Tag: Death of God

“Buried in the Past; Captive to What Was”: Personal Agony

Luke 18:13d: “‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”*

Introduction

I know what I’m supposed to say
The lines on the script say that I’m okay
Standing on an island
I can only hear the silence
Deaf to the crowd that I claim to know
Standing in an ocean
I can barely feel the motion
All these waves drag me down
And I feel like I gotta go
I’m a castaway[1]

We are people who would rather grow still and die than move forward and change. We’d rather drown than fall head first in the void, letting go of our grip on comfort and what’s known.

I wish I had better words. But I don’t. One can die before they physically die. A person can drown without water. Death is only the cessation of movement forward and therein it can take many forms. Individually, we all suffer from the virus of the fear of change. We are so afraid of it that we get mad at people for changing (either good or bad). Relationships end because people change, and we are left where we were; I don’t even know who you are any more… We would rather leave beloved communities because too much has changed, it’s all unfamiliar; this isn’t anything like I remember. We cling to dusty relics hoping they will bring us the same joy they once did but no longer can and maybe they never did in the first place. We strive for happiness by thinking that all we need to do is to find that thing that was, that used to be. We valorize former versions of ourselves, thinking that if we want to be happy now, we need to go back to something that we believe used to be but never were.

My face is wearing thin
These thoughts, they chafe against my skin
Lost in the crowd again
And I swear I met this guy who seemed like a friend
Wow, look how far I’ve fallen
Now, everything’s dark
And I don’t wanna fall again
I’m a castaway[2]

We, ourselves, resist change as if change itself is the last word forever forbidding us from comfort and peace. I find this virus in my own flesh. I get stuck in wanting to reach and stretch backward to retrieve some form of me that was something better than I am now. If I could just get back there, be that person, recreate that sensation and feeling, then maybe I can be happy now. Maybe I’ll reach for some music, some habit, some fake mentality to recreate what I am convinced was there. But it’s a lie; a lie that kills the present and thus erases both the future and past. Trying to go backwards to retrieve something and drag it into the present prohibits me from going forward and forces the past (it’s stories and memories, it’s sensations and feelings) to bear a burden it cannot hold; the past can never be the present because it will dissolve into dust I our hands. We even resist change with ever weapon it has when it threated to take from us what we have grown accustomed to and know, what is familiar; we shun off anything new for fear that it will swallow us whole and forbid us from never having comfort again. As we resist change and forbid moving forward, we remain stuck in the past and captive to what was. In other words, WE ARE DEAD.

It’s okay to feel alone right now
I promise one day that we’ll make it out
Disney movies always have a happy ending
But I’m not feeling too happy yet
So I guess it’s not the end
Is there anyone out there
Looking out at sea
‘Cause I’m kinda scared now
That there’s no one there
For me[3]

Should I mention our desire to maintain systems and judgments, ideologies and dogmas, that have long ago expired? Systems and structures starting off well-meaning and decent become septic and toxic when we—in our voracious hubris—would rather die than see something new take its place. We’d rather that people suffer than maybe change the smallest part of the way we think about things because that change would require us to die to something that has brought us (too much?) comfort over the years. We’d rather leave people behind who love us because they’ve changed rather than dare to change with them. We’d rather grow cold than admit defeat or fault.

Isaiah 53: 1-9
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
(Is. 53:2c-6, 8-9)

The agony articulated by one of the Isaiahs is our agony.[4] Today, this is where we are. Agony. We are in agony because we are exposed. Exposed to the core. Some how we must hold the goodness of our divine creation and our guilt of complicity in the myriad forms of death swirling all about us. We can be good and guilty. We can be beloved and guilty. (We must ditch the binary of guilty is bad and not-guilty is good. If we can’t, we’ll find ourselves justifying more and more death and violence and our confessions will become more and more false.) We can be good and guilty of participating in systems, narratives, ideologies, theologies, dogmas, doctrines that harm other people and ourselves. I know I am guilty of this. I know you are guilty of this. We are all convicted here.

