Constellations and Theologies

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself wondering where on earth the summer’s gone! But I think that every year, around this time!

It’s always the same. You look forwards to things slowing down a little when the kids are off school, and you don’t have to be a taxi driver six days a week, and then before you know it it’s time to gear up again, get the pencil cases filled and get the labels sewn onto school clothes, go shopping for school shoes….

The holidays are nearly over, and like it or not, autumn’s on the way.

But it isn’t all bad news because autumn has its own charms too – the changing colours of the season, the productivity of harvestime, and one of my own favourites – that narrow window of time when the stars are amazing at night, but it’s still mild enough to stand outside and enjoy them. 

I’m no great stargazer, but I do know my way around some of the night sky, and recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between theologies and constellations.

You see, constellations are pretty arbitrary. Our ancestors looked at the night sky and picked out a bear and a warrior and a dragon. But they might equally well have seen a lizard and a milkmaid and a sickle. The same clusters of stars might inspire different images in different minds, or you could join the dots in entirely different ways that would make every bit as much sense as the patterns we’re used to.

It’s worth remembering that if we relocated to a different solar system, the constellations would be totally different. It would be the same night sky, but we’d scarcely recognise it.

Constellations can even be a little misleading in the way they simplify the night sky. When you look at the plough or Orion you get the impression that all the stars are in the same vertical plane, but in reality they could be light years away from one another.

The point I’m trying to make is that constellations are useful, but only up to a point. They’re a helpful way of mapping the night sky and helping us get our bearings, but the best they can ever be is a snapshot of a much bigger, grander reality.

Constellations can help us, but only up to a point.

And I would argue that the same is true of theologies. No matter how precious they are to us, and no matter how much we have vested in them, all theologies, all attempts to explain God and God’s working in the world, will always fall short in some way, because they can never fully describe the reality they’re trying to depict.

We can’t put God in a box. We can’t wrap him up in words. He is: and a tongue-tied, awestruck universe can only try to find the right words to describe him.

Our theologies aren’t the reality. God is the reality; theologies are humanity’s best efforts to try and describe what we know of God.

And the thing is, there are many of them, even within our own Spiritual tradition of Christianity.

Since Luther started the Reformation 500 years ago by nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, the Protestant wing of the church has proliferated something like 20,000 different denominations – high church, low church, sprinklers, dunkers, strict and particular, free and easy, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Brethren, Quaker, Mennonite, Independent, Adventist, and of course, our own particularly variegated strand, the Presbyterian.

That’s a lot of different theologies going about.

Not to mention all the different shades of Roman Catholic and Orthodox who were already on the go before Luther.

We’re all trying to describe the indescribable, struggling to make sense of a reality that none of us can fully get our heads around. And it’s an enduring shame of the church that in our history we’ve chosen to burn people at the stake over theological differences. And the irony is we did it in Christ’s name, when it’s something I doubt Christ himself would ever have done.

I’m thinking about this a lot just now because I come across a whole lot of different theologies in my reading, and the more I read the more it strikes me that some are more helpful than others.

Good theologies take the whole of Scripture into account, and always keep in mind  what I was saying last week. That Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God ‘s nature and character. Our benchmark. Our touchstone.  

Unhelpful theologies dilute that connection between God and

Jesus, sometimes almost setting them against one another, and they tend to magnify certain ideas or doctrines at the expense of others.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Just a few weeks ago I read this sentence in an article a friend had posted a link to on Facebook –

“Since only deeds done out of love for God are genuinely good, we must love God before we can do any good. But we do not naturally love God. We are born loving self and that self-love expresses itself in any number of godless lusts. What we naturally are is incapable of good.”

Now there’s a lot in there we could discuss, but let’s focus in on those last few words. What we naturally are is incapable of good.

How did that author come to such a pessimistic view of human nature?

Well it strikes me that that kind of theology grows out of an overemphasis on the  passages in Scripture which speak pessimistically about human nature. 

