Where’s Solomon? (Approximately 10 MB - right-click to download) 

Where’s Solomon2 Samuel 13 - 1 Kings 2 

Today our scripture is about David’s response to the death of his son Absalom. One piece of scripture at the end of a whole story. I am going to tell you the story, then our quintet will sing to you about David’s response. The story begins in 2 Samuel 13 and goes all the way to 1 Kings Chapter 2.  In that whole section of the Bible – scholars call it the “Succession Narrative” – God’s perspective is never mentioned. The setup for this story is another story that is familiar to you. That is the story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah. David saw Bathsheba bathing and thought she was just gorgeous and he wanted her so he called her over and they had sexual relations. She got pregnant. David is trying to figure out how to get out of this mess and he thinks, “I’ll call her husband back from the war and that way her husband can sleep with her and I’ll not be thought of as the father. They’ll figure Uriah is the father.” Uriah comes back, but being a decent man, he figures it is not fair to the other fighting men for him to come home and enjoy sex with his wife so he stays on the front door step and does not ever go into her. Then he goes back to war. So David sent word to his Generals to put Uriah in harms way in the battle. They do and Uriah is killed. When that news comes to David, he takes it in stride and marries Bathsheba. But the voice of God speaks to David and calls him to account for this horrible deed he has done. (We are not talking about the sex, we are talking about the murder.) God, through Nathan the Prophet, says that David will have to pay for this sin; his son that will be born will not be born alive. Sure enough Bathsheba‘s son does die. But Bathsheba has another son. His name is Solomon. The text tells us that Adonai, the Lord, loved Solomon. That is the last time the text mentions God’s perspective until Solomon reaches the throne.Time passes. David has many sons, but two are important for this part of the story - Ammon who is the oldest, the crown prince, the one that is heir to the throne, and Absalom. Absalom has a sister named  Tamar.  She is beautiful. Ammon’s lust for her is stirred. He finds a rather clever scheme to lure her into his home. When she comes, he forces himself upon her – rapes her, then sends her out. She is shamed, banished from polite society. She goes to her brother Absalom and stays with him. David does nothing – how could he, he has lost all moral authority? For two years the situation stays just like that until finally when least expected, Absalom murders his older brother Ammon avenging the rape and, conveniently, putting him in line for the throne.Absalom, afraid of what his father will do, because he killed his older brother, runs away to another country. He is there for three years. During this time David managed to get over his grief over the death of his eldest son Ammon. He missed Absalom; he is also getting older. One of his general’s comes to David and suggests that maybe he should reconcile with Absalom.  David seemed to miss Absalom. The General of course, is looking some stability in the way the crown is passed on to the next generation.  So with David’s permission, the General goes and gets Absalom and brings him back to

Rev. Alexander will not be in the pulpit on June 22.

Where is God? (Audio MP3 approximately 9 MB - Right-click to download)

Where is God?

Acts 17:22-28

A summer sermon challenge series, sermon today. This one Dick Gray asked for. Thank you Dick. He wanted me to talk about Panentheism. How come you don’t look thrilled?

NRS Acts 17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown God.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him– though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

The real question posed when we talk about Panentheism is, Where is God? Where is God? That is the question we ask today.

When we were teaching preaching last semester we talked to the students about the form of the sermon. There a number of different forms you can use. You want to make sure they are structured well so they communicate. Congregations get used to pastors preaching in a particular form. Pastors usually gravitate toward one form – (though I’m hoping we all develop some range over time.) Anyway, there is a form called the “four pages and the sermon.” You were used to that for a while because that is Bob Conover’s stock and trade. I do something called the “Lowry Loop.” You don’t have to know what these things are. I am mentioning it because I am not going to preach my “stock and trade” form  of sermon today. I am telling you because you are used to me by now, so I want to signal something a little different. Today we are going to preach what I call a “gemstone sermon.” Which is to say, this question, Where is God? is like a gem stone and we are going to look at it from a variety of points of view – facets of a gemstone. Where is God? What are all the answers that humanity has come up with as answers to that question? Where’s God?

