Sermon

Who is that Masked Man?

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

April 3, 2005

Reading: Genesis 2:4-25

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’

Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

Sermon

I remember visiting my grandparents when they still lived on a farm. I was probably five or six years old. I would stand in the kitchen and watch my grandmother cook dinner and listen to the Lone Ranger on the radio. Do any of you remember listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio? As I think back about it I believe the special effects were better than those in The Matrix. They were better because they were all in my imagination, and nothing can compare with that.

The premise of the show was simple. The Lone Ranger had been a Texas Ranger, injured in a shoot-out with the bad guys. Nursed back to health he decided the best way he could fight the bad guys was by concealing his identity. And everyone was always asking the same question at the end of each episode - an ending that always concluded with good triumphing over evil: “Who was that masked man?” What strikes me as odd about that line is why we don’t hear it in church. I say that because of what happens to the image of God in the bible.

You heard the reading this morning. God was not wearing a mask in the book of Genesis. There was no question about his identity. Throughout that first book of the bible God is front and center. He makes personal appearances everywhere. He doesn’t use a agent to deliver his message. And in the first two chapters of Genesis he not only makes a personal appearance, he personally creates the world. He’s a real hands on kind of guy. And in the next few chapters he personally talks to Adam and Eve, to Cain and to Noah. But by the time he talks to Noah you begin to see a change. Remember what he does in the first two chapters? He creates the world. Even Norm Abrams from The New Yankee Workshop would be impressed. But by the time he gets to Noah - a story that begins in the fifth chapter - God starts using subcontractors. The deity that could create the world now needs someone to build an ark. Why is it that a God that can create the world needs a human carpenter to build a boat? And the pattern continues. Over the course of the next few books of the bible God fades away from public sight. Where once there were public miracles, now miracles are only performed - if at all - for private audiences. Where once God appeared and spoke to human beings, now God appears only in dreams - if at all. And when you get to the book of Esther, guess what you find. Does anybody know what God does and says in the book of Esther? Does anybody know how many times God is mentioned in the book of Esther? He does nothing, he says nothing and in fact he is never mentioned. With just a few minor exceptions God disappears. By the end of the Hebrew bible all people know of the deity is from second hand accounts from people who don’t actually see or hear God - they can only relate dreams. He is like a ghost, like a mysterious masked man that people aren’t quite sure they’ve seen - that people aren’t quite sure someone else has seen, because he appears only in dreams and performs miracles only in private. But as God disappears the priesthood that represents him - or her, but its usually him - grows larger and larger, ever more eager to explain to the world what this stranger in the shadows is doing. What’s going on? Why does God disappear?

It’s a story that continues into our own time. Pope John Paul II died yesterday. In a few days there will be a conclave of Cardinals to elect his successor. Why doesn’t God announce who she wants? Why is this election by surrogates necessary? Just a few days before Terri Schiavo died. God’s surrogates were busy telling everybody it was God’s will to keep her alive. Why didn’t God just make a personal announcement to the world? A few months ago Pat Robertson assured us that the election of George W. Bush was in the bag because God had personally directed that Bush be elected. But if that’s true, why wasn’t there a divine decree. Think of all the money that could have been saved on the campaign and the election process. The closest we seem to come to a personal appearance by God these days is the occasional potato chip or grilled cheese sandwich. Do you think I’m making up that last bit? Last November a man sold half of a ten year old grilled cheese sandwich that people believe has an image of the Virgin Mary on it. He sold it for five thousand one hundred dollars - plus nine dollars and ninety-five cents for shipping and handling. Where is the God that could create the world? Where is the God that personally spoke to people? Where is the God that performed miracles for thousands to see, who could put a pillar of flame in the night ski and a pillar of smoke during the day to lead the Israelites to the promised land? Somehow half of a grilled cheese sandwich just doesn’t cut it for me.

