Ephesians 4:1-16
Functional Unitarians and Unflattening God
James Sledge June
28, 2015
I
had a theology professor in seminary who was fond of saying that nearly all of
us are functional Unitarians. We may sing Holy, Holy, Holy on Trinity Sunday
and baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but when it
comes right down to it, we reduce God to one person of the Trinity.
It
is possible to do a Unitarianism of the Son, begining every prayer with “Jesus
we just ask you…” Quakers and others sometimes reduce God to Spirit. But I
think by far the most popular choice is a Unitarianism of the Father.
Many
open their prayers with “Heavenly Father” or even “Father God.” In fact this form
of Unitarianism is so pervasive that” God” and “Father” become virtual synonyms
in a way that never happens with Jesus or the Spirit. Just look at the hymnals
in our pews. They have various sections, seasonal ones for Advent, Christmas,
Lent, sections for baptism and the Lord’s Supper and other parts of worship.
And there are sections for the Trinity labeled “Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ,” and
“God.”
I
realize that for many the Trinity is some esoteric doctrine with no real
connection to faith, but it seems to me that we flatten and diminish the
incredible mystery of God when we reduce God to one thing, when we require God
to conform to our conceptual limitations.
We
humans have a tendency to think that unity or oneness means sameness. That is
why sports teams and armies wear uniforms, a visible display of sameness. When
Christian missionaries first went to Africa, they assumed that converting
people the faith meant making them look and act like Christians in America and
Europe. In Ghana and Congo they insisted that pastors wear black robes in
stifling heat and import pianos or small organs for playing Western hymns. No
indigenous instruments or music allowed.
Thankfully
we eventually saw the arrogance of this, yet functionally, we still struggle
with this need for sameness. There are successful multi-cultural congregations
in America, but they are few. Many more are mostly one race, one socio-economic
group, one political leaning, and so on. And I have to think such sameness impacts
our images of God.
Our reading from Ephesians speaks a lot
about unity and oneness. There is one body, one baptism, one faith, one Lord,
one Spirit, one God and Father of us all. There is unity in the Spirit and the
unity of faith. However the one body is marked not by sameness but rather
diversity. The body is a complex organism working together for a common goal,
and in this it somehow mimics that complex relationship that is God.
What
image or picture of God do you have? Diane told me recently of a project for
her Doctor of Ministry class where she is to interview a child about her image
of God. I did something similar in one of my seminary classes. As I recall,
almost all those interviews revealed some version of God as a bearded,
white-haired man. Of course you might get similar results from many adults.
When
God is seen exclusively as Father, the man upstairs, we may end up with
incomplete, immature, even harmful notions of what God is like, how we relate
to God, and how the people of God are to live and act in the world. The white-haired, heavenly Father is often
seen as remote, authoritarian, and distant. Such a God is easily appropriated
by empire or nation as a domineering king and disciplinarian who keeps subjects
in line, rules with an iron fist, and fights for us against our enemies.
But Christians speak of coming to know
God through Jesus, who is neither distant nor remote but is like us, a brother
who eats and laughs and parties with the very people that remote disciplinarian
was supposed to punish, fight against, or keep in line. And the first
generations of Christians insisted that they didn’t just know about Christ, but
they actually knew him because they were joined to him and to one another by
the Spirit. There was a unity in the Spirit, one body with many disparate and
diversely gifted members.
____________________________________________________________________________
I
read a blog post the other day entitled, “The Church Is Not Dying. It’s
Failing. There’s a Difference.” The author noted the well reported fact of
Mainline denominations’ alarming decline, but suggested that dying is too
passive a term to use. How can it just be fading away? she asked. Certainly not
because people no longer care about God. She writes, “I have never noticed or
perceived that people were not interested in God anymore. People are incredibly
hungry for God. It isn’t that people don’t want to experience God. It is that
The Church of the 1950s is failing to be a place where that happens.”[1]
When I read that I couldn’t help but
think of a critique I heard many years ago, one I’ve shared before. It says
that the Mainline Church’s problem is that people come to us seeking an
experience of God, and we give them information about God.
____________________________________________________________________________
I
recently stumbled across an interview with Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and
widely respected writer on spirituality. In the interview he was asked, “What
is mysticism?” Rohr answered, “To make it simple, it really means ‘experiential.’
And when you have real experience, it’s high-level. When most people hear the
word mystical, they think it means impossible for most of us, or distant, or
only capable to those who are ascetical for 25 years or something like that.
Actually, in my judgment, it simply means experiential knowledge of God,
instead of merely mental or cognitive knowledge of God.”[2]
Rohr
talks about how prayer, which originally was about being connected to God,
dwelling in God, got corrupted into asking God for stuff, a bit like letters to
Santa. But prayer is about listening for God, hearing God, experiencing God.
And God as Trinity, the diversity that exists within God, is also about
experience. It may be theological doctrine but it came into being as early
Christians tried to make sense of their experience of God, one who was Creator
and Father, but who they met in Jesus, and who dwelled within them by the
Spirit.
A
Trinitarian experience of God is a wonderful deterrent to unhelpful pictures of
God that assume God is like us, for us, loves only this or that group, and all
other manner of distortions that emerge when God must conform to some neat
picture we devise. A Trinitarian experience of God shatters the limited,
hierarchical, formulaic notions that too often emerge when we stare long enough
at one facet of God, missing the remarkable and incredible ways that God defies
and undermines the very notions the people of God have about the divine. And a
Trinitarian experience of God also undermines faith communities and
congregations based primarily on sameness rather than the surprising relational
diversity that is God.
Who
is God to you, and what is God like? Have you met this incredible God who contains
diversity and relationship, whose love cannot be bound by religious boundaries,
and who calls us to take our place in the body of Christ that reflects this
diversity and relationship and love for the sake of the world?
Surely
we all want to meet this God, and it may be that all we need do is let go of
some assumptions, some certainties. And it doesn’t matter if we’re
conservative, liberal, or anywhere in between, we’ve all got some of those. And
I think that right now, America and the world could really use a lot more
people who’ve encountered and know the God who embodies more diversity and love
and differences and dynamism and welcome and openness and relationship than we
can ever imagine.
We
Make the Road by Walking. The practice
begun in Advent continues through summer of 2015. Scripture and sermons connect
to chapters in Brian McLaren’s book. This week’s chapter is 45, “Spirit of
Unity and Diversity.”
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