“The Future of Faith - a New Look!”

Karen Sloan 31/10/2021

Readings -

Mark 12:28-34

“One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question”.

The gospel reading today is one of those readings which should just say it all.  There, Jesus has put all the law and all the commandments into two, love God and love your neighbour. This is far more important all the rules and regulations.

Easy, now we can all go home.

Actually, no, we can’t!

While no one asked Jesus any more questions, we are!

Notice that Jesus, in the first part of the reading, doesn’t say God is love, but love God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.  In other words, with all that you are as a human being.

For many, many weeks we have had readings where love has been the focus of our preaching, and rightly so.  Many preachers might say, God is love, and so we must love.  But is God really love.  What does that even mean.  And what about evolution, the way we got here as human beings, and the reality that some of creation is not all that loving.  Someone asked me the other day about this.  How can we have God as love when for millions of years there was no such thing as us!

So, when we hear this famous passage, maybe what we have to decide first and foremost who and what God is. An idea I and many people, in and outside the church, grapple with endlessly.   We have been running a seminar series on the Future of Christianity at Floreat Uniting, at times confronting and challenging.  It suggests that if we want a future for our faith we have to address seriously this question, what do we mean when we use the word God?

So here goes!

Sometime ago I asked some friends, some from here and some are from elsewhere, to give me their definition of God. I was hoping to gather them together in a small book. 

One was Val Webb, who we heard from in our series. Val is a theologian, writer and speaker, who has been to Perth many times giving talks and lectures, and who has been exploring the evolving nature of Christianity.

Let me read her a bit of her submission to me…

.(Val’s definition…)

While I have only read Val’s, every person I asked , and they included Bill Loader, Marion and Nev from our church and Dennis Ryle from yours, and others, less well known, talked humbly about God being in all things, the ground of being, the essential element of life, the creativity that is required to give life, now, in the past and in the future. And about a mystery that is at the very depth of it all.

Now it doesn’t mean that other people’s definition has to be yours.  But if we want to open ourselves up a bit, then this idea that God gives life matches very well with modern science and its ideas about life.  Maybe if we take modern science seriously then we have to take seriously the idea that we need a new definition of God.

So, as I said, we are going to go on a bit of a journey this morning.  Possibly it reflects my own.

Firstly, I want to just renew your acquaintance with how we got here, how did life originate in the first place.  To place what we call God or spirit in the picture.

So, a little summary on all that has gone before (thanks Arthur Peacock, “A Genesis for the Third Millennium”for some of it) …

Scientists tell us the `Great Story` as we understand it today, begins with the ultimate mystery of the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago.

In the first minutes after that there were particles, little bits of energy everywhere. 

The first particles appeared 3 mins into the life of the universe and bonded with other particles to produce atoms. After a little while the universe cooled down to the temperature of the sun, cooled down enough that atoms began to come together to make molecules.

Stars were formed and some of the heavier metals appeared.

5 billion years ago, one star in our galaxy, our sun, attracted around it matter as planets.  One of them was our earth..

On Earth, the assembly of atoms and the temperature became just right to allow water and solid rock to form continents, and mountains grew.  And in some deep wet crevice, or pool, or deep in the sea, just over 3 billion years ago, some molecules became large and complex enough to make copies of themselves and become the first specks of life.

Life then multiplied in the seas, diversifying and becoming more and more complex.  Five hundred million years ago, creatures with solid skeletons, the vertebrates, appeared.  On land, green plants changed the atmosphere by making oxygen.  Then 300 million years ago, certain fish learned to crawl from the sea and live on the edge of the land, breathing that oxygen from the air.

Now life burst into many forms – reptiles, mammals (and dinosaurs) on land, reptiles and birds in the air.  Over millions of years the mammals began to develop complex brains which enabled them to learn.  Among these were creatures that lived in trees, the primates from which we arise.. 

So far, so pretty amazing. But let’s go a bit further…

Because, as you know, we didn’t just appear as us, modern humans, as the bible might lead us to believe.  We are derived from a common ancestor which we shared with the Chimps and with the Bonobo, some 7 million years ago, or with the Gorilla some 8 or 9 million years ago, fellow primates. These species have evolved separate from us, but we have an ancient link.

From there we took our own road.

We are ourselves the product of millions of years of evolution, not linear but branching.  Our bipedal ancestors, appeared 2- 3 million years ago, while the homo species, initially Homo Habilus followed a million years later.   Our most recent ancestors, the Neanderthals, lived the same time as us, Homo Sapiens, around 200-300,00 years ago, but were a dead end, not surviving the rigours of life in their surroundings. In all of these groups we have found signs of culture and painting, of respect for the dead and some rituals.. 

As Homo Sapiens, we have gone on to develop fire, tools, language, complex societies, cities, work, economies, and religious structures. And the list is unfinished.  Today we are discovering what makes up who we are, what makes us tick in a way unheard of even a few years ago let alone 2,000 years ago. From the DNA molecule, to the process my which our cells know how to differentiate to become skin or heart or brain tissue, we are finding out new things every day.

So we are a marvel of life, no doubt. Yet we are life that is part of larger life.  If we put our 13.7 billion year universe on a clock of one hour, `humanity appears in only the last few seconds` (Peters 2002:127).

As Weston, 1993, says

Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced us.

The ancestral stars are part of our genealogy.

`Out of the stars and their flight,

Out of the dust of eternity, here have we come,

Stardust and sunlight, mingling,

Through time and through space`.

This is what is real, this is reality for us in the 21st century.

Many people of faith, including myself, would say God gives life, this incredible life, that God is somehow involved in all of this creating.. 

But how, if we don’t picture God sitting somewhere else, directing the traffic!

So, let’s look even a bit further still….

