I am, I care - God

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

• Psalm 121
• Isaiah 43:14 – 44:5
• John 5:30-47

5 September pm 2010 Rev. Dr. Raymond Pelly Priest Associate http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

‘“I am, I care”, yours truly, God’. If I were to put a counter-slogan on buses to the well known, ‘There’s probably no God…’, it would be that. More on this in a moment.

First though, note that it comes straight out of the Bible. In the soaring rhetoric from Isaiah we have just heard, God announces God-self – via the words of the Prophet – in the words, ‘I, I am He’. This is the ‘I am’ who says, ‘I make all things new’ and, ‘I blot out your iniquities’. This recalls the classic Exodus situation in which God originally announces God-self as, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ or, ‘I will be who I will be’ – in modern language, ‘I’m free to chose who I will be’; or, another translation, ‘I am the One who is there for you’, the faithful God who binds God-self to particular peoples in particular situations - in this case, a slave-people, Israel, in ancient Egypt [Exodus 3:14].

Now listen to a couple more utterances characteristic of this God. ‘I have observed the misery of my people … I have heard their cry … I know their sufferings … and I have come down to deliver them’ [Exodus 3:7-8]. Alongside that, some words from Isaiah, ‘In all their afflictions he was afflicted. It was his presence that saved them’ [Isaiah 63:9, NRSV alternative reading]. Put all that together and we have this: the God who is co-passionate, the One whose passionate love compels God to share the suffering of peoples – ‘in all their afflictions I was afflicted’; but who, in even greater measure (if that were possible), yearns for their freedom and well-being. This, moreover, is the God who makes promises, of land, of a future.

All this is recalled/remembered/rehearsed by Isaiah in a new situation of exile and oppression, this time in Babylon; and to the discerning eye we see the same thing ‘hot, strong, and thick’ in the life, passion, and raising to new life of Jesus. He is the One who witnesses to, and incarnates, this co-passionate God, the living God of the Bible. He is the One who ‘completes the very works (or deeds) … that the Father has sent me to do’ [John 5:36]. This ‘Father’, the One who sends – on mission, on the journey into the ‘far country’ of human suffering and misery – is the very One we have just spoken about, the co-passionate God, the ‘I am who I am’ of the ever self-renewing story of redemption.

Cut now to the Bus slogan. The full text reads, ‘In the beginning, man created God. There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’. What is so striking about this its extraordinary complacency. ‘Stop worrying and enjoy your life’. That’s OK as far as it goes – faith too is about accessing the fullness of life and in the best possible way. But – and this a big ‘but’ – the Bus slogan sounds to me suspiciously like the ideology of the ‘haves’ of this world, not the ‘have nots’. It’s the rhetoric of people saying, ‘We’re the ones (give or take a bit) who’ve got all we want – housing, education, food, employment, entertainment, travel, Medicare & etc. What do we want with this silly old God that people keep wittering on about? Our material beatitude is as near heaven on earth as it gets.’ In the words of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin-doctor, ‘We don’t do God’.

To the people caught up in this, the atheism of complacency, we might want to say: ‘Aren’t you guys living on borrowed time? Can your overuse/exploitation of the world’s resources go on indefinitely? When is crunch time? What happens when the world’s supply of fossil fuels runs out/ ‘peak oil’? when there are no longer big trucks to bring food to your supermarkets? when the world starts to heat up to the point where it’s uninhabitable? Isn’t your recipe for ‘heaven on earth’ actually leading to ‘hell on earth’? I AM, I CARE – God. Maybe we need to start with, ‘I am, I care’ – Arthur, Kevin, Jim, Martha, Elaine, Rebecca … And if we start acting that out – well, who knows where it might lead?

The atheism of complacency – but that’s not the only one that bombards us every day. We also have the vocal lobby that says, ‘Science is the only show in town. Bye-bye God’. Richard Dawkins, latter-day disciple of Charles Darwin, thinks that everything (including God) can be explained by the theory of evolution. And in Friday’s Dom Post (3 Sept 2010) we had a blast from Stephen Hawking. Everything – including the origin of the universe or any number of universes – is explainable by ‘string theory’ or, more precisely, ‘a string of string theories’. What do we make of that?

Let me acknowledge straightaway that I don’t understand the first thing about ‘string theory’. I am, on the other hand, pro-science. I can’t wait for the day when science has discovered all there is to discover – a day which is a long way off! Hawking & Dawkins, too, are well aware that the theories they so confidently announce as irrefutable are in fact disputed in the scientific community itself. A lot of discoveries have been made – like the discovery of the human genome – since Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species in 1859. Is evolution simply a matter of external factors – ‘the survival of the fittest’? Or does it owe something to the internal, self-directed development of a given species, like one centred, say, on the human brain? Or, when I read the article about Stephen Hawking, I remembered an earlier piece about another Cambridge professor, Sir Martin Rees, who, in his Reith Lectures earlier this year, said that he doubted whether humankind had the capacity ever to produce a single theory of everything. Are we, I thought, listening in to a furious argument between Professors in Cambridge?

Come back, then, to our little bit of theology, ‘I am, I care, God’. What happens to the theories of the likes of Dawkins or Hawking if we translate them into ethics? Take ‘the survival of the fittest’, wouldn’t we have to say things like, ‘All those poor unfortunate people in dysfunctional economies in failed states should be culled, dropped, left to die. The same goes for mentally or physically handicapped people. As for the old and infirm, shouldn’t they be pressured into ‘taking themselves off’? For don’t they absorb so much of society’s resources & contribute so little?’ Here we wind up with an ideology that says, ‘I’m OK. You’re not OK. Get to hell out of it’. We have to ask ourselves, ‘Is this the kind of world we want for our children and grandchildren?’

Ever-increasing conflicts over ever-shrinking resources? And guess who the winners are going to be?

Come back, finally, to Stephen Hawking. I don’t know whether it’s in this latest book, but recently he opined that the world’s problems are so bad (and can only get worse) that the only solution to them is to abandon planet earth and start colonizing planets in outer space. C’mon, Steve, how realistic is that? Imagine trying to get the population of Bangladesh to Mars at a time when Buzz Aldrin has just said that only a consortium of rich nations could put up enough funding even to get a handful of people to Mars (and maybe back again!). How about coming down to earth, having the political and ethical will to deal with the admittedly horrendous problems in our own backyard? How about, ‘I am. I care – God’, with its carry-over into a humankind that says, ‘We are. We all care. Love from all of us?’

To conclude, then, some words from people I regard as ‘pastors & masters’. First, Keith Ward, philosopher & theologian: ‘The root of materialism is probably a firm commitment to empirical scientific method as the only reliable way to discover truth. Commitment to experimental method is in itself entirely commendable. But when it begins to exclude every other understanding of truth, one may suspect that it will result in a radically impoverished view of reality as a whole. The root of theism is probably a commitment to worship and prayer, which carries with it the belief that aesthetic, ethical, personal and relational aspects of experience provide distinctive paths to truth, and that the highest truth of all lies in apprehension of an objective reality of supreme beauty and goodness’.

Then, Rowan Williams, a fine theologian who doubles as Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘You only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled – so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your wish-fulfilment fantasies. Either you sense that you are confronting an energy so immense that here are no adequate words for it, or you give up.’

Yup, I really like that, but wonder whether it isn’t too cool, too laidback, not urgent enough. Which is why I’m partisan for my own little bit of kitchen-sink theology, ‘I am, I care. God’ – with all its spin-offs: ‘You and I are. We care for each other’; ‘We all are. We all care’. So help me God. So help us God.