Gods Known and Unknown: Learning from My Mother and the Dalai Lama
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
A Sermon by the Reverend Ron Parker

I don’t know whether Paul had been to Athens before, but today’s text tells us that he is wandering around the Areopagus – the square surrounding an important judicial court in Athens – gawking at everything like a tourist.  Think of it as like walking around Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus.  Like Sproul, just about every brand of religion, politics, sexual orientation, and social interest was represented there.  But it had one thing that I’ve never seen on the Cal campus:  an altar to “an unknown god.”  Most of the people at those tables on Sproul Plaza seem pretty certain of who God is or isn’t.

I think an altar to an unknown god is a good idea.  It keeps us appropriately humble.  We often get in trouble when we think we know God better than she knows herself.  Actually, I wouldn’t be opposed to having a little altar along one of the side aisles here where we could light a candle to the part of God that we don’t know yet.

It would remind us of the two sides to the religious life: affirming and practicing what we do know and exploring and looking into what we don’t know.

***

After it was too late to add anything to the bulletin this week, I thought of an extension to the title of this sermon.  I’d call it “Gods Known and Unknown:  Learning from My Mother and the Dalai Lama.”

You see, last Sunday morning I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I had to choose:  Should I go with my mother to Dixboro United Methodist Church – the church I grew up in – or should I go to a teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama?  Neither my mother nor the Dalai Lama were putting any pressure on me.  My mother had been collecting clippings about the Dalai Lama for weeks in anticipation of our visit and we had tickets to his sold-out teachings in the University of Michigan basketball arena.

So since I’ve been to Dixboro Church a lot of times and will surely go again, and the Dalai Lama might not be back, I chose the Dalai Lama.  Most of my friends and relatives have gotten used to my choosing what they consider the edgy and exotic over the familiar and traditional.  Why else would I have left rural Michigan and moved to Berkeley, after all?

But what is often overlooked is that the religious life is about finding a way of living with both the known and the unknown, with the comfortable and the uncomfortable, with the traditional and the exotic.

There is probably no place on earth that I am more comfortable than sitting in the third pew on the left in Dixboro Church between my 98-year-old mother and my 92-year-old Aunt Ola, with my sister and my cousin and my fifth grade Sunday School teacher singing in the choir, directed by the Janice Clarke who directed the children’s choir when I was 10, not to mention my high school girlfriend,  April, sitting across the aisle.  That’s the clearest definition of home, I can imagine.

That sense of “at-homeness’  is and essential part of the life of faith.  It’s an important part of what we try to create in this room every Sunday.

But the other side of the life of faith is looking for the part of God that we have not yet seen.  For that, we often have to look beyond our comfortable and familiar pew.  We have to do some things and encounter some people that make us uncomfortable.  We have to listen to some ideas and participate in some practices that feel less familiar.

In his book The Way of All the Earth, theologian John Dunne, describes this process. He writes, “Is a religion coming to birth in our time? It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call “passing over,” passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion.” According to Dunne, passing over leads to a return.  He says, “it is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call “coming back,” coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.” He says: “Passing over and coming back, it seems is the spiritual adventure of our time.”

“Passing over and coming back.”  For me, this is the essential movement of growing in faith.

Now I am well aware that that is not the way of California spirituality, where the dominant movement often seems to be:  “Get out and don’t look back.”.  I meet many people who say, “I’m so glad to be free of that awful religion of my childhood..  Now I just pick and choose the best of all religions.”  What that often means is that they skim the shallow surface of the world’s traditions without ever going deep enough to find a solid ground anywhere.

On the other hand, what I’ve learned about the Dalai Lama is that where Tibetan Buddhism is concerned, he’s a pretty conservative guy.  He likes to come to the West and learn from other faiths.   He’s fun and gregarious.  But when he goes back to Daramsala, he returns to the ancient rituals of his own faith.   His understanding of that practice may be enriched by the experiences and dialogues he has had, but he does not give it up.

The Apostle Paul struggled with this movement in nearly all of his writings.  He was a Jew, raised and trained in the Synagogue, immersed in the texts and practices of his faith.  He had had a shattering vision on the road to Damascus that had transformed but not obliterated that faith.  Now we have him wandering through the spiritual marketplace of Athens, puzzling and marveling at the many statues of gods.  Maybe he is still a little gun shy and half afraid that one of them will speak to him, while at the same time remembering that central tenant of his own tradition:  Thou shalt not make unto me any graven images.

Perhaps he is somewhat relieved when he comes to an altar with no graven image, dedicated “to an unknown god.”   One reason that the Jews didn’t make statues was to remind themselves how little they knew of God.  A statue can be carried around, manipulated, seen from all sides.  Paul’s God was mysterious, barely known, encountered by reaching out beyond the known.

I’m always a little uncomfortable when someone asks: “Do you know God?”  I know I am expected to say, “Yes,” but I want to follow that answer quickly with, “but there is infinitely more of God that I don’t know than this pittance I do.”

Unfortunately, people who ask that question  always seem sure that they know most everything about God and are anxious to set me straight.

So when Paul says that we come from one ancestor and that God hopes that in our diverse cultures we will search and grope after God, I feel right at home.  He actually sounds a bit like the Dalai Lama.

***

OK, let’s stop right here for a minute.  I’m starting to feel the press of objections coming up from the pews.

Objection number 1:  Paul is no where near as open-minded as I am making him out to be.  

Of course you’re right.  He wanted to convert all those Athenians to the new faith that he had found, but I would argue that he also knew from experience that God was often to be encountered in new and unexpected places.  His theology, as we find it in his letters, is full of references and insights from the pluralistic culture in which he lived.  Even though he didn’t always sound like it, he knew that he didn’t know everything there was to know about God.

Objection number 2:  Are you telling me that I have to go back to that narrow-minded, sexist, homophobic, uptight religion I grew up with?

I don’t think so.  I expect to keep on living in Berkeley and going to church in that hotbed of radicalism called “Epworth.”  But at the same time, I want to remember that my feet stand on the ground in Dixboro, because that is where some deep part of myself lives.

Objection number 3:  What if I really find it more meaningful to practice some new religion altogether?

I think that’s fine, too, as long as we don’t forget that whatever we practiced when we were  a child, will likely pop up in our practice of our new-found faith as well.  There are lots of Baptist Buddhists and fundamentalist liberals around these days.  That’s part of the ongoing inner dialogue that is the spiritual quest.

The biggest danger in any religion is that we pretend to see more than we really do.  That’s when we stumble. We can do this with either words or statues or practices.  It’s called idolatry.

In Egyptian writing, the hieroglyphic sign shaped like the eye signified the word to make rather than to see.  Perhaps they guessed the danger of making up more than we know.  God is most often found on the edge of what we do not know.

The very enterprise of our faith is the process of groping for what is absent in our lives.  Making up words and images to hint at what we barely know.  The poet Rumi writes:

I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.
A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they st]art to fill.  Their hope, though
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it.  It contains
what you need!

So in order to see God, we dare to step into the darkness.  In order to speak of God, we dare to break the silence.

And how do we dare to step into the darkness or break the silence? Because we trust that God is there, waiting to reveal a morsel more of the Divine Presence we seek and from that darkness we may return with a little more richness to the little light we have.