Some people say that the answer is growing human sophistication. The disappearance of God in the Hebrew bible is, according to some theories, evidence that people were growing in sophistication and abilities or just a necessary attribute of the transcendence of God. But I don’t accept such explanations. I don’t think the disappearance of God has anything to do with increasing human ability or sophistication or the imagined transcendence of God. I’m not even sure I know why God disappears from the specific stories of the bible. But I have an idea why God may - in the larger sense - have become an unseen stranger, lurking on the edge of human consciousness, always there even if we’re not quite sure who or what it is.

The oldest ideas, the oldest images of God are those of a person or animal of power. The oldest images of God had the power to create the world and to make the rain fall, the wind blow, the crops to grow or fail. Then God became more human. God granted power and approval. God became a kind of middle eastern potentate. There was little of justice or goodness about such an image of God. With such gods, as with kings, it was do it their way or die. It may not have been a desirable image, but it was one people could understand, for they dealt with people of a like nature all the time. But over time a new concern emerged and that concern was justice. If God could create the heavens and the earth, then surely God could create the just world, the world where the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. In hindsight it seems easier to create the world, than to create justice to fill that world. But this new image of God was different. It was one thing to bargain and even to fight with a God who was like your neighbor - even a disagreeable neighbor. But what about a God who was serious about justice? What about a God who would hold us accountable for what is right and what is wrong?

I don’t believe in a God who is a cosmic judge of right and wrong. But for many people that’s what God is. And if that’s the case, then I think people are wise to want to keep God on the edge of things, to have God disappear from town, as it were, because if God is a cosmic judge, then a lot of people should be uncomfortable. Better to have God as a distant figure whose name you can invoke on your behalf without the embarrassment of having him actually show up and demand to know that you’ve been doing in his name. But even if God isn’t a cosmic judge, a God that truly loves justice is an embarrassment, because if you truly believe it, then you would have to be careful about what you said.

Too often I think we make God in our own image and for our own purposes. We produce Gods that aren’t worthy of the name. We produce Gods that give theism a bad name. We produce Gods that make atheism - or at least agnosticism - the only reasonable alternative. I think atheism is one of the great contributions of the nineteenth century to theological thinking. In the twentieth century it tended to adopt the name of humanism, which I think is unfortunate because humanism is much more than atheism. But it’s really a nineteenth century idea - an idea that said the images of God that have dominated the world for centuries are unworthy of belief - just as feminism taught us the problems with gender based images of God.

But the sense of the ineffable remains, that sense of something beyond the shore of the known. Liberal religion - which has long been associated with an acceptance of atheism - is also the religious movement that understands religion as rooted in human experience - not intellectual assertions, but human experience and human feelings - rooted not in revelation, but in the spirit. Orthodox religion - on the other hand - begins with revelation. It says you must first believe. Feelings and experience follow intellectual belief. That’s why I’ve always found it ironic that liberal religion is frequently perceived as a religion of the head - even though it begins in the heart - while orthodox religion is perceived as a matter of the heart - even though it begins in the head. And because liberal religion begins in the heart, I do not believe we can ignore the sense of the ineffable that persists despite the intellectual logic of atheism - which is why I believe the heart requires the head not to accept atheism as blindly as some accept the traditional notions of God. Instead, I think we should move beyond the rejection of classical theism and ask ourselves, who is that masked man that lurks in the shadows. Not a man, certainly, nor a woman, and I think not even a thing - but something none the less. What might be an image of God look like - unlike what so many have believed for so long - that would be worthy of the name God?

I have some ideas of my own, but I will leave the answer to you with this thought. The word “God” itself is just a word, a symbol that we use to point to something. How we use it is completely within our power. It has no meaning in and of itself. In this sense it is like a stick we hold in our hand use as a pointer. But a stick has two ends and it points back to us. When we use that stick to point at something we are always saying something about ourselves, even, especially if we use it to say there is nothing there.

When I was a child standing in my grandmother’s kitchen I would have said the stick pointed to a man who created the universe and ruled its destiny. Later in life I said it pointed to nothing. Now I think it points to something, but I’m not quite sure what. I wonder where you point your stick. And I wonder what that means for you and for me.

Amen.