God is a verb

 

Psalm 145: 10-18
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 25, 2021

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED Talk in 2009 about the dangers of the single story. She said that when people are shown as one thing, as only one thing, over and over, then that is what they become. When someone tells someone else’s story, it gives them power not only over the story but over the person or the people. It becomes the definitive story of that person or people. It also flattens the experience of a person or people or an entire nation. Stereotypes are inherently incomplete. They only tell part of the story.



I think the same can be said of God. When God is shown as one thing, as only one thing, over and over, then that is who God becomes. When one group of people are the only ones who tell God’s story or who dominate the story, it gives them power not only over the story but over who and what God is. It becomes the definitive story of God. It also flattens the experience of God. Stereotypes about God and about religion are inherently incomplete. They only tell part of the story.

Even though the Hebrew scriptures and the four gospels and the letters of the early Church tell different, sometimes conflicting stories of who and what God is, even within their own framework, what we know as the Bible has become a single story of who and what God is. Is there a single story that sums up who you are? Of course not. Are there aspects of your personality that contradict each other? Probably. Is there a single story of your experience of God that encompasses who and what God is to you? Maybe, but I would hope that over time there have been multiple stories of God that you have experienced and embraced, because that’s how we grow. We grow when we embrace change.



Author Octavia Butler, in her Afrofuturist novel Parable of the Sower, posed the idea that God is Change. She wrote, “All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” And yet even that expansive vision is still one story of who and what God is. For millennia human beings have used countless ideas, concepts, theories, processes, and metaphors to describe what is essentially a mystery.

In this morning’s psalm, God is Lord, creator of the heavens and the earth, and sovereign over his glorious kingdom. God is a benevolent and noble king, reigning with an open hand, giving everyone their food in due season, upholding those who are falling and raising up those who are bowed down. God is kind and just and is near to all who call on him. Though there is some feminine imagery sprinkled throughout, the God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is predominantly male. In 1973 feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote, “If God is male, then the male is God.” This single story of God has been told for thousands of years and influenced everything from religious to civic governance, gender roles, gender identity and expression, family structure, economics, the value and hierarchy of work, the ability to exercise power over and violence against others—what we call patriarchy.



Imagine if we took all that male hierarchical language out of the psalm and replaced it with something more relational, like Kindred One, and replaced kingdom with kindom, as we did in the bulletin.



“All your works shall give thanks to you, Kindred One…Your kindom is an everlasting kindom…” as though there is nothing that would ever separate us from our kindred and the mystery that brought us into being, as though our unity as a human family runs deeper than anything that makes us different from each other. At the very least this truth of kinship would be something we aspire to.

And yet there is another problematic single story undergirding this psalm: the use of the word ‘all’. All your works shall give thanks to you, faithful in all words, gracious in all deeds, just in all ways, kind in all doings. The psalm is intended to give us this sense of God’s majesty, of God encompassing all of human experience, even beyond our imagining. Really, though, would you say that God is gracious in all deeds in a pandemic? Or after the loss of a loved one? Or to someone being evicted or fired from their job? Or to those who’ve lost their homes to wildfires and flood waters?



Pastor Robb McCoy of Two Rivers Methodist Church in Rock Island, IL tweeted this wisdom, “I once had a seminary prof tell me, ‘Anything you say about God you have to able to say to children in ovens in Auschwitz and to Native people massacred for their land and to a mother dying of cancer.’” Many of our stories of God come out of grief, trauma, and pain, like the Israelites freed from enslavement, exiles coming home after decades in captivity, former fishermen and women with means who tell wild tales of a rabbi executed by the state who was raised from the dead, a Pharisee who once breathed threats and murder against those who followed Jesus now risks his life to preach what Jesus taught.



Not all stories of God are for all people, all situations, for all time. And yet any story we tell of God must center the oppressed, the marginalized, the underserved, the most vulnerable, those who suffer because of the self-interest, domination, and control of empire, nationalism, and White supremacy. If God is anything, God is justice, which is what Cornel West said is what love looks like in public. God is a verb, active in and with and through human beings and the whole of creation. Fannie Lou Hamer is famous for saying, “You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” What we know of God, we know through the actions, lives, and experiences of human beings and the mystery that connects us to the earth from which we come and to which we return.

If we are to be honest and true to the danger of the single story of God, we must also include the stories of no God along with our stories of God; that if God is a verb, humanity is a verb, human agency, human will made known through hope, perseverance, complexity, community. All of this is our search for purpose and meaning and those higher truths to which we aspire like unconditional love, fearless compassion, restorative justice, and radical forgiveness. It’s hard to imagine that we can evolve on our own, so we need many stories of God and of no God, Goddess stories and God-beyond-the-binary stories, human stories, animal stories, earth stories, all the stories that show us where we’ve been, where we are now, where we could go, what is possible.



Most of all, we have this wealth of stories to know we’re not alone. It was retired Presbyterian pastor Thom Shuman who coined the phrase “God in Community, Holy in One”. None of us has all the answers nor do we have to. Who holds you when you fall? Who raises you up when you are downcast? Who do you go to when you need comfort, a good word, some sound advice? In whose company do you feel nourished and fed, rested and whole? Who do you trust to tell you the truth about yourself and love you anyway? Who can you call in the middle of the night to come and be with you? Who disrupts their life for you? Where do you find divinity, how do you experience the sacred mystery? What sustains you when you are the verb, when God is active through you? In the words of Rachel Held Evans, who and what makes you feel safe, brave, and loved? So even Church is one story amongst so many ways we might answer.



Thanks be to all that is good and holy and true, made known to us in ways as numerous as the stars in the heavens. As another psalm says, how weighty are God’s thoughts, they are more than the sand, we try to count them, and when we come to the end, we are still with God. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com

Go forth, in the Spirit of the Near One
who nourishes us and calls us to our True Selves.
Go forth, witnessing divinity in the presence
of people and beings around you.
Go forth, honoring how you embody the holy,
that together our shared lives might create
a poem of purpose and possibility.