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The first answer, the agnostic answer, goes something like this:  “I don’t know. Let’s go play golf.” At one level that is what it is. “I don’t know and it is not a category for me and frankly the whole thing is confusing and I don’t want to have anything to do with it so, let’s go have some fun.” But there is another kind of agnostic. Another kind of person who doesn’t know. That is every single one of us. We can’t know. This God we’re talking about is beyond  comprehension. We can’t know. We can search. We can grope, as Paul says. We can reach out and grasp for it. So, actually we are all agnostics in one way or another. Some of us search for it and others don’t. I think those that don’t seek are missing out on part of what it means to be human. Missing out on that spiritual dimension of human life that makes up a good deal of our character. Agnostic.

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Another answer to our question is an Atheist answer.  An atheist is somebody who doesn’t believe in God. Where’s God? Well, God doesn’t exist so it is really not a problem. I’ve discovered something about many of the people who are atheists. I like to ask them , “What God doesn’t exist?” – because usually what happens is they tell you about the God they were handed when they were six years old, or they tell you about some God they heard about from some tele-evangelist and by the time they get through telling me about the God they don’t believe in, I say “Yeah, I don’t believe in that God either.”

That is one kind of atheist, but there is another kind of atheist. One that is firmly committed to the idea the there is no God – that there simply is no God. What you see is what you get. This is it. A real atheist answer. The interesting thing to me is that this is very close to another answer to this question, Where is God: It is what is called the pantheist answer. That is different than panentheist – Dick’s requested topic. The pantheist answer  to our question is, “Look around you. It’s all God. You’re God. The chair is God. Flame is God. Wind is God. The trees, the rocks, the frogs. What you see is what you get. It’s all God. Pantheist answer.

There are strengths and weaknesses to pantheism. This is true of all our theologies, all of our words about God. Since we cant’ comprehend God with words, they are all errant in some way. It’s important to understand what the weakness is in your particular way of looking at God. You want to understand what the weakness in your theology might be and that way you don’t get caught up in it.

So, the strength of Pantheism is, that it allows people to look at the creation with some respect. We find that the early Pantheists did just that. They had a deep reverence for Nature, a deep reverence of life. They cared for nature. These are the mystical religions of nature.

But there were also inherent weaknesses.  They wanted to manipulate nature, since, after all this is all there is. There is nothing out there. This is it, so we can manipulate nature however we like without consequence - try and make it work for us. So, at its worst, Pantheism led to child sacrifices – a magical way of manipulating God. This is a way to manipulate the world around you. A way to get this God which is everything around us, to act in ways that are going to help. Or, when it came to agriculture, they had religious ceremonies that ended up engaging in sexual rituals that were really usury of the feminine. This was Pantheism at its worst.  So, at its’ best it gives us a healthy respect for nature around us; at its worst it leads us to manipulate without regard for ethical consequence. The truth is that we still have pantheists today of both kinds.

We laugh about tree huggers, don’t we? The tree hugging group is the group that went out and said, this is it. Let’s hug a tree. Let’s care for and love the nature around us. This is it. Yet, on the other hand, another pantheist (or an atheist) might say, “This is it. Let’s manipulate it for our own ends. Let’s do whatever we feel like doing so we can make this thing called creation work for us.” Pantheism. Some strengths, some weaknesses.

This pantheist God is an immanent God. By immanent, I mean very present. All around us. It is us. This is a present God. Not an out there God. This is a very present God.

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Now we turn to look at another facet of the question, Where is God? Where’s God? Out there. This one Western Christianity has focused a lot on the last few hundred  years. Where is God? Out there. This is a “theistic” God. That is to say that God is transcendent, beyond creation, outside creation, wholly other. There are a couple advantages to this God. If you have a pantheist God, an immanent God you can’t relate to it, because you are it. So there is no sense of relationship and therefore no real sense of purpose because when you relate to a pantheist God things just keep going and going and going without any particular point, without any particular future. It all just is. But if you are relating to a God that is out there, a transcendent God, that can give you a sense of purpose because this God is working in this world, has created this world to produce something of value so that this God can enjoy it. So, the transcendent God, the one  that is out there, provides a framework for ethics. We are here for a reason. Because we are here for a reason, we act in particular ways. So we can live out our own purpose. If we act in ways that go against that purpose, then we have violated and ethical boundary. We’ve hurt a relationship.

This the great advantage of a transcendent God, one that we can relate to and that gives us value and purpose. The trouble is, that if you focus too hard on this transcendent God and you eventually might say, “Well, if God is out there and we are here and - you know -  God is good, what does that make us?” Its makes creation bad, of less worth. If you are completely focused on this up there, out there God, then creation can seem bad, less important. You can do away with creation in order to get to the good. It is not surprising that Western Christianity would focus so much on a transcendent God during the industrial age and manage to choke itself environmentally. Why not? If it passes away, no tears, it is bad anyway.