In Romans, the apostle Paul, quoting the Psalms,  says “There is no-one righteous, not even one; there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no-one who does good, not even one.”

At one point, Isaiah, speaking about the people of Israel, says “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags”.

The prophet Habbakuk tells us that “God is too pure to look upon evil.”

And we do evil, of course. We’re sinners. And the logic goes that because we’re sinners God can only bear to look at us if we clothe ourselves in Christ through faith. But even then, in Luther’s own words, we are little more than snow-covered dung.

Do you see where this very selective, myopic theology takes us? To a God trapped in the prison of his own holiness, and despising the creation that he’s made so much he can scarcely even bring himself to look at it.

Going back to last week’s sermon does that sound like Jesus to you? Does it sounds like John 3:16 to you which tells us that  “ God so LOVED the world, he sent his one and only son.”

Yes, Habbakuk says “God is too pure to look upon evil”. But in the very next breath, he goes on to ask God why he does exactly that!

Why he bears with a fallen world and fallen people!

If God is literally too pure to look on evil, why didn’t Jesus go around with a blindfold on all the time? He was God incarnate. His holiness didn’t keep him away from sinners in disgust, it took him towards them in the hope of seeing them restored and redeemed.

If God has to turn away from us in anger because we’re sinful, why does Scripture show God turning towards sinful men and women time and time again from Genesis through to Revelation?

And if “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags”  then why does Jesus spend so much time in the Sermon on the Mount exhorting us to righteous acts?

Why does Paul say in Romans that it’s those who ‘persist in doing good’ who will be given eternal life?

Why does James say we should demonstrate our faith in what we do?

I come back to what I said last week, but expand it a little.

If we have an image of God, or a theology of God, which does not look or sound like Jesus we are fully justified in questioning it.

And I have to tell you, I am very much in a questioning mode at this stage in my journey of faith.

I don’t care who said it or theologised about it! If it doesn’t square with the wide sweep of scripture, and what I’ve come to know of Christ for myself, I feel duty bound to question it.

The scriptures do say that “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags” but I think that’s hyperbole, not doctrine.

If all our righteous acts are like filthy rags, why is Jesus moved by the righteous act of four men bringing their friend along to him for healing?

We know this story well, don’t we, and I know I’ve preached on it several times before at Belhelvie.

And the same things always strike me when I read this passage - the men’s persistence – the sheer effort they went to to bring their friend to Jesus.

Jesus’ reponse – forgiving sins first, which was a claim to divinity, and a recognition that inner healing and friendship with God is even more important than physical healing.

But then this glorious command of ‘get up and walk’ – an indescribable blessing to the man who was ill, but also a slap in face for the strict and particular Pharisees. Men who just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that God  could work in ways their theology wouldn’t allow.

But in the light of what I’ve been saying this morning, let’s linger on five very significant words as we close. “When Jesus saw THEIR faith.”

“When Jesus saw THEIR faith.” he said to the man ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.” It wasn’t just  the man’s faith he was responding to; it was their faith.

Jesus sees these men, out of love for their friend, sweating and struggling their way up onto the roof, risking the wrath of the houseowner by ripping the ceiling open, and then lowering him down into the chaos in search of healing.

He saw the friendship, the faith and the sheer effort involved and he despised it, because naturally we are incapable of any good.

No – he responded to it and affirmed it – and his compassion went out towards them in forgiveness and healing.

This is our God. He knows the things we do to help carry others through life; he sees the burdens we bear out of love and appreciates them.  And he sees the times when we ourselves need to be carried. He knows. And his compassion goes out to us.

I want to end with another short poem by Seamus Heaney which he wrote after he’d had a stroke and this Biblical story came to life for him in a very real and personal way. And this goes out to all of you who in different ways are carrying others, or being carried today. It’s called ‘Miracle’.

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in —

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight light-headedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along

Amen.