“Spiritual Affective Disorder:  Who is God?”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

February 20, 2011

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

 

Scripture Readings:  Deut. 30: 15-20; 1 John 4: 7-16

 

During this month of February, we are reflecting on the concept of “Spiritual Affective Disorder.”  And just in case you may have missed the last couple of weeks of sermons, I’m going to begin today with a very brief review of what we’re talking about.

            Spiritual Affective Disorder is not the same thing as Seasonal Affective Disorder, with which you may be more familiar.  Seasonal Affective Disorder is a physiologically-caused (and –treatable) condition, in which those who have it typically experience depression, sadness, lethargy, and other related feelings in the darker (i.e., winter) months of the year.

Spiritual Affective Disorder is the spiritual parallel of this disorder.  (And) some of its symptoms include depression or sadness about our spiritual life; difficulty with our prayer-life; and lethargy – just not really caring much one way or the other – about our relationship with God.

            Last week, we considered one of the causes of Spiritual Affective Disorder (and there are many).  That cause is our loss of connection with (or lost sight of) our deepest desires, those yearnings and hopes and gifts and passions that God has planted in our souls.  When we lose sight of what we are created to be, of what God is yearning for us to be, our lives become far less abundant, our hearts become far less happy, our minds become far less active, and we may well succumb to Spiritual Affective Disorder.

Today, we’re going to consider another cause of Spiritual Affective Disorder.  And it is a cause that is both simple and complex at the same time.  Quite simply, it is our answer to the question, “Who is God?”  More complexly, it has to do with how we understand God to work or act (or not act) in the world; our sense of who and what this person or energy or entity that we call “God” – that we call the “Holy One” – is.

            Most of us sitting here this morning grew up going to Sunday School and/or to church.  And if we did, we know that we had Sunday School teachers and other ministers who talked to us every Sunday about what they believed God is like.  They told us Bible stories.  They may have had us put on costumes and act out the “Christmas story.”  And by their example as well as by what they said, they taught us what they believed about who God is.  Perhaps that God is always loving.  Perhaps that God is often angry.  Or that God is always hospitable.  Or always judgmental.  Or some other way.

            Depending on our family’s stance with respect to faith – or at least to religion – we may have also heard from our parents what they believed God is like.  Maybe it was similar to what we learned in Sunday School or church.  And maybe it was very different – which to a child, can be really confusing, and you end up wondering what to believe.  And of course, depending on the kind of school we went to, and the kinds of communities we spent our time in, we may have heard still other versions of what other people believed God is like.

            And so we arrive at this morning, February 20, 2011, with our very own image – or images – of what God is like.  And depending on what that image is – and all of the rest of our theology that goes with it – we may be more or less prone to Spiritual Affective Disorder.

            For example, one of my favorite images of God in the entire Bible is found in two of the Gospels, where Jesus describes God as “a hen gathering her brood under her wings.”  Let me say that again, in case you don’t remember this one:  Jesus describes God as “a hen gathering her brood under her wings.”

            That image of God reminds me of summer trips our family made to Ohio, where my Aunt Dot and Uncle Ken had a farm.  And on their farm, there was a … well, actually, there were cows and pigs and chickens and geese and ducks, all of which supplied food for the family table and larder, and some of which were sold to bring in a little extra income.

On those summer visits, I loved sitting on the grass just outside the chicken-pen and watching their chickens, which I now know were Rhode Island Reds, and which I thought were some of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen.  Sitting there on my heels in the dirt and grass and humid Ohio summer heat, I learned that one of the things that chicken do is keep a sharp eye out for danger – especially if they are mama-chickens.  If they have any reason to think there might be a predator nearby – like an unexpected or odd sound, or an unexpected or peculiar shadow, or any number of other things – the hens (mama chickens) immediately call their babies to them, and all the babies cuddle up under the shelter of mama’s wings.

            When I think about as God being like those mama chickens, gathering us all under her wings, I feel safe and comforted and loved.  The total opposite of having Spiritual Affective Disorder – or at least, a pretty good preventative most of the time.