Isaiah’s prophetic prayer highlights that whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, we are in agony and are suffering. We are suffering because of our resistance to move forward, our fear of change, our inability to let go and fall into something new. Thus, this suffering is not the product of divine chastisement; it’s the product of our own hands.[5] We are caught up in the muck and mire of the tension between being held captive and being complicit in our suffering and the suffering of others. Isaiah says, all have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way. Each of us is called to account for our complicit and captive actions against the revolution of divine life in the world.

We are in so much agony and suffering that our anger and fear cause us to choose to put God to death than abandon our own comfort security.

Conclusion

We are in agony, we are suffering, we are stuck, we are captive, and we are exposed.

Rather than let Christ’s voice call us, Christ’s actions challenge us, Christ’s presence change us, we clamored for Jesus’s death, and we got it. Because we hate change, hate being challenged, hate being called to move forward, the judgment of God is surely upon us. Today, in this story, we are reminded that Jesus bore our iniquity…because he bore our very, very bad judgment informed by the doctrines and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and not the kingdom of God. The weight of that judgment, as we watch and witness the death of God by our hand, renders us to our own death. Today, our incarceration to our own comfort, to what makes our own selves feel safe comes to a cataclysmic head-on collision with God; none of us survive.

Today, we get what want, we force the past to be the present and erase the future; by our own hands we realize and affirm our captivity to our own fear and our being stuck in anger. Today, we stop moving; today, we are dead where we are as we were. Because today we killed God.

* small portions of this sermon are found in the Good Friday sermon from 2022.

[1] Kroh, “Castaway (feat. Halfy & Winks),” verse 1. This song was recommended to me by my son, Jackson H. L. Larkin

[2] Kroh, “Castaway (feat. Halfy & Winks),” verse 2.

[3] Kroh, “Castaway (feat. Halfy & Winks),” Chorus and Outro.

[4] Abraham Heschel The Prophets New York, NY: JPS, 1962. 149.

[5] Heschel Prophets 151

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Laudation from Dorothee Sölle for Carola Moosbach

I just translated the following from Dorothee Sölle; it’s a powerful engagement with a poem by Carola Moobach. Sölle conversation with this text by Moosbach is especially poignant for today in light of “death of God” and postmodernist theological and religious deconstruction. The original text can be located here: http://www.carola-moosbach.de/buecher/laudatio.htm. I stumbled upon this Laudatio from this website: https://www.dorothee-soelle.de

Laudation from Dorothee Sölle for Carola Moosbach: On the occasion of the award ceremony on June 2, 2000 in Hamburg (Prize of the FrauenKirchenKalender for divine poets)

Dear Carola Moosbach,

How can I praise God, without lying? How can I open a way to speak to that which is in truth of and about God? That is a question to which I also return again.

When I went to Israel in 1960, I sought for the great Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. I had declared myself as a “Theologian.” The conversation did not begin at all; at first Buber kept silent. After a long silence he said, “Theo-logie…how does one actually do it? There is, after all, no Logos of Theos.” For do Logos and God fit together? There is Geology and other –logies, but God is not an object of a doctrine, of a science—God lives in the relationship; yes, we can say: God is relationship.

God remains not in an academic edifice of dogmatically right clauses. These old remains of faith decompose today before our eyes.

God desires to be related to as it was understood long since in the Jewish tradition. Theo-poetics, God-poetics—in this way we can speak of the experience with God. Instead of wishing to prove God, we say with American Process theology, “God happens”, God come before; last Tuesday afternoon God suddenly appeared…

These relations of God that emerged—this “To praise God without lying”—we can learn from Carola Moosbach.

Respectively

I had already written You off long ago
childish belief wishful-folk-babble
who still seriously reckons with You today
You the impossible of all possibilities
and now You are there; I do not see it
what does it mean for how can it be
from the search to the petition toward the being found
how have only you done that, God
I have angst you come to near to me
with faith I am still not faithful
and when you suddenly dissolve yourself in the heavens
then I stand there and still need you
Blow my angst away God
and leave it be there anyway
bestow to me Your nearness God
and leave me to doubt anyway
to praise God, without lying

It is an honest, truthful speech, which Carola Moosbach speaks here; a speech of which we all need more.

Come near help me to believe You All-Weaver
So that You need and miss having wanted me
and hear me also still at that time
Come near help me to speak You All-Saving
A union becomes established


The last phrase of this poem grasps a technical command. This sobriety does well!

