Sunday Sermonette: In the Image of God
This is the time of year when the pastor at my former church would head for Cape Cod and leave the pulpit to me. Unlike the Catholics, it's not a mortal sin to skip church, any many Episcopalians consider themselves faithful even if they take the summer off. Besides, the church isn't air-conditioned.
I have described myself as an atheist for a few years now, but there are some who would say that I have been godless for much longer. To my parents and grandparents, I was in trouble because I’d left the Roman Catholic Church, “the one true Church, outside which there is no salvation” as the old fathers said. To other Christian friends, my soul was imperiled because I did not believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Inspired by God, yes. But dictated by him? That seemed unlikely.
I was a sensible, rational man, after all. I respected science, and saw nothing in evolution that excluded God. Field-testing man's design on apes first was just good Yankee parsimony. My faith was solidly founded on the three-legged stool of Anglicanism: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, each balancing the others. Or so I would have said.
I was a member of a liberal church, one which accepted LGBT people. We saw ourselves as prophetic. We had women priests and bishops. We were inclusive and welcoming.
One of my more conservative friends, a Orthodox priest, wrote an urgent email to warn me to escape the coming divine wrath and flee to a true Christian church. Poor man. He was deluded and confused. He had created God in his own image and likeness, in the image of his own political predilections and prejudices created he Him.
I knew I was right, that God was the loving father of all his children, regardless of sexual orientation or gender. How could I be so sure? Simple: God told me.
Oh, he didn’t speak to me from a flaming shrubbery or hand me engraved rocks. God doesn’t work that way. I knew him in my heart, you see. It didn’t happen often, but there were times I felt a warm, loving glow in my chest. At such times, I would feel an ineffable sense of peace, a joyful certainty that I was deeply loved.
Strictly speaking, you weren’t supposed to seek these feelings out, just accept them with gratitude when they came. It’s our job to be about God’s work in the world, after all, we’re not supposed to spend the days sitting around with blissed-out smiles. There’ll be time for that in heaven. Such feelings come when you are open to God and surrender yourself utterly to Him. That’s hard to do, so if it happens, it’s usually unexpected.
What more evidence did I need? I knew that God is real and that he loves me because I’d felt it directly. It’s a pity about atheists, but faith is a gift that not everyone is blessed with.
The trouble is, my Catholic friends also feel the inner presence of God. And so do my Evangelical friends. The corn-fed young missionaries who preached to me referred me to the Book of Mormon, Moroni, chapter 10, verses 4 and 5. God would reveal the truth of Prophet Smith’s revelation to me. How? By a “burning in the bosom.” Buddhists have been experience transcendent inner peace for eons. So have Hindus. You can know the truth of Islam because your very soul will testify that there is no God but Allah. Pagans and animists feel it on vision quests and in their sacred groves.
Which is more likely? That people from all cultures and times have experienced these feelings, but mine is the only genuine touch of the Holy Spirit? Or that the ability to create these feelings is simply a human talent? Is it more likely that this phenomenon is outside of ourselves, transmitted to us in some mysterious and undetectable way, or that it’s been part of our psychological makeup all along.
A few years ago, I decided it was the latter. I had only been fooling myself. That I had made a God in my own image and likeness is not proof that no gods exist, of course. There may very well be a God, and that God may very well love you and have a personal relationship with you (at least so far as such relationships go, which is somehow not nearly as personal as the simple human relationship I have with the guy who sells me coffee). God may choose to give special attention to you among the almost seven billion people on earth by means of warm fuzzy feelings, and everyone else may just be fooling themselves.
If that were so, I wonder, how would you prove it?
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
-- Demosthenes.
I have described myself as an atheist for a few years now, but there are some who would say that I have been godless for much longer. To my parents and grandparents, I was in trouble because I’d left the Roman Catholic Church, “the one true Church, outside which there is no salvation” as the old fathers said. To other Christian friends, my soul was imperiled because I did not believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Inspired by God, yes. But dictated by him? That seemed unlikely.
I was a sensible, rational man, after all. I respected science, and saw nothing in evolution that excluded God. Field-testing man's design on apes first was just good Yankee parsimony. My faith was solidly founded on the three-legged stool of Anglicanism: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, each balancing the others. Or so I would have said.
I was a member of a liberal church, one which accepted LGBT people. We saw ourselves as prophetic. We had women priests and bishops. We were inclusive and welcoming.
One of my more conservative friends, a Orthodox priest, wrote an urgent email to warn me to escape the coming divine wrath and flee to a true Christian church. Poor man. He was deluded and confused. He had created God in his own image and likeness, in the image of his own political predilections and prejudices created he Him.
I knew I was right, that God was the loving father of all his children, regardless of sexual orientation or gender. How could I be so sure? Simple: God told me.
Oh, he didn’t speak to me from a flaming shrubbery or hand me engraved rocks. God doesn’t work that way. I knew him in my heart, you see. It didn’t happen often, but there were times I felt a warm, loving glow in my chest. At such times, I would feel an ineffable sense of peace, a joyful certainty that I was deeply loved.
Strictly speaking, you weren’t supposed to seek these feelings out, just accept them with gratitude when they came. It’s our job to be about God’s work in the world, after all, we’re not supposed to spend the days sitting around with blissed-out smiles. There’ll be time for that in heaven. Such feelings come when you are open to God and surrender yourself utterly to Him. That’s hard to do, so if it happens, it’s usually unexpected.
What more evidence did I need? I knew that God is real and that he loves me because I’d felt it directly. It’s a pity about atheists, but faith is a gift that not everyone is blessed with.
The trouble is, my Catholic friends also feel the inner presence of God. And so do my Evangelical friends. The corn-fed young missionaries who preached to me referred me to the Book of Mormon, Moroni, chapter 10, verses 4 and 5. God would reveal the truth of Prophet Smith’s revelation to me. How? By a “burning in the bosom.” Buddhists have been experience transcendent inner peace for eons. So have Hindus. You can know the truth of Islam because your very soul will testify that there is no God but Allah. Pagans and animists feel it on vision quests and in their sacred groves.
Which is more likely? That people from all cultures and times have experienced these feelings, but mine is the only genuine touch of the Holy Spirit? Or that the ability to create these feelings is simply a human talent? Is it more likely that this phenomenon is outside of ourselves, transmitted to us in some mysterious and undetectable way, or that it’s been part of our psychological makeup all along.
A few years ago, I decided it was the latter. I had only been fooling myself. That I had made a God in my own image and likeness is not proof that no gods exist, of course. There may very well be a God, and that God may very well love you and have a personal relationship with you (at least so far as such relationships go, which is somehow not nearly as personal as the simple human relationship I have with the guy who sells me coffee). God may choose to give special attention to you among the almost seven billion people on earth by means of warm fuzzy feelings, and everyone else may just be fooling themselves.
If that were so, I wonder, how would you prove it?
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
-- Demosthenes.