There is another weakness. This transcendent God can be described in all sorts of ways. This God is a little fickle. That up-there out-there God looks at you and since he is good and you are bad that God can be mean. That God might hurt you. So you stay away from that God for fear of that God. You get angry at that God. You spend time justifying your actions. It doesn’t necessarily promote a sense of love and a sense of the connection of all.

So, we have a transcendent God. It can give us purpose and it can give us a framework for ethics; that is a wonderful thing, but it can also give us a sense that we are nothing, that we are rotten, that we are no good and that there is no point in moving forward. Which brings us to a Panentheist God.

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What if God is not like that? What if God is not out there beyond. What if God is actually very present? What if God is really both? Where is God? Well certainly God is other at some level, but God is also present and part of us. That is what this passage in Acts is getting at. “In God we live and move and have our being.” It’s as though we are touched and surrounded by God. We are not God, but we are so intimately united with God that we are an expression of who God is. Our life is an expression of who God is; the stars are an expression of who God is.

I’ve been talking to Nancy Wiens these last weeks about ways to deal with images of God and she said to me,  “What we need to do is to get a picture in our mind of the God that has been damaging to us. If we have that picture and we name it, we can walk away from it - but then we need some other image, some other idea that might begin to work in our conscious and subconscious minds to alter the way we react to the world.”  I was thinking about it and came up with a couple of images that are candidates.

Remember Fantasia, that Disney movie with the wonderful music behind it? There was one scene in which there was this God, kind of an old man, up in a cloud. He decided, apparently for an arbitrary reason, to produce a storm. He yelled and roared and threw lightening bolts down from the sky and blew wind and everybody ran in all directions. Poor little Mickey Mouse didn’t know what was happening. This powerful controlling God was arbitrary and mean. Then the storm ends, as storms do, and God sat back in the cloud and noticed something was bothering him  -  he had dropped a lightning bolt on the cloud. When he sat down it bugged him so he threw it down and  it destroyed a house and some poor mouse had to run off. That is an image of God that has been damaging. That is the out-there God that has been damaging. I think if we name that we can see it, recognize it and reject it. Then how are we supposed to describe this immanent, this present God that is in and around us; in whom we move and live and have our being?

The physicists in our group will need to excuse me because I may mess this up, but I’ve been learning about the smallest particles that have been proposed. The atoms used to be the smallest, then it moved to the protons and neutrons and electrons. Those aren’t the smallest – now you have quarks and neutrinos, very very tiny. You finally get to the smallest, pi and mu. These two things spin, one spins right and the other spins left. Essentially what they are is nothing spinning. Maybe this is a good image for a  panentheistic God. All in and around you, yet no you -  nothing spinning. Effecting and spinning out life anew, expressing anew. I’m saying this metaphorically, I am not trying to claim that I have discovered that God is pi and mu. Nothing spinning. That is an image that has a presence.

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I am wondering how life would be different if you recognized that the God that is transcendent, the God that you are relating to, the God that gives you value, that loves you, that gives you purpose – if you recognize that that God is spinning through everything you see and do. How is that going to change how you look at the world around you, how you act toward the world around you.

We have a friend who talked about a change in her life. She said she was in the shower one day and she noticed a spider there weaving its web. She was completely enthralled by it. She stayed in the shower until the water went cold, completely enthralled by this beautiful spider as it was working on its intricate web and amazed at the presence of the creative power of God in that. It really knocked her out. She said, “You know what? Five years ago I would have killed that spider.”

When we look at the world with a kind of awe of the presence of God as though God is spinning everywhere we change, we act in different ways.

How would you treat yourself if you thought of yourself as being spun out by the purposes of God – an expression of God, you yourself, a valuable expression of who God is. Sure, at your best moments, when you are singing, smiling and in joy you can understand that is God is expressing God’s self there. But what about the low times? What about the times when you are disappointed with yourself? The times when you feel that you don’t measure up? The times you are angry, the times when you are hurt, the times you are sick? What about all of those times? Those times too are an expression of who God is. Because at those moments, God is expressing God’s creative power as birth pangs for something new and glorious to come about. Even at the moment of death, that is a moment of birth into some new thing that is an expression of God spinning God’ life out.

