Meeting God Again for the First Time: Revelation
Mark 1:9-15
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Rev. J. Douglas Paterson
You have probably heard about the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.
Unfortunately, he missed one letter of his wife’s email address, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.
At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
Dearest Wife,
Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
PS. Sure is hot down here.
As persons of faith we sometimes wish we could have such direct communication. We wish we could get an email from the other realm, or maybe just a letter in your mailbox from God.This is the premise of William Paul Young’s book The Shack, a novel based on Young’s faith that might help us rethink who and what God is, and our relationship with God.We will be using it as a spring board this Lent to look at some of weightier questions of our faith that may need a 21st century perspective. As I said it is a novel, and we will use the Wesleyan understanding of doing theology by using Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.But I also think a novel like this has the capability of removing the cataracts from our eyes to see things in a new way.
I envy Mack (Mackenzie Philips) who receives a direct letter from God and a direct invitation to spend a weekend with God one on one (or three on one as the case may be).But we shouldn’t be too envious.Don’t forget the Biblical stories of people meeting God one on one. We have been where Job of the Old Testament has been, when based on everything you have learned and believed, life quits making sense, and you struggle to piece together some modicum of sanity in the turbulent sea senselessness.
In anger or despair, or both, you raise your voice to God and demand some kind explanation. “Quit hiding, God, behind your mystical omnipotence.Quit being such a coward, God.Look at me face to face and explain yourself.” Of course that is just what God did in the book of Job and what we read is that basically Job got his socks blown off.And by the end of God’s response, Job was rendered to the point that there was not much else he to do but say “oops.”
If you want to meet God one on one, be prepared to come out a different person.Be prepared to let go of all your preconceived ideas.
But there is so much in life that we would want different.There is so much that is hard to reconcile with our understanding that God is a loving, giving God.We cannot overestimate the pain, hurt, and anxiety that life often offers, and if God is in charge of all this, then where does that leave us?Too often we feel abandoned by this God who created all that is.We think that, somehow, if we were in charge we would make it different.
Now I hope and trust that our normal, daily walk with God is not one that perpetuates this feeling of abandonment.But I do believe that there are times in each of our lives when abandonment is exactly what we feel, and that’s being positive.How much worse would it be to experience some of the things we do, thinking that God, being in control of all things, can be nothing more, therefore, than a malevolent manipulator?Which, by the way, I don’t believe in the slightest.
The intimations of God’s grace and goodness are too abundant, if we pause long enough to get out of ourselves and breathe deeply again the freshness of creation, if we choose to take our blinders off that we might see God’s panorama and not just the focal point of our choosing, if we allow ourselves to be open to God’s ongoing revelation and not mire ourselves in a single-minded concept stuck in time and limited experience.
Which is why I like The Shack, because it helped me to do each of those things:to breathe in the freshness of new possibility; to see from a new perspective that if left on my own I would not have bothered to look; and as a reminder that God did not quit revealing or participating in our lives two thousand years ago, but is willing to meet us anew in each new day.
I have gotten some very interesting responses from those who have had the chance to read The Shack.Some, and for good reason, have a difficult time even starting the book because of its premise.It is based on a horrible tragedy that none of us would even want our enemies to experience – the abduction and murder of a young daughter.While the novel stays away from any graphic description, there is an emotional response that just might not be worth it for some.
For me, I thought it was quite gripping because I wanted to see how Young would deal with a concept of God explaining God-self and revealing who God is in the midst of such a tragedy. It is not going to be a book that will win any Pulitzer Prize.But even more interesting is the kind of press this book as gotten.It seems that it is either the greatest book on earth (it has been on the New York Times best seller list for the past 40 weeks), or the greatest piece of blasphemy ever written.All you need to do is Google it to see the negative response by some Christian circles.I have been in very few conversations where people didn’t have much of an opinion one way or another.
