other cities, you will find churches of every stripe comfortably at worship of a god who looks, thinks, and acts as they do. It is quite difficult for us and a few other churches to maintain something of a traditional, liturgical style of music when we are surrounded by churches whose worship more nearly resembles a rock concert than worship. It would be so easy for us to dismiss that style of worship except that we would have to engage then in the actual exercise of our own faith from whatever intellectual or spiritual framework we might muster. At this point I should pause for you to let out a big yawn, because the last thing most Christians want to talk about is a God who challenges their minds and their spirits. What kind of God do you worship? Is that God male, female, white, black, Hispanic, Asian? Do you enter this sanctuary or any other place with a sense of fear and trembling over the possibility of meeting up with the real God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Sarah, and our God as well? If you ve noticed anything at all about my preaching style it is that I ask a lot of questions. And I do so because after nearly fifty years in church work of one sort and another, I still have more questions than answers. So, if you are looking for answers this morning, continue your nap and we ll wake you when it s time to leave. We sometimes say that you don t have to park your brain at the door here. Really? Well, maybe you don t, but then again maybe we choose to listen for the familiar themes of our Baptist way of thinking without ever having our minds and
spirits challenged to find the God who himself challenges everything we think, and everything we do, and everything we are. Celebrated American author Annie Dillard asks, Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? And she suggests that we modern Christians are like children playing with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT with which to kill a Sunday morning. She even goes so far as to say that we should all be wearing crash helmets and life preservers and be lashed to our seats for fear that God might awake and draw us out to a place we have never been. You think this is a new problem? Think again. We have only to look at the story of the Israelites escape from Egypt in the Book of Exodus to see that believers in God have always had a tendency to run off after other gods, other more manageable deities fitted to their own whims and eccentricities. Exodus 32 gives us that great story about the golden calf. Moses had gone off to the mountaintop to receive the Word of God, the Ten Commandments, and while he was away the Israelites got bored with their leadership, bored with their completely sufficient manna from heaven, bored with their moveable tabernacle, bored with themselves and bored with their God. So, seeking to relieve their boredom they gather together all their gold jewelry, melt it down, and fashion it into this golden calf. Talk about a manageable deity, they put one together. As McCullough points out they did not think they had abandoned the God who had saved them, but they re-fashioned God to fit their expectations and to service their desires. They reduced God to a more manageable deity and exchanged the saving God for a trivial god. God did not issue the first commandment You shall have no other gods before me to pagans but to the very people of God. Being saved never guarantees our worship of the true God. Like those ancient Israelites we may think God to be too distant, too slow to appear when we call, too unresponsive to our individual desires, too unlike us! And this longing to re-fashion God to be more like us can seduce us into adulterous liaisons with more immediately satisfying gods that we can manage. Ours may be a faster-paced age, but the desire to fashion golden calves is no less tempting, and indeed our technological mentality may only make it easier and quicker to mold our golden desires into gods we can control. McCullough suggests that there are three primary characteristics of modern day American Christianity that seduces us into creating more manageable deities.
LOSS OF AWE The first of these is our loss of awe. Our ancestors lived in a world of mystery and erected magnificent houses of worship, great cathedrals, dedicated to the Creator whom they considered uncontrollable and unexplainable. They dared not question the existence of God and felt no need to explain God s existence. Modern humans on the other hand attempt to explain everything and indeed believe that everything can be explained. The rapidity with which our knowledge of the world around us grows is sometimes frightening and we have the tendency to believe that in good time everything will be explained. But can you really explain to me just how a cell phone works? Does the fact that someone can explain the technology leave you in any less awe of it? Is it not truly miraculous that I can take this hand-held device, punch in a few numbers, and be talking to someone thousands and thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds? Even Einstein would find cell phones miraculous and mysterious, don t you think? And yet he declared, The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. The scientific revolution, particularly in this age of instantaneous communication, whether intended or not, has crowded out the mysterious in favor of the factual. And even the most sophisticated of our theologians and most certainly those high-volume televangelists and spiritual gurus tend to reduce God to the explainable. Can there be any greater folly than to believe we can explain God? Would you not have to be greater than God to explain God? Do we suppose that we are so well informed that we know everything there is to know about everything, including God? If so, then maybe you need to take time out on a starry night to gaze into the heavens and explain infinity. None of us has ever ventured beyond the edges of our universe, so how can we say with such factual certainty that we know much of anything? Perhaps our problem is not so much that our God is too small, but that our God is too familiar, too explainable, too manageable. Impatience with Silence Once we have lost our sense of awe and even if we acknowledge the existence of God, it is ever so much easier to feel that God is silent and we have no patience with a God who is not at our beck and call. We call out to God for healing and expect that the healing will be instantaneous and miraculous. We cry
out to God in anguish over the horrors of war and the inhumanity all around us and we cannot understand why God doesn t just come down and fix this mess we re in. We say we want God to speak to us and yet we are so busy speaking to him making our desires and demands known to him without ever taking the time to listen. And we think that because we are not hearing the voice of God that God is silent, not speaking, when in fact we do not often really wish to hear what God is saying to us. Do you not recall that imagery that the Word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword? Are we willing to listen to the Word of God when it is not pretty, when it is not comforting, when it is not controllable? While it may seem that God s silence has deepened, other voices have multiplied and become louder. We have been bombarded with information by the megabyte and the terabyte. We have been surrounded by commercial messages by the thousands every day and in every way. This plethora of information appears indiscriminately and in enormous quantity at high speeds, but it is so often disconnected from meaning and from purpose. For all our gaining of knowledge, have we gained any wisdom at all? When it seems that God is silent, we are tempted to create for ourselves golden calves more obviously present and ready to provide guidance in a confusing world, or so we think. Rampant Individualism Finally, McCullough reminds us that an individualistic Christianity leads inevitably to an individualistic god. We Americans, especially those of us associated with evangelical churches, have placed so much emphasis on our individual rights and experiences that we sometimes think we need no one else. If you listen to the political candidates you would think that each one of us is totally responsible for our livelihoods, our schools, our public services, and everything else we enjoy in our society and that the costs for all these is borne by us as individuals. Do they not understand that it is only as we pool our resources, as we sacrifice something of ourselves and our possessions, i.e. taxes, that we simply cannot afford individually what we can afford collectively? Is not life better for all of us when it is better for all of us? And is it not the same with church finances?
We preach the necessity of the individual s acceptance of Christ as personal Savior and so often let it go at that without preaching the Lordship of Christ within the community. Have we forgotten that the early Church was very nearly communistic, proclaiming that the Church was to pool their resources so that all could share equally? Have we forgotten that the Church was to take care of the widows and the orphans? Have we not learned in these two millennia since Jesus walked this earth that we do not worship alone and we do not serve alone? It may sound nice to say God and I are a majority of one, but that sort of attitude means that I am still in control of things and my personal freedom is in no way threatened. Only as we submit our individual wills to God within the context of the company of others who have done the same can there be any chance of being the Church! Our church is in the deliberate process of trying to re-imagine who we are and how we might best serve God in our community. But we must not re-imagine God for the Bible tells us that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. We must not re-create God in our own image but re-create ourselves and our church in the image of God. Then and only then will we find God s better way into our future. AMEN.