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“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
To paraphrase: “I am not asking you to bow down before me, or to make some great tribute to me. What I want above all is for you to know me.”
How do we come to know God? Is reading what the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament, or the Muslim Koran has to say about God, the same thing as
knowing God?
The question is perhaps most acute for Christians. Historic Christian theology has held that to know Jesus the Christ is to know God. Is it as
simple as that?
There was a period in my life, well after I was ordained, when I didn’t believe some one could know God. And then I had a personal experience that
left me convinced that God knew me - in that I felt reached by a source of love that I could attribute only to God. That experience, and what I
derived from it, was the basis of what I have thought and taught and preached since.
But as I was preparing for this sermon by reading Psalm 50, I was jarred by words the psalmist attributes to God. These are the words we spoke in the
opening sentences:
“Mark this, then, you who forget God: You hate discipline, and you cast
my words behind you.
Mark this, then, you who forget God: I will tear you apart, and there will be
no one to deliver.”
I was jarred not because I felt these words were addressed directly to me - in the way people sometimes say sermons feel specifically directed to
them. I was jarred because I realized that I really wanted to take these words seriously. And for a long time I had passed off such passages as
thoughts and emotions attributed to God by very human persons with their own agendas, some admirable and uplifting, some fraught with anger and
resentment. Perhaps it was the phrase: “You who forget God” that most caught my attention: You who forget - or assume, and take for granted,
and begin to overlook, and allow distance - and are not bothered by this.
To take God for granted - As Woody Allen would say, “With all due respect.” I did feel bothered by that. And here before me, so to speak, were
the author of psalm 50, and the prophet Hosea, and Jesus himself to whom Matthew attributes the words: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire
mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I felt I wanted to take all their words seriously. Why, I wondered?
A few weeks ago, in the Sunday morning session of the St. Mark’s functional education course at Dupont House, Jack Harris gave a very full and
probing account of anxiety. He quoted Jim Adams’ belief that “Sin is the avoidance or denial of reality.” He continued with the statement that,
“What we seek to avoid and to deny in reality is the presence of anxiety.” That insight stuck with me. It made me think; it challenged me. In
the prophet Isaiah’s term, it shook my foundations enough to open me up to new possibilities, to new thoughts, perhaps to new life.
Why, you may wonder, have I told you this? It is because I have come to believe that one’s perception of God - whatever that might be - is
changed when one’s view of one’s self is changed. We think we know ourselves, at least much of the time, and then something happens and we
realize that our knowledge is only partial and we must now view ourselves in a fuller light. What was reality for us has been shaken. And
so is our perception of ultimate reality - to which we give the name “God.” This doesn’t mean that we now have a deeper or clearer perception
of God. Only that we know our relationship to God must be different. The psalmist portrays God as saying, “You thought that I was one just
like yourself...” And we respond, “Whatever we thought, it is no longer adequate. “
Does it follow that the biblical portrayal of God is “ adequate”? How can it be? There are so many contradictions, so many discrepancies, so
many accounts that fly in the face of our 21st century learning. But this doesn’t mean that the writers, the historians, the theologians,
the poets, the gospelers, the correspondents are either insincere or shallow. They are just limited, as they must be, as we must be in trying
to depict the ultimate reality of our and of all existence. The important question is: Do we think these writers cared enough? Did they give
all they had in their efforts to know and portray God? Aren’t these the same questions we ask, and should ask, of Jesus of Nazareth?
And so, as one who realizes he needs the experiences and insights of others in trying to close the distance between us and God, I again give
you the words of the prophet Hosea, which words Hosea portrays as God’s own: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of
God rather than burnt offerings.”
I wonder if we - you and me - are not essentially in the same boat? Each with our partial experience of God, and none with a very close
knowledge of God. What is our hope? Is it not in the longing of our hearts? The longing to be more open, to be more receptive, to be more
alert? When the foundations are shaken, there is occasion and possibility for the new. To quote Hosea again: “Let us know, let us press on
to know the Lord; [God’s] appearing is as sure as the dawn; [God] will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
But what if God doesn’t come to us so surely? What if we are in a dry season, and there are no rains outside us or inside us? What if we
have essentially given up on a personal relationship with God and feel resigned to just going through the motions on Sunday mornings, hoping
a good worship experience now and then might be enough? What if we find that, at this point in our lives, the Bible doesn’t seem to come
through for us - in spite of the lessons and gospel readings we continue to try and absorb. What then?
At the end of the play “J.B.,” a modern retelling of the Job story, all the lights in the world - including those in the churches - seem to
have gone out for Job and his wife. And yet they dare tell each other: “Blow on the coals of the heart.” I think that is why a St. Mark’s
parishoner, one who does not too often worship here, told me that he finds that only one part of the Bible urgently speaks to him, and that
is the Psalms. He didn’t go on to say why, but I think his attraction to these ancient poems has to do with the naked honesty of the emotions
and desires expressed in their reaching for and fleeing from God.
Not long ago Susan and I went over to the bookstore Politics and Prose to hear the self-proclaimed atheist Richard Dawkins present his book
The God Delusion. We were less impressed by Dawkins than we were by the huge crowd that had assembled to hear him. Who were these people?
Were they all atheists? How could one know? But they looked like people who had more than a casual interest in whether we can or cannot
know God. They would be persons to talk with - if only to ask why they cared so much.
Finally, we might also look to persons outside our christian tradition who also care deeply about knowing God. In his book, The Prophets,
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel warns us that, “An idea or theory of God can easily become a substitute for God, impressive to the mind when
God as a living reality is absent from the soul.” He concludes: “The prophets had no theory or ‘idea’ of God. What they had was an
understanding... To the prophets, God was overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present.”
You and I might wish for a somewhat less threatening understanding. No doubt the prophets did too. But they finally seemed to be able to
absorb and fully respond to the God that came to them. And it’s hard not to conclude that this was due to their ability to live with the
anxiety that such a knowledge, such an understanding of God must bring.
What despair, then, you and I might feel, if we didn’t remember that anxiety is inevitably involved in every love relationship we’ve had
or aspire to! And people do live, and sometimes live deeply, with anxiety. The poet Jack Gilbert, in today’s reading, notes that - somehow -
“There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta..” And he concludes, “We must risk delight, we can do without pleasure,
but not delight.” You and I must risk a deeper knowledge of God, trusting that this knowledge also is delight. Amen.