            And maybe that’s the kind of image you have of God too.  Or at least one of the images of God that you have.  Because you might also (or instead) have quite a different kind of image, one that is altogether at odds with that warm and comforting image of God as mother-hen.

            For example, suppose your Sunday School teacher or minister drew their lessons heavily from some of the scarier stories in the Old Testament, like the story of Noah, in which you may remember that God drowns – God deliberately kills – all of the people and other living beings on the earth except for Noah and his family and the animals they took on the ark – a story which, for some baffling reason, is immensely popular with Sunday School teachers.  Or maybe your minister was enthusiastic about the story in which Abraham nearly murders his son Isaac (at God’s behest), or the one about Cain murdering his brother Abel because God liked Abel’s sacrifice better than Cain’s sacrifice.  (And that’s just in the first few chapters of the first book of the Bible!)  If what you grew up on was mostly stories like that you might well have an image of God as a fierce, cruel, punitive deity, who is forever afflicting people with plagues … or wars … or death.

            You don’t have to look far in the older part of the Bible to find any number of pictures of God who creates and then destroys.  A God who drives out people in trouble, rather than gathering them in safely.  A God filled with wrath and fury, rather than with tenderness and compassion.  A God whom you had better fear – or had better please – at all costs, or else!  A God whose image could well contribute to a serious case of Spiritual Affective Disorder.

            What we sometimes forget is that when we look to the Bible for answers about faith, say, for “accurate” descriptions of God, it does not offer one single, solitary, consistent image of God, but many images.  And we shouldn’t be surprised by that fact, because this collection of texts that we call the Bible was written by countless different people, each of them living in different times, in different places, in different circumstances, and each of whom themselves had been taught different things about who God is, and what God is like.  And so it is not surprising – nor particularly disturbing, theologically – that those different people imagined God in quite different ways.

For example, the God we first meet in the first story of the first book of the Bible is a powerful, imaginative, generous, Creator.  This is the God from whom all things come into being, the God who not only creates, but then looks at each and every creation, including humankind, and pronounces it “good.”  And yet, this is the same God who, only a couple of chapters later, gets seriously ticked-off with the human beings God has created, the ones the story-writers named Adam and Eve, and curses them, and sends them out to a life of suffering and toil, and an eventual fate of returning to the dust from whence they came.

            Just a couple of books in the Bible later, we find the Deuteronomist describing God in one place as the God who makes promises to and covenants with God’s people, and who cares about those people enough to honor the promises and covenants:  “Because the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them” (Deut. 4:31).  And yet in the very same book and very same chapter of the Bible, the Deuteronomist describes God this way:   “the Lord your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God” (Deut. 4:24).

            When we turn to the prophets, we find that they describe God differently, too.  Nahum, for example, says,  “A jealous and avenging God is the Lord, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies” (Nahum 1:2).  Ezra says, “the hand of our God is gracious to all who seek him, but his power and his wrath are against all who forsake him” (Ez. 8:22).  And yet Isaiah says, “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation” (Isa. 12:22).

            The Psalmist offers beautiful, grace-filled portraits of God like those we prayed a little while ago, in the words of Psalm 23:  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul…”  and in Psalm 46: 1:  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,.” and in Psalm 116: 5:  “Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.”  But side by side with those portrayals, are others:  “We are consumed by (God’s) anger; by (God’s) wrath we are overwhelmed” (Psa. 90:7).  “I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink, because of (God’s) indignation and anger; for (God) has lifted me up and thrown me aside” (Psa. 102:9-10).  And on and on, we find these contrasting answers to the question, “Who is God?”

So, how do we know who God really is?  How do we know what God is really like?

            The Biblical reality is … we don’t.  In fact, our ancestors in faith remind us over and over that we cannot know what God is really like.  The story-tellers, the historians, the poets all tell us that at bottom, at bedrock, what and who and how God is, is mystery.  That God is beyond all human understanding, and simply does not fit into any of our limited human categories.

            But most of us, as would-be people of faith, still want to have some idea of what this deity is we have chosen to center our lives around.  And the good news is, we can do (at least to some degree) what scientists do, and look at the preponderance of evidence that we do have.