Obedience is not the most significant virtue rather [the most significant virtue is] to be able to trust. Considering that we need a different relationship to God: God is for us, not for God’s self. Also, God needs us. Every real love is reciprocal—that is a perception of Feminist Theology—there is a giving and a receiving. When it is related to the children: God loves you, God protects you, God warms you, I completely agree with it. But just as important is it to say to them: God is in need of you, you can warm God. Sometimes, it is also cold here to God.

In 1 John it tells: God is love and who remains in love, remains in God and God in [them].

Graven image
self-sufficing Lord God
friendly strict Patriarch
created after white unfeminine image
beclouded truth self-deification
caged and sliced in pieces
ensnared in Golden Heaven’s gilded cage (like a bird)
fed with blood and jewels
tall-tales in Your name
from above and below head and body
divine ordering to command obeying
the earth a tributary to the Lord

This is a bitter text, which exposes the false theology, which was recently formulated by half of humanity. Today we see clearer that this theology is not being received well. Feminist Theology, which was initiated about 30 years [ago], is therefore desperately necessary.

In her prayer “Missing” Carola Moosbach writes in the last line,

Have mercy; I miss You

“I miss God,” this request has me deeply moved. At last, it might be a first step for many people sadly to miss God. In doing so it is certainly nonsensical, to be made itself a determining image of God.

No image many images
kill the images and give them to God
be swarming language and medicinal silence

Consistently there are mystical elements in the text of Carola Moosbach. Many of her texts manage to create something entirely special: to establish mystical silence. And that is the great accolade that can be said about poetry, if at all.

Dorothee Sölle

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Into the Abyss

Poem by William Brien

The following poetry was sent to me by someone I know to be very in touch with the underbelly of human existence, the crisis of self, the pull of the darkness that threatens. These things in their rich darkness are beautiful, for it’s here, paradoxically, where we experience life, the vibrancy of our heart’s beat, the reality of existence. Threatened by the gulf of unknown and lured to release into that which calls to us but of that which we cannot see the bottom, here is life abundant. But he says it better than I do. I give you Albert Warner and his poem: Into the Abyss. Enjoy.

Into the Abyss

To be, or not to be, that is the question [1]

I stare at a sharp corner
With precise blind vision,
Tracing the broad rigid line
Then the two U-shaped humps
Which ride along the letter’s origin.
Magnificent tsunamis reach an eerie calm.
Distant shapes become blurred puddles,
Then swallow each other,
Part into a dark cone of vision,
Hiding their insignificance behind black shadows,
Leaving only pointy corners and laborious curves in perception.

The world evades us because it becomes itself again [2]

Comforting words pass through me as a hand swipes through air,
Compassionate embraces as a knife through warm butter.
Laughter no different than breath,
Smiles the same as frowns.
Red veins creep like vines
In already tired eyes.
Names appear not as old comrades,
But bundles of sharp-sided letters
With exhausting round lumps.

When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you [3]

I hold not hope,
I feel not passion,
I see not reason.
I am not dead,
I am not alive.
I am naught.

 

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“God is in the Gallows; God is in the Rubble”

Luke 2:8-20 and 9/11 (Homily)

The following is the homily I delivered in remembrance of 9/11 at the school where I’m a teaching chaplain. It was written last minute because that morning I felt powerfully in my mind and heart to ask the person who was slotted to preach that day to let me do it instead. Here is what I felt called to share…

The Shepherds and the Angels

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!’

 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” (Luke 2:8-20)

 

On September 11th, 2001, I walked from the subway station on 33rd street and headed over to my office, located just a mile from the station in midtown, Manhattan, just outside of Rockefeller plaza, at 53rd and 5th avenue. The air was crisp, early fall was settling in; the sky was a bright blue, not a cloud in the sky; and the sun was bright and warm. The day was perfect. I didn’t expect that moments later while sitting at my desk I’d be told that a massive passenger plane had flown into the North tower of the World Trade Center, just a little over a mile away from where I sat. “Like ‘hit’ one of the towers?” I asked. “No, like into.” Was my colleague’s response. Disbelief. What?! How is that even possible?