And it’s equally amazing.  Earlier I talked about particles, and atoms and molecules in the story of the universe, but there seems to be an urge for all of these things to come together.  It now appears that it’s not about the things themselves, but about how they are related, from the very small to the very big. This matter in relationship is what enables us to create more and more life out of simpler things.

And it happens in 3 distinct ways.  

There is increasing complexity, atoms are more complex than particles, cells are more complex than molecules, a person is more complex than a group of cells. 

There is increasing depth where we get atoms from particles, cells from molecules, each adding a layer of depth as it unfolds.  When atoms bond to atoms you get something new, that didn’t exist in a lower level.  This process is called emergence. "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," meaning the whole has properties its parts don’t have. These properties come about because of interactions among the parts. 

And finally

There is increasing unity, those of similar essence and substance bond together, creating this something new.  Everything in the universe wants to bond with substances that will make something bigger and more complex than themselves. We are basically drawn together.

While this is quantum mechanics, and I’m no expert in quantum mechanics and you don’t want to be either, it appears that these 3 features are essential to the expansion of the universe and life. It’s like progress is the soul of the universe. Life happens even when we think it just can’t. And even when there are some dead ends, blind alleys and death and destruction along the way, life seems to be what we end up with. In answer to my friends’ question from before.

So, in the 21st century, as we use science, or more particularly quantum mechanics to explore our life and how we got here, we find some details that may lead us to the mystery we call God. A God that gives life. 

Many of us believe and trust that there is something driving all of this life forward, something hidden, within this incredible picture I have just painted..  That we can sense and experience, at a deep heart level.  Call it what you will, God, force, spirit, breath, energy, even cosmic consciousness, because in some sense it is a mystery, as Val said. A mystery yes, but one that is more in keeping with what we know about our world and about us.  Somehow God is in the process, not above, not outside but within this incredible process of life, including us, pulling the whole thing forward.

So, when we return to our redefining of God which we started with, the idea of an external ruler that rules only for human seems limited.

Rather, as Michael Morwood would say, maybe we should see God as that “mysterious reality that permeates the universe and holds everything together in connectedness and relationship”.  An energizing creative impulse that has been present since the dawn of the world and the dawn of the universe.   This spirit is not just a fly by nighter, here one day and gone the next, it is at the heart of who we are and who we are to be.  It is found in all of life, from the earliest beginnings in the universe, in the galaxies and stars and planets, and from the smallest life forms to the complex creatures we have evolved into.  If we understand God in this way we find all of life shows the presence of God’s spirit, in which we live and move and have our being, not just one part, and not just the human part.

And we are not alone in thinking like this.

Rob Bell, in his book called “Everything is Spiritual”, suggests “this God presence is a reality that can be known, felt and experienced, but one that cannot be located in any specific physical space in any tangible way”. Or as Paul Tillich, a famous 20th century theologian would say, it is the ground of all being, ours and everything. Or we can go back to the Hebrew scriptures which talk about the breath of God, that moves where it will. And gives life

So, what do we do with this understanding now, today!

Maybe we should take a leaf out of the book of the universe. Maybe today we are being called to bond together, linking arm in arm, to make something new.  Something better.  In fact, maybe when we bind together in harmony, and in support of each other we are recreating the universe. By increasing depth, complexity and unity, and producing something new we join in with the divine presence that infuses all of it. We can give life to one another, if we respond to the pull of this mysterious force called God that has always been there and always will be, that joins us together. 

So, what gives life to people, communities, nations, the world? I think we already know.  Racism doesn’t, loneliness doesn’t, injustice doesn’t, inequality doesn’t, and fundamentalism doesn’t. Love does.  So, does compassion and empathy and forgiveness and justice and non-violence. And peace. That’s what gives life. And today a mayor thing that gives life for all of us is the care and protection of the non- human part of our creation.

You can see now why the ancients and even us use a shorthand way of describing this mystery.  God is love because love gives life. God’s spirit residing in this world just as in ours, working for life. They just didn’t know it went back so far.

But what about us, do I have a current example?

Well, I saw it the other night. I was watching “Fires”, an ABC program based on last year’s catastrophic fires on the  East Coast.  The third program in the series, said so much about what is life giving.  I recommend you catch up on it if you haven’t.  Basically, we see the impact of the loss of a loved one in a fire, the grief and wretchedness and blame that comes with that, and then the life-giving forgiveness of neighbours and the love of family and community which occurs, and which gives a little light and comfort at that terrible time. It was profound to watch. These are stories that are based on actual events, but they happen every day in every way in our lives together. Dark and light, death and resurrection. Everyday a new thing can be born. We see it in the universe, we see it in evolution and we see it in us.

As Charles Birch would say..

“God is the spirit that breathes life into the creatures and calls the higher organisms to the more abundant life of love”.

This is who Jesus points to in his great commandment.  For he knew what gave light and light in his world. And what gives it in ours. It is God, however you name this divine process.

But what about the second part of the great commandment.

I think the second part that Jesus gave his followers that day now speaks for itself. Love your brother as yourself.  And who is our brother.  Everyone and everything.  For we are connected to one another in such depth and complexity it is incredible.  We just have to recognise it and work with this life-giving power each and every day. 

Just as Jesus did.

And finally, who will be happy to know, what about the future of Christianity, which we touched on at the beginning.  Maybe what we are witnessing today in our society and the world at large is something broader.   Not the death of God or religion, and particularly Christianity, but the reawakening of an awareness of God’s presence in the world, in the everyday, in all of life.  An awareness that drives us toward greater hope and love, forgiveness, compassion and peace. An awareness and way that Jesus spoke, lived and modelled.

And I believe we remain his followers because of it

Just another thought to conclude with .

Amen