What happens is Mack Philips takes his children camping (his wife has to work and so couldn’t go).While camping, Missy, the youngest child, was abducted. Though her body was never found, the police did find evidence in an abandoned shack to prove that she had been brutally murdered by a notorious serial killer who preyed on young girls. There comes a time in the story when it has been quite a while since the abduction and murder, and Mack, who has gotten on with life, but has been living in the shadow of what he calls the Great Sadness, receives a strange note that is apparently from God. God invites Mack to return to this shack for a get together. Though uncertain, Mack visits the scene of the crime and there has a weekend-long encounter with God, or, more accurately, the God we know as Trinity.
There is a humorous paragraph as Mack approaches the cabin.He ponders how he approaches God.Should he knock?Maybe he should just walk in since God was expecting him.How should he address God?Should he call him Father,Almighty One,Mr. God?Or just fall on his knees and worship?But that isn’t the kind of mood he was in.
As he tried to establish equilibriumwith all that he was experiencing, the anger that he thought had passed began to emerge within him again. He really didn’t care anymore about what to call God, and energized by his ire, he walked up to the door. Mack decided to bang loudly and see what happened, but just as he raised his fist to do so, the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman.The woman is God (or at least the form God chose to take on in order to communicate with Mack).
Throughout the story she is known as Papa because that is what Mack’s wife would call God. Near the end, because Mack requires a father figure, she turns into a pony-tailed, grey-haired man, but otherwise God is this woman. Jesus is a young to middle-aged man of obvious Middle-Eastern descent, while the Holy Spirit is played by Sarayu, a small, delicate and eclectic woman of Asian descent – visually barely perceptible as she moves about.
It is interesting to see how people visualize God.I was reading one critic of The Shack that complained of too much anthropomorphizing – giving God too many human characteristics.And while that is one of our greatest limitations we have when considering God, I do not know how else to think of God.That is the realm of our understanding.What is important is not to get stuck in any one characteristic limiting God to that characteristic.As Tim has been fond of saying in his sermon series on the Apostle’s Creed, the name Yahweh by which the ancient Israelites knew God means, “I am who I am.” Or more accurately, “I will be whom I will be.” Don’t put me in box, humanity.I am more than any label you can put on me.
What’s interesting to note is that this review that I was reading that complained of Young’s images for God, if I recall right, kept calling God “him,” as if that weren’t anthropomorphizing.
Outside of how God gets imaged is a more theologically profound issue that Young addresses, and that is the concept of Trinity.Young is only the latest in the long and ongoing line of those who try to articulate exactly what Christians mean when they say that we believe in one God but in three persons:Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Sometimes Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Young has Mack questioning the Godhead, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, “Who is in charge? Who has final authority?” This turns out to be a nonsensical question for the three in The Shack, because Young’s concept is that Trinity exists entirely without hierarchy and that hierarchy is actually the result of sin. The Trinity, he has Sarayu saying, “are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command….What you are seeing here is a relationship without any overlay of power.We don’t need power over the other because we are always looking out for the best. Hierarchy would make no sense among us.” (pg. 122)
Mack complains how hard that is to fathom, because every human institution is governed with hierarchy. It is the social fabric that help keeps order, he argues.Papa responds, “What a waste!It is one reason why experiencing true relationship is so difficult for you.” Jesus, addressing Mack, adds, “[that’s why] you rarely see or experience relationship apart from power.Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.”(pg. 122-123)
I read one review that vehemently argued against Young on this point calling it unbiblical and irresponsible, which I don’t quite understand. I think Jesus’ point, when he said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love others as yourself, gets precisely to the point that when you look out for the best of the other, you don’t need rules and hierarchy to govern the relationship.
But here is what I do understand: William Paul Young’s The Shack will challenge some of your long held views, and some of our long entrenched dogmas.It may very well feel like you are meeting God again for the first time.It may well reveal a way to think about God that perhaps we could not have done on our own.And it may, like Job meeting God in the whirlwind, blow your socks off.
So I invite you to journey with me this Lent as we attempt to refresh our faith with new perspectives, challenging imagery, maybe even with a short stroll into the realm of heresy, that God might grab our attention and imagination, and we meet God again, perhaps for the first time.
I pray that it will be true in your life and in mine.Amen.
THE ANCIENT FUTURE CHURCH:Sunday, March 1, 2009, Rev. J. Douglas Paterson
REVELATIONFirst United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor
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