We crowded around every TV we could find and watched the billowing smoke of one of our iconic buildings take over the bright blue sky. And as we watched, along with the world, another plane hit the south tower. It was official: our world was under attack. We were dismissed from our jobs and set free into the streets of New York City to find our ways to home? To safety? Somewhere? The city went on lockdown and no one could come in or leave.

It took me a while before I was able to fight my way over to my big brother’s apartment building, where, when I entered, the door man took one look at me and said, before I could say anything, “He’s waiting for you upstairs. Go!”

By a little after noon, Manhattan had quieted completely. It was so quiet. Eerie quiet. Big cities never get quiet. But this very big one was silent. Nothing seemed to move apart from the lone pedestrian or the occasional fire truck, police car, or ambulance that zoomed by, sirens blaring, lights flashing, headed to ground zero. I could and did walk down the center of 5th avenue; it was the first and last time I’ve ever been able to do such a thing.

Manhattan and the immediate surrounding areas would never be the same. You can’t go back to “normal” because we were consistently reminded of the horror and tragedy as we walked by walls, bus-stands, bulletin boards, that were plastered with pictures of loved ones who were never found, never recovered, never buried.

I was a new Christian, like baby new. Not even a year into walking with the Lord and here I was faced with evil, with tragedy, with suffering, and sorrow, grief and mourning. Where was God? Where was this God that I had just given my life to? There were no words being spoken, no waters parting, no rainbows filling the air. God was silent. And for many, and maybe even for me for a bit there, God was dead or at least appeared to be.

All of the events of tragedy and all the sorrow and suffering that happens to us individually and collectively draws up from the depths of our being and our soul and our mind the desperate questions of why? And where were you? And, Where are you God? Divine silence even more than divine judgment causes dis-ease, anxiety, and substantial pain in our very being. Where was God on 9/11?

I’ve spent the majority of my academic life in the pursuit of that question: where is God when we suffer? Where is the comfort in divine silence? And there are times like 9/11/2001 where I come up silent myself. The only I answer I have are the tears I shed because suffering is real and I hate it. And I cry because I can, for there are those who can no longer cry. Where is God in moments of suffering, pain, grief, sorrow? How is God for us when some of us are now widows and orphans, left destitute and grieving?

But there are times when I see so clearly where God is: right there in the suffering. There among those who have breathed their last; there with those who are not even close to shedding their last tear. With the child who will never know their parent; the lover who will never hold their beloved again; the parent who has but a last email from their adult child. God is in the gallows; God is in the rubble.

God is in our suffering, breathing for us when we can’t, holding us upright when our knees shake and quack. And the only reason why I can say this is because Jesus the Christ lay in a manger and the dirty outcast shepherds came and dwelt with God as dirty outcast shepherds. This God, wrapped in swaddling clothes, came to be with us in our suffering as humans. Jesus suffered and died and was raised on the third day to give us hope in solidarity with us. Our God knows suffering; our God is the suffering God, our God dwells amongst suffering. Did you know that this is possibly the most unique thing about the proclamation of the Gospel: our God dwells among the suffering as the Suffering God?

And God does indeed dwell amongst those who are suffering. The dead do not suffer; it’s those who have been left behind who suffer, and God is in their midst. When tragedy hits, when suffering lands, when catastrophe wreaks havoc, there God is in the midst of God’s people as we gather together, come close, push towards each other in our suffering and pain and grief. God was at Ground zero every time a new search and rescue team stepped up to help; God was there in every emergency room as doctors and surgeons and nurses pulled together to mend the broken and resuscitate those they could; God was there in the massive lines formed of people eager to do whatever they could even if it meant waiting hours to offer a pint or two of blood; God was there in that quiet whispered hello from your neighbor and in the brief moment of eye-contact shared in passing; God was there in the meals that were brought, the arms that embraced, and the services performed. And God continued to be present on that Manhattan Island, the surrounding state of New York, New England, the nation, and the world as people pulled together and prayed yes, but, more: when they showed up.

God is only as silent and dead if I stay silent and dead. But that silence is broken and that death turned to new life when I, a suffering grieving human being, reach out to you a fellow suffering and grieving human being; that silence is broken and that death turned to new life when I use my words and my deeds to be in solidarity with you as you suffer and grieve. God is present in suffering because we are present with each other in suffering.

Praise be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

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