A Word from the Marsh Hen
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A Word from the Marsh Hen
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A WORD FROM THE MARSH HEN (February 9, 2003) "It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in." Isaiah 40:22 In the movie "Chariots of Fire" it is this powerful passage from Isaiah which Eric Liddell, the Scottish racer, reads at a worship service at the church in Paris when others are running at the Olympic stadium in the race for which he had trained and was the favorite. He had decided that he must honor God first in his life, the God made known in Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of all. Later, Liddell would get to run in another race and win for Britain, but on this day he is in the Church of Scotland service in Paris. And so he reads: "Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain. To whom then will you compare me, says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?…." Does it happen to you that you find yourself returning to good books that made an impact on you years ago? For me, one such book is J. B. Phillips' Your God is Too Small. Presbyterians have always been strong supporters of the largest idea of God possible. The sovereignty of God is one of our defining doctrines. The ideas of Isaiah resonate with us strongly: God sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers." In Your God is Too Small Phillips wrote: "The trouble with many people is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs." They are modern people who acknowledge and even worship the scientific and technological advances of our age, who would not think of being behind the times in the electronic devices they own, but when it comes to God their ideas haven't gotten beyond kindergarten. Sometimes this takes the form of thinking of God as a "resident policeman", to use J. B. Phillips term, always making petty rules. Or God as a "parental hangover", that is a substitute for our earliest ideas of our human father, or of God as simply the Grand Old Man, someone to be treated with great respect but couldn't possibly understand the complexities of modern life. I thought of this recently when it was reported that the European Union is debating whether to include God or not in their formulations of what they are about. I can just hear how Isaiah would respond: just grasshoppers. And for some there is the God of the perennial grievance - the only purpose God serves for them is the object of their complaints about the universe. Every minister I know has met people for whom God is exactly nothing more than that. There is another very little idea of God which is far too popular today. The idea of God as our Personal Avenger. I thought of it this week as I read of a TV documentary on Muslim extremists. The photo with the article showed a young man just before going off to be a suicide bomber in Israel and announcing his intentions sitting at a table before two banners in Arabic with the words of the Muslim confession of faith, "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet" behind him. What a denigration, to make God the author, the motivating force, behind such an act of barbarity. Such a diminution of the idea of God, indeed of the noble thoughts behind what Muslims call the word of witness, to reduce such a word of witness to a cause for suicide or, as the French say, a kamikase attack on innocent people. We have had too much of this recently. In 1995 a young Jewish man, acting on what he said were "orders from God," killed the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. I remember how we had a memorial service at the Temple and my friend Rabbi Perelmuter told how horrified he was to hear these words. The assassin, for all his training at a religious university, had not found a God big enough for modern needs. He had found only God as Personal Avenger. And of course such an idea of God is not unknown among
Christians. One of my favorite programs is Law and Order. Last Wednesday
the program was about a vigilante killing of a drug dealer by a priest.
The priest argued he had been ordered by God to kill the drug dealer who
was ruining the neighborhood. I was glad that in the program he did not
get away with this argument. Christian theology has always said that the God who is the Holy One is made known in Jesus Christ, who himself was called the Holy One of God by the deranged man in the synagogue, as we heard last week. All that we need to know of God is made known in Jesus, whom God raised from the dead to be Lord of all, but even this is not all there is to God. The seductively attractive part about small ideas of God - the God of the perennial complaint, God as the parental hangover, God as the source of our personal vengeance, is that in a sense we control the image. And because we control the image then it becomes a situation of God in service to us, rather than our being in the service of God. But God who is the creator of the ends of the earth and is the Holy One revealed in Jesus Christ, the Lord of all, is beyond our controlling. Last Saturday's tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia has stunned and saddened us all. But this week I have thought that it must be some comfort to their survivors that they died in a truly noble cause, thinking big ideas, reaching outward and upward, and they did not die, as far as we know, because of some stupid people's little ideas of God, as did the 2800 people who perished on 9/11 in the twin towers. For the grief stricken survivors, that may be small consolation, but I suggest in our world today it is a consolation not without merit. One of the photographs showed the chair in the choir where two of the astronauts worshipped draped with a flag. Those seven knew, perhaps better than most, how truly small we are and how great God is. When I went last month with Travis and Chip and Teresa to the Museum of Natural History we passed by the statue of Theodore Roosevelt. I thought of this again with the news of Columbia. The naturalist Charles William Beebe used to visit Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill and they would talk about astronomy and the natural world. They would go outside at night and search the skies until they found the Great Square of Pegasus. And then one of them would say: That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. |