February 12, 2006

 

 

Meditation

 

I go among trees and sit still. 

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle. 

 

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

 

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

 

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at least,

and I sing it.  As we sing,

the day turns, the trees move. 

      - Wendell Berry

 

Readings 

from Abraham:  A Journey to the heart of three faiths, Bruce Feiler (p. 177)

 

The mind-set changed in the twentieth century with the struggles over European colonization in the Middle East, the emergence of the State of Israel, and the rise of American hegemony.  These political battles gradually began to infect the religious dialogue, so that even a conversation about Abraham among Jews, Christians, and Muslims today often deteriorates into a disagreement about Jerusalem, Palestine, Osama bin Laden, Jewish settlements, suicide bombers, Iraqi schoolchildren, Iranian hostages, the Gulf War, Jewish control of the media, the Saudi royal family, the CIA, the Mossad.

 

And, inevitably, the will of God. 

 

 

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, pp. 50-51

 

But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus’ own most fervent prayer was refused:  “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me:  nevertheless not my will, but thine be done.”  I must have read that verse or heard it a hundred times before without seeing or hearing.  Maybe I didn’t want to see it.  But then one day I saw it.  It just knocked me in the head.  This I thought, is what is meant by “thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.  It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same.  It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for.  It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.  It means you may be crucified. 

 

After Jesus’ terrible prayer at Gethsemane, an angel came to Him and gave Him strength, but did not remove the cup.  …

 

But now I was unsure about what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it.  After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said?  And where do you find the strength to pray “thy will be done” after you see what it means? 

 

And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed?  And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation – my congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing – and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war?  Does prayer change God’s mind?  If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all?  And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things – as when two devout mothers of soldiers on opposite sides pray for the safety of their sons, or for victory? 

 

Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us?  If we can’t – and it looked to me like we can’t – will He help us?  Or does He want us to fall into the abyss?  Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can’t learn except by falling into the abyss?  Is that why the Jonah of old, who could not say “thy will be done,” had to lie three days and three nights in the dark in the belly of the great fish?  

 

“Father, remove this cup from me,” I prayed.  And there I stopped.  For how would I know what God’s will was, even provided I could have the strength to submit to it?  I knew a lot of hearsay about God speaking to people in plain English, but He never had (He never has) spoken so to me. 

 

Sermon                                                  God’s Will

                                         Reverend Jill Ann Terwilliger, Minister

 

Once upon a time there was a man named Abraham.  He was neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim, but as legends tell it, he was the first monotheist, the first to reject the local and tribal gods and the idols in which those gods took shape and instead to worship and to follow one all-powerful, transcendent and intangible God.  For the strength of Abraham’s belief, for the ancientness of his faith, for the power of his experience, Judaism, Christianity and Islam each reach back to Abraham as the true father of their religion.  As I described last week, each of these religions looked to Abraham as a universal, all embracing figure, and then each re-interpreted their religion as the ONE true expression of Abraham’s original faith. 

 

One of the best known stories about Abraham is a story shared by all three of his descendent religions.  It is a story about following the will of God.  It is a story which, among feminist interpreters of the Bible, has earned the label, a “text of terror.”  It is the story of Abraham taking his son Isaac – the son born to Sarah after so much wrangling with God, the son from whom God promised to make a great nation – Abraham takes this son up the mountain to sacrifice him to the Lord, and he does that at the request of that Lord.  But at the last moment, when God sees that Abraham is willing to do this deed, God provides a ram caught in a nearby thicket in the son’s place.  Here is how Sura 27 of the Koran describes the event: 

 

We gave him news of a gentle son.  And when he reached the age when he could work with him, his father said to him:  “My son, I dreamt that I was sacrificing you.  Tell me what you think.” 

      He replied:  “Father, do as you are bidden.  God willing, you shall find me steadfast.” 

      And when they had both submitted to God, and Abraham had laid down his son prostrate upon his face, We called out to him, saying “Abraham, you have fulfilled your vision.”  Thus do We reward the righteous.  That was indeed a bitter test.  We ransomed his son with a noble sacrifice and bestowed on him the praise of later generations.  “Peace be on Abraham!”

      Thus do We reward the righteous.  He was one of Our believing servants. 

