“God
As Event”
Matthew 2:1-12
First Presbyterian Church of
Jamestown, New York
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
January 7, 2007
Epiphany Sunday
Meditation before Holy Communion
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(Note to Web
Readers: Just prior to the sermon,
Cindy Lind Hanson, our Minister of Music, offered a “piano prayer” -an
instrumental song called “Little Star”- a setting of “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star” by Jim Brickman. The
piano was placed under a large Epiphany star suspended from the ceiling.)
The bad news, for
me, is that I currently am reading a book that is so dense and difficult that I
hardly understand it. The worse
news, for you, is that I am going to try to tell you about it anyway.
The good news is that if I can come anywhere near to the author’s
intent, I think I can offer us a compelling and helpful way of thinking about
God for our times.
Let me start out,
though, by explaining to you that I asked Cindy to play that piano prayer today
because I want the Epiphany star in our gospel reading (Matthew 2:9) to
be a sign and a metaphor of the wonder and wonderment that God and life both
invite and evoke in us. “Twinkle,
twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…” Mary Oliver has a poem entitled “When Death Comes”
in which she declares,
When it’s over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
That seems to me to
be the only appropriate and responsible posture toward this life that we are
living- to be wedded to amazement, to wonder not only about the stars but to ask
questions about everything and to hold the answers lightly, seeing as though
creation’s predilection, and thus, presumably, the Creator’s, is for mystery
and magic. Meister Eckhart in the
fourteenth century wrote,
This, then, is salvation:
When we marvel at the beauty of created things
and praise their beautiful creator.
If that take on
salvation seems a little unorthodox, well, Eckhart only was following Jesus
himself who saw in such wonder-full things as “birds of the air” and
“lilies of the field” guidance and wisdom for living. Wonder and mystery engage us, draw us in, soften our
rough edges, open us to joy. We
defend dogma, and that divides and separates us from those who believe
otherwise. We defend dogma, but we
delight in wonder, and so it repairs the breaches within us and between us and
helps to make us whole.
A second Epiphany
image: my parents gave me for
Christmas a portable GPS (global positioning satellite) system for my car (so
that I can find my way around the megalopolis of Jamestown, I guess!)
It is an amazing device, really, and I have had fun programming
destinations into it and then allowing the computerized female voice (that Emily
has named “Ivy”) to direct my travel. The
thing is, sometimes I know shortcuts that the satellites in space apparently do
not. So, when I defy Ivy, she gets
flustered and exclaims, “Recalculating, recalculating,” and has to catch up
to me as I make my way by another road (Matthew 2:12).
Stars of wonder and
alternate routes are Epiphany icons that serve us well as we learn to trust the
epiphanies we experience in our own lives.
Just because a road “is less traveled by,” to use Robert Frost’s
good phrase, does not mean that we should not take it. More and more, for instance, I am finding that many of the
theological highways I traveled in younger years take me to “places” I now
have outgrown and to which I have no desire to return. So “recalculating, recalculating” can be a good thing if
it points us in the direction of a larger and more inclusive love for the world
and all who live in it, if it sets us on a pathway to peace, if it steers us
toward conceiving of God not as prosecutor but interlocutor, as one who calls to
us and engages us in conversation about life and the shape, direction, and
substance of our lives.
The challenging book
to which I earlier alluded was written by a Syracuse University professor and
theologian named John D. Caputo. His book has as its main title The
Weakness of God but it is the book’s subtitle, The Theology of
the Event, that interests me more today.
Caputo says that “the name of God is an event, or rather that it
harbors an event, and that theology is the hermeneutics (interpretation) of that
event, its task being to release what is happening in that name, to set it
free,…, and therefore to head off the forces that would prevent this event.”
Stick with me here.
Your brain only will hurt for a minute or two, I promise.
Names, Caputo says, “can accumulate historical power and worldly
prestige and have very powerful institutions erected in or under their name,
getting themselves carved in stone…” So,
for instance, God’s name has acquired very powerful connotations so that when
many people think of God they imagine an all-powerful, all-knowing, sovereign
Being who runs the world and intervenes in earthly affairs.
Powerful institutions like the church rise up around that name to make
claims of perpetuating and propagating divine rule and will.
God’s name is then appropriated by the powers of the world to serve and
justify their causes. God becomes a
pawn in political and polemical propaganda.
But, according to
Caputo, an event cannot be held captive by a confessional faith or a creedal
formula. An event happens to us.
An event is not our doing but is done to us.
It is not in our control. So,
for instance, even though the crucifixion of Jesus was planned by the powers of
his day to silence Jesus and to deflate the movement that had grown up around
him, when God is understood as an event harbored by the name of God and not as
the name itself, that God, God as event, cannot be contained or
constrained. And so, God as event “is
present (Caputo says) at the crucifixion, as the power of the powerlessness of
Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross,
in and as the words of forgiveness, not as a deferred power that will be visited
upon one’s enemies at a later time. God
is in attendance as the weak force (hence, ‘the weakness of God’ in the
title) of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that
cries from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power. The (call) of the cross is a call to renounce violence, not
to conceal and defer it and then, in a stunning act that takes the enemy by
surprise, to lay them low with real power, which shows the enemy who really has
the power.”
To talk of “God as
event” is to take the name of God as the name of a call rather than a
causality. God is not sitting in a
celestial throne room somewhere “causing” specific things to happen, or not.
God is not a “super power” bending the course of history irrespective
of our involvement in it. Rather,
God is the call within every event, every transaction, every experience in life
to live justly, compassionately, lovingly, courageously, generously, mercifully,
hospitably, sacrificially, gratefully. This
God, God as event, as the call within every event, lacking physical power or
threat or intimidation, is a “weak force,” in Caputo’s words, that,
ironically, over time, outlasts and overturns the power of might and strength.
Did not Jesus say
the same thing?
Blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are the meek…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
Blessed are the merciful…
Blessed are the pure in heart…
Blessed are the peacemakers…
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake…
The “weak
forces” of spiritual poverty and hunger, mercy, purity, meekness become the
vessels through which the kingdom of God makes its appearance in this life.
This sacrament set
before us, as it turns out, is a picture of what I am trying to say.
There is no power here at this table as the world thinks of power, no
force of law. We are far from the
halls of Congress and the “situation rooms” of White House and State House.
No newspaper will report on what we are about to do.
But as the powers of this world invoke the name of God to serve their
purposes and to bless their plans, God as event is calling to us from
this modest meal to remember as we eat the bread and drink the cup that it is
the weakness of love- sacrificial, generous, faithful love the kind of which we
saw and see in Jesus –that has the capacity, as a little child once said to
me, to turn the world “upside right.”
That is my epiphany
for Epiphany in the year of our Lord 2007.
Amen.
* The seed for this sermon and any quotations attributed to John D. Caputo come from a book by Dr. Caputo entitled, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event published in 2006 by Indiana University Press.
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First Presbyterian Church