            Like the fact that even though our Sunday School teachers, pastors, or parents may have emphasized the frightening and negative aspects of what God is like, when we actually look at the many images of God in Scripture we find that the positive and hopeful aspects of God far outnumber the negative ones.  Even in the Old Testament, for example, where we find so many of those portrayals of God as angry, and harsh, and punitive, we also find that time after time, no matter how badly the people go astray, no matter how often they violate their half of the covenant of faith, God invariably stays in relationship with them, and forgives them,and tries to love them back into spiritual health and well-being.

            And when we turn to the New Testament – the part of the Bible that as Christians we claim as most authoritative for us, we see that theme of God’s enduring mercy and compassion and care taken to a whole new level.  Because in the New Testament, we find God incarnate – God made flesh – God in the form of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus, who parties with his friends and family, celebrating God’s goodness together.  Jesus, who sits down at table and breaks bread even with those no-one else wants to associate with.  Jesus, who listens patiently to others as they struggle with life’s hardest problems, and who heals those who are wounded, suffering, in pain.

What kind of God do we see in Jesus Christ?  Unfailingly and unquestionably, we see a God of love.  And we see and hear a God who calls us to love as well.  The passage we heard this morning from the letter called First John puts it so beautifully:  ^“No one has ever seen God; (but) if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us…  (Through Jesus) we have known and believe the love that God has for us.  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

            Some of us have been lucky enough to have faith-teachers in our lives who taught us that most essential fact about who God is.  Some of us have not.  But the good news, my friends, is that as mature, growing-in-faith adults, we get to reflect on and to choose which images of God we will let shape our faith, and our lives.

            Just as people of faith have had that choice for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  In today’s passage from Deuteronomy, a text written some 2700 or more years ago, the writer is declaring to the people of that long-ago day that they had such a choice.  As those ancient writers put it so poetically, “God has set before us the ways of life and death.”  And we get to choose which “ways” we will live, including the images of God that we will allow to nurture – or to hamper – our hearts, and minds, and lives.

            Just like photographers, who use different filters to capture different qualities of light, each of us chooses (consciously or unconsciously) – and uses (usually unconsciously) – a particular filter (or set of filters) as we read the Bible, as we listen to sermons, as we watch television, as we talk with our loved ones, as we do each and every thing that shapes and informs our spirituality and our faith.

When we talk about God – and what God is like – we bring particular filters to bear there, too.  And the kind of filter we use is important not because it changes God – after all, God is God – but because it changes us, and how we are able to respond to God, and whether our spirits are healthy and whole, or are likely to be wounded or broken by Spiritual Affective Disorder.

            I’m going to close today with a story that captures the essence of those kinds of filters, and that offers a pretty strong hint of why the kind of filter we choose matters in our lives.  It seems that once upon a time, “God decided to become visible to a king and a peasant, and God sent an angel to inform (each of) them of the blessed impending event.

‘O king,’ the angel announced, ‘God has deigned to be revealed to you in whatever manner you wish.  In what form do you want God to appear?’  Seated pompously on his throne, and surrounded by (his) awestruck subjects, the king royally proclaimed:  ‘How else would I wish to see God, save in majesty and power?  Show God to us in the full glory of power.’  God granted the king’s wish, and appeared as a bolt of lightning that instantly pulverized the king, his entire court (and his whole castle).  Nothing, not even a cinder, remained.

            The angel then manifested herself to a peasant (woman), saying:  ‘God designs to be revealed to you in whatever manner you wish.  How do you wish to see God?’  The woman paused and thought for a minute, and then finally said, very quietly, ‘I am a poor woman, and not worthy to see God face to face.  But if it is God’s will to be revealed to me, let it be in those things with which I’m familiar:  in the earth my husband ploughs each day, and from which I pick vegetables, in the warm milk that my cow gives me each morning, in the eggs that my chickens lay, in the good clear water from our well.  Let me see the presence of God in the faces of my family, and my neighbors, and – if God deems it as good for myself and for others – in my own reflection as well.’  And God granted her her wish, and she lived a long and happy life[1].”

 

May it be so, even for us.  Amen.