 

Abraham the righteous.  Abraham the believing servant, carrying out God’s command with hardly a question.  This is the Abraham most often remembered.  And yet this is not how it always went between God and Abraham.  There were other times Abraham questioned, even argued with God.  The book of Genesis also tells how God planned to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their great sin.  Abraham can’t see the fairness of destroying the innocent along with the guilty and he challenges God, “Shall not the judge of all earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25)  And then Abraham begins bargaining. 

      Abraham:  What if there are 50 innocent ones in the city.  Then would you spare it? 

      God:  Yes, for the sake of 50 I would spare it. 

      Abraham:  What if there are but 5 less?

      God:  Yes, I will spare the city for the sake of 45.

      Abraham:  30, do I hear 30? 

And so it goes until they reach 10.  

 

Even Abraham-the-unquestioning-servant argues with and questions God from time to time.  Which says to me that for modern mortals like ourselves – those to whom God does not just speak in plain English – it may be difficult to know just what God’s will is and how we are supposed to act. 

 

A more contemporary personality who wrestled with this question is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and Nazi resistor who was discovered in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, imprisoned, and executed in 1945.  This year marks the 100^th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth.  A new movie about his life aired on PBS this month and the filmmaker, Martin Doblmeier, was featured on the Public Radio Show, Speaking of Faith.  The title of the program was “Ethics and the Will of God” so you can bet my ears perked up to hear what he had to say. 

 

The film maker told a bit of the story of Bonhoeffer’s life:  how Bonhoeffer had been on a clear path to academic theology -- to the university, to a life of the mind -- and how the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism drew him to a completely different path – a path filled with secrecy, deception, witnessing evil and attempting murder.  And Bonhoeffer did this with a pretty clear sense that this was the only way to follow the will of God.  That was always at the center of his thinking, how to follow, to know, to do, the will of God. 

 

Bonhoeffer wrote: 

The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset.  It is something new and different in each different situation in life.  And for this reason a man must forever re-examine what the will of God may be.  The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.

 

And he wrote this, too: 

There is no way to peace along the way of safety.   Peace is the great adventure.  It has to be dared.

 

I was so glad to Bonhoeffer wrote of peace, because peace is where I have been wanting to go this month, to some lifting of the veil on the roads that might lead in that direction. 

 

“There is no way to peace along the way of safety.   Peace is the great adventure.  It has to be dared.”  This sense of daring and adventure harkens back to preacher Jayber Crow’s wonderings about praying “thy will be done” and his conclusion that this was a pretty scary thing to pray.  This was opening yourself up to losing everything; opening yourself to the possibility that God’s call could take you to completely unexpected places. 

 

For Bonhoeffer this led to the conclusion that ending the life of a tyrant in the hopes of ending the fear and suffering of millions was the necessary way of answering God’s call.  We are used to revering the lives of pacifist leaders such as Gandhi and King, but here is one who was willing to take a life to save other lives. 

 

Thinking on this I begin to feel an eerie discomfort that the leap from Bonhoeffer’s actions to the act of a suicide bomber is not so great a leap as I would wish it to be.  While Bonhoeffer sought to end fear by ending one life and suicide bombers spread fear by indiscriminate destruction, their sense of doing God’s will is the same.  It’s this kind of similarity that makes a whole lot of liberals – even very religious ones – cringe at utterances about the will of God.  And trying to grasp an understanding of God’s will gets increasingly uncomfortable the further you take it.  Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators were great theologians but not such great assassins.  They made several attempts on Hitler’s life, each of which failed.  Which led Krista Tippet, host of the Speaking of Faith radio show, to say:  Objectively speaking, you could look at this story and say God was on Hitler’s side. … It’s very puzzling … it could almost make you lose faith.  They didn’t win.  The good guys did not win.” 

 

And then you can say, well maybe it was God’s will that Hitler came to power at all.  And maybe it was God’s will that those airplanes flew into the World Trade center.  And maybe it is God’s will that people get AIDS.  And maybe it is God’s will that there is a hole in the ozone and the icecaps are melting.  And if all these things are God’s will, then who am I to try to change the course of anything!?  Who am I to question the will of God?  