That is the wonder of a Panentheist God. Moving away from a Pantheist God that has no purpose. Moving away from a transcendent God that stays so far away that we see ourselves as evil in relation to that God. Moving towards a kind of balance that gives purpose and framework to our lives, and gives us a sense of the deep value that we have as people whose very lives are an expression of God’s abiding love.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to this church. You are beautiful. Amen.

God’s Character (approximately 10 MB Right-click to download)

God’s Character

Micah 2:1-5; 7:18-20 

Our scripture lesson this morning comes from Micah. Most people are familiar with one verse coming out of this book: God has told you O mortal what is good - and what does Adonai require of you but to do justice, love, kindness and walk humbly with your God. That is the most common phrase that comes out of Micah. It is a nice idea, it’s a vision, a dream. But when Micah brought it up he was annoyed. He  was pretty clear that this isn’t the way that people were acting. Micah was one of those early written prophets who had a lot of fire . I’d like to read six or seven  verses from early in the book and then the closing two verses.

NRS Micah 2:1 Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power. 2 They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance. 3 Therefore thus says the LORD: Now, I am devising against this family an evil from which you cannot remove your necks; and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time. 4 On that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, “We are utterly ruined; the LORD alters the inheritance of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he parcels out our fields.” 5 Therefore you will have no one to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the LORD.NRS Micah 7:18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. 19 He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. 20 You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.

There it is again. That mean, nasty, punishing God of the Old Testament.  Page upon page upon page of horrible things that are going to happen to the people of Israel and the people of

Violence. For goodness sakes. If human beings were not violent, they wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from the lions and the wolves. They wouldn’t be able to hunt. So the parents of the kids who wouldn’t hunt, who wouldn’t protect the tribe from an outside force; those parents’ kids didn’t make it. So, we are the product of the people who were violent.  It’s also supposed to be wrong to be promiscuous sexually, not to be monogamous – one of those naughty deeds we shouldn’t engage in. I was reading a socio-biologist not too long ago who pointed out that sexual monogamy in nature is so rare that you would have to call our monogamous way aberrant sexual behavior.  Our forbearers - the ones who formed our genetic content - didn’t pay a lot of attention to monogamy or their genes wouldn’t have made it into the next generation. We are the product of those people. So here we are doing pretty much what comes naturally and there is this God up there who is supposed to reach in and  git us because we have done naughty, evil things.

Isn’t it a little unfair? Isn’t that God just a little unfair? Especially because we think of that God as being able to organize and create things the way that God wants  - well, it seems to me as though I am the product of God’s work, and so he makes the product and then like a two year old, sets up a building and then knocks it down. That punishing God.

We don’t really think that God up there is doing that. We don’t think there is a God up there with a check list that is trying to find a way to punish or hurt us. Yet, somehow that is an image of God we can’t get rid of. That fear we have that maybe if we fall short things are going not going to go well. Isn’t that the case? We don’t really think there is a God up there that does that, yet, we worry about it. Every time we say the words, why is this happening to me? That’s what we are wondering about. Why is this happening to me? Is there some deity somewhere that is making sure I get my just desserts? Is that what God is like? It is hard to shake that idea and it can be really damaging. There are damaging consequences when we look at God that way because we tend to hide from that God; tend to walk away from the God. We tend to deny things to ourselves. We tend to deny our own shame.

I had a friend who was sick with Cancer for many years before she died. Probably the saddest thing to me about that death was that for the last three or four years she was worried that she was doing the wrong thing. That this came upon her because she had done the wrong thing, she had eaten the wrong things; or she had thought the wrong things. She used to wonder if she had too negative an attitude and that was why the Cancer was taking over her body. Because there was this God up there, this weight of  creation that rested upon shoulders. That was probably the saddest thing about the whole death. It is really hard to let go of that image, I think.

That is because we all know the sense of guilt and the sense of fear. Right? We all know that sense of guilt that we haven’t measured up to what we imagine we might become – who we might be. Sometimes we simply can’t live up to the expectations we have created for our employer. So we finally feel like a failure and feel we have let our families down at moments like that. Even if it is not true. Sometimes it is just economic circumstances that move you out of your job. Yet, there is this feeling that you don’t quite measure up and you wonder, Why me?