 

I am Abraham.  And you are Abraham.  And Bonhoeffer is Abraham.  And Abraham is our inheritance from God.  Abraham is God’s will to humanity.  Abraham is the holder of God’s covenant with humanity.  Whether we as individuals believe in the existence of this God or not, the legends of Abraham are in the world and they are our inheritance.  And the Abraham we have inherited submits to God at some times, and at others, he bargains with God, he questions God’s will.  But at all times, Abraham is faithful to his covenant with God and to the principles of truth, morality, and coexistence.  Living for those principles is what it means to live the will of God. 

*******************

Now I want to step back for a moment and ask how it is people think they know the will of God these days.  Not many people claim that God speaks to them in plain English, and most of those who do aren’t taken that seriously.  In the context of world conflict, most of those who claim to be acting out God’s will base their understanding of that will on the texts and teachings of their respective traditions:  the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran. 

 

A Jewish archeologist whom Bruce Feiler interviewed, Hanan Eschel, talked about the problem of how the sacred texts are sometimes used: 

 

“If you ask me, it’s a question of modesty,” he said.  “Why do religious people act the way they act?  It’s because of a lack of modesty.  It’s what happened in Jerusalem with Christian cults planning to blow up the Temple Mount to make way for the messiah.  It’s what happened in Israel with the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he made peace with the Palestinians.  Some people read the text and suffer from a lack of modesty.  They really believed they had all the answers.  I know that I don’t have all the answers.  I am trying to understand the text and the commentaries, and I know that somebody else will have more insights than I will.” 

 

He continued, “I think the same thing has happened with Islam.  The Koran says that the people who believe in Muhammad should rule the world, yet they found out that the world is not functioning the way it’s written in Scripture.  It can’t be a mistake in theology, so it must be a mistake in history – and this mistake must be temporary.  The minute you get this notion in your head, you’re allowed to change it.  You’re allowed to act for God” (pp. 134-5). 

 

That problem isn’t confined to Islam.  The New Testament’s book Revelation describes the end-time before God will come again in judgment and some interpreters say Christian fundamentalists are actively trying to prepare the world stage for that end-time vision. 

 

Feiler interviewed historians and clerics and theologians of Jewish, Christian and Islamic faith in Israel, Palestine and the US.  He talked to them about Abraham and about history and about the possibilities for peace in our time.  And with only a very few exceptions, all of those leaders and thinkers saw Abraham as a vital key in opening inter-religious understanding. 

 

Abraham has been recreated by every generation for 4000 years.  Feiler suggests it’s time for yet another new Abraham, one for our times, one created through dialogue.  One of his German scholars living and working in Jerusalem says: 

 

“… you’re a Jew, I’m a Christian – we’ll sit down and begin to draw a picture of Abraham.  I’ll say, ‘What do you know?’  You’ll ask what I know, and we’ll come up with some basic features:  He’s a man, he lives in the desert.  And we start from there. …

 

      “And what do we have in the end?” (Feiler asks)

 

“A giant figure, who holds our joint expectations in his life, and whose character we both see as representing the best of ourselves.  It’s beautiful.  And it can happen.”  … “Now let’s find a Muslim.  The three of us will do the same, and we’re on the way to solving the problems of the world.”  (p. 155)

 

“There is no way to peace along the way of safety,” said Bonhoeffer.  “Peace is the great adventure.  It has to be dared.”  Deitrich Bonhoeffer was a daring man in his day.  With a great deal of inner conflict, he took the last boat from Germany to America.  He escaped.  But not much later, he took the last boat from America back to Germany.  He threw himself back into that horrible situation, knowing there was every chance he wouldn’t come through it alive.  He made that daring commitment in the hope of peace. 

 

In the Middle East today, it may be that the most daring commitment people could make would be to approach their religion’s teachings with modesty and to encourage others to do the same.  Maybe the most daring commitment a person could make would be to sit down with two others and together create a new Abraham of peace.  In some places this might mean risking safety of the body for participants.  And it might mean risking safety of the soul – to be open to hearing others, open to change in one’s self, open to finding God’s will “concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.” 

 

 “There is no way to peace along the way of safety.   Peace is the great adventure.”  Maybe this adventure is God’s will for the children of Abraham in these difficult days. 

 

May it be so.

May we make it so through our living.