Why is this happening? Why have I fallen short? We know that sense of failure and shame. We also know what it is like to be unfaithful. I’m not necessarily talking about sexually unfaithful. But I think we have all been in relationships where we have not lived out our love in the way that we would like to. So, even if our partner doesn’t know about that, we still know that the trust gets undermined, something isn’t quite right, something gets disturbed and distressed. We know what it is like to feel that guilt when we act in ways that are shameful. It doesn’t really stop us, but we are afraid sometimes of what the consequences might be. Sometimes those consequences are quite subtle and sometimes quite dramatic. Ask Elliott Spitzer. It’s hard to get the idea of that deity out of our head. That this deity is there is trying to punish us for the things we have done wrong. Because we know what it’s like.

We excuse our behavior, we deny our behavior. Sometimes we anesthetize ourselves so we don’t have to think about our behavior, but the reality is that we keep doing what we do. And we keep wondering what’s up. It is hard to let go of that image of God.

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That is exactly why the prophet Micah wrote this book. Sure, he knows things go wrong. He is living in a world where they thought God was up there, so he described the difficult times – the times when the consequences of action come crashing down upon us – or the consequence of other people’s actions, as the judgment of God. But is that really what God is all about? Just looking to nail us for our bad behavior?

Not to Micah. That is not the fundamental character of God. That is why Micah wrote this book. He wrote this book for these last verses. After all the focus on all the horrible things that were happening - because the world is a place where consequences come to bear, these last verses that describe the nature of God. God is a God who passes over transgressions, who delights in clemency, who does not hold on to anger. This is a God who forgives. Then he says this incredibly beautiful thing. This is a God who takes all of our sin - that is to say all of the things we have done wrong, all of the things we haven’t done, all of the character traits we think are broken and screwed up -  he has taken all of that and hurled it into the sea.

Think about the sea for the people of

There is no need to sit around overwhelmed with guilt wondering if God is going to try to destroy you because you did something naughty. No need for that because what God has done is taken all of that, hurled it into the sea and looks to make something new from those experiences.

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We know those moments. We really do know those moments. What about the time when there has been unfaithfulness in your relationship? It is in fact, a moment for trust to be rebuilt. You move through a moment like that in a relationship and you come to understand and trust more, not less. Yes, it is possible that a relationship will break at that moment. You carry that fear, that angst, that loss to a new place and, as God works with that fear, that angst, that loss, some new hope can begin to come. That is what Micah is saying.

All of that angst gets hurled into the sea so that a new generative moment can come out. Happens with failures at work. When I was at Old First Presbyterian Church, most of you know, that it didn’t go really well. There were a number of reasons for that, but one of them was that I served the church I wanted, not the church I had. That was a mistake. So I sense that God has taken that mistake and hurled it into the sea and what has generated and come out of it is, I think, a lesson learned because I do hope I am serving the church I have right now. This is the nature of God.

Some will say, what about death? What about disease and death? How is God going to regenerate that? What is going to happen there? We have a friend who is in his last days of life. Barbara talked to him yesterday. There have been e-mails and exchanges over the last few weeks. His wife wrote yesterday afternoon and thanked everybody for all the calls and e-mails and letters. She said it had come to the moment when he couldn’t see well enough to read. His energy couldn’t be focused and he couldn’t communicate. The time of communication has come to a close. She said one other thing that was just lovely. She said, “If I don’t answer the phone now it is because sometimes I am drawn into the room and in those moments we are close to the sacred together. Even in death, even at that moment of loss, it can be thrown into the sea so that some new generative  hope may come from it.  That is the nature of our God.

There is absolutely no limit to God’s creative imagination. There is only a limit to ours.

No limit to God’s creative imagination, only a limit to ours. We find it hard to imagine how it could be that God would bring something out of the despair that has been thrown into the sea. Yet, for centuries the voice of Micah has been crying out, “That is the real nature of God.”

Micah wrote seven hundred years before Jesus Christ. Seven hundred years before Christ he understood that. Yes, he understood the fear, the guilt, the shame; and that it is the nature of  God to take all of that and turn it upside down and produce some new and glorious hope. It is the message of the resurrection. It is the message that lives in each one of us.

Can you hear that voice? Across all of the centuries, wherever it is that you are; wherever it is that you think you fall short, can you feel the freedom that comes from the good news that God is God and hurls everything that doesn’t work into the sea and allows it to become something new and fresh in each one of our lives. Do hear what the Spirit is saying to our church.