A God Who Knows ALL

This week’s sermon was a true gift from Pastor Dudley Riggle.

I share a deep interest of Pastor Riggle’s: a fondness for issues where science meets religion and spirituality. He recounted a story regarding Hans von Ohain, inventor of the first jet power aircraft in Germany, and later employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base after the war. He recounted that he and Hans had shared numerous thought-provoking conversations on issues where faith, God, and science intersect. Hans, he recalled, mentioned (and I paraphrase) “I have no trouble believing God is all-seeing. I may not be entirely comfortable with that idea, but I have no trouble believing it.” Hans retold stories of reconnaissance satellites that could capture a person on Earth lighting a match. “If”, he said, “man can design an apparatus that can accomplish this, then I have no problem believing in an ‘all-seeing’ God.”

Hearing him tell these stories reminded me of two stories that are indelibly etched in my memory. I regularly used to attend the so-called Gordon conferences in Holderness, New Hampshire where no published papers are allowed – this stipulation is made so that scientists could discuss their “outlandish, out-there ideas” without fear of reviewer reprisal in the published archives. It had the flavor of a scientific institute where scientists could “think freely and outside-the-box” – a place where, most often, creative discoveries are made. This particular conference has early morning and late night sessions with afternoons free for the participants to “go for a run or a bike ride together” and freely discuss the germane issues in very informal settings. After one long bike ride with 3 colleagues, I was writing postcards following an intriguing conversation in which we imagined God looking down at Earth at Nobel Prize winners in string theory, much as we look at small children who’ve just learned to tie their shoes, thinking “Isn’t that cute. They’ve figured it out.” all the time knowing WHAT they’ve figured out is relatively simple in the grand scheme of things!

The second story is about a Franciscan nun who taught me Church History in High School. I remember that she had struggled with cancer of the tongue, having to have part of her jaw removed, leaving her disfigured. For whatever reasons we as high school students think this way, some students felt they could take advantage in her class. One day, one student was carrying on disrespectfully. She approached him and simply asked him “Henry, do you believe God sees everything you do?” Not knowing that she had seen everything he was doing, and thinking he was caught off-guard and that this was a question she was asking as part of the class, he boldly, with a smile on his face, loudly responded “Yes, sister I DO believe God sees everything I do!” She hesitated, looked him in the eye and said “Pretty embarrassing, isn’t it?”

This 2nd story relates directly to Pastor Riggle’s next point. If we have notion of a God that is all-seeing, that notion can be simultaneously refreshing and discomforting, reassuring and yet threatening. God is, at the same time, The Compassionate One who sees our fears and our failures, our valiant attempts to live the right way and our shortcomings in these attempts. This God is accepting and forgiving. God is also The One who sees into our hearts, sees our desires and our actual deeds, and may reject us and condemn us for these indiscretions.

The rabbi Harold Kushner, in a book titled How Good Do We Have to Be? reinterpreted the story of the Garden of Eden. He recounts that in Biblical translation, the word for “rib” (as in Eve was made from Adam’s rib), can, from the Hebrew, be translated as meaning “side”. His interesting interpretation is that man is “one side of God”, the paternal side, more demanding and one to whom we are held accountable for our actions; woman was created as “another side of God”, often the maternal, comforting, forgiving side that accepts us in spite of our shortcomings, a need we all have in order to grow well and be willing to “try again” without recourse to giving up for our unworthiness.

And this leads naturally to Pastor Riggle’s excellent segue into our worth despite Sin! Despite our sinful nature, we are not unworthy to serve God’s purpose. The Bible is filled with stories of God using truly human beings, complete with their inadequacies, to “do His will” and “spread His Word”.

I wanted, yes, to “find” a Peanuts comic strip Pastor Riggle referred to, but alas, when Googling Peanuts and peanut butter, I found the limits of my internet/downloading/cyber-interconnectedness skills. The strip went something like:

CHARLIE BROWN: Lucy! Hands are fascinating! They can write books, design bridges, they can create stirring art on canvases, they can save lives!”

LUCY: They’ve got peanut butter all over them!

Yes, they’re covered with peanut butter, seemingly all the time; dirty, soiled, yet they are capable of all those wonderful things as Charlie Brown reminds us. We are reminded in the texts today that we are called by God to serve DESPITE our shortcomings! God’s message in Isaiah is not so much about sin as it is about grace! And with that grace, what CAN we do to “go on” in spite of the human condition. Pastor eloquently said we are called, by the grace of God, to

“doubt our doubts”!!

Peter, Pastor reminds us, holds the record for prayers that don’t get the answers he would like! When he kneels in self-admission of unworthiness before God and says “God should walk away from him”, God refuses! And God calls him to be a “fisher of men”. God, the Compassionate, is for us – so who can be against? He forgives us our iniquities and, always, walks with us. So we are then tasked by the New Testament readings to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps for God and walk His walk! We should oppose injustice, as did Jesus, but focus NOT on guilt for our humanness, but on mercy & grace bestowed upon us by our Creator.

This reminds me of a line from a sermon given at a Baccalaureate service at my own college graduation; “If you believe in justice and not in mercy, you’d better not make any mistakes!” But that is our nature, to continually make mistakes. Voltaire once said “The enemy of The Good is The Great”. In a futile effort to be perfect, we make excuses for the futileness of our capacity for “good”. Pastor Riggle eloquently painted an illustration of this, The Human Condition. That condition is a continual struggle with the darker side of our nature. A tendency toward, as Pastor Riggle points out, self-centeredness, pride, and ultimately self worship.

Shakespeare penned, “The fault lies not within our stars, but in ourselves”

Mahatma Gandhi said “The greatest demons we ever fight are those from within”

And Pastor Riggle reminded us of Einstein’s admonition that “The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to change the nature of Plutonium than to change the nature of man.”

But Einstein also reminded us that we are human and not divine when he said

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”

And we must continually remind ourselves that, despite our humanness, we are children of God, whom He loves and accepts and that, while unworthy, we are, with and through His unending grace, able to be his messengers here on Earth!

In one of the great quotes of this sermon, Pastor Riggle reminds us:

“The problem’s not in falling down – it’s in staying on the ground!”

Do not dwell on the peanut butter covering your hands, Charlie Brown, for as certain as tomorrow’s coming, they will be soon be “dirty” again. Do not dwell on the dirty hands and the guilt for our human nature. Rather, trust that, with God’s grace, all is possible; to serve His higher purpose is certainly possible. And that grace is always more present than it appears, more present than we seem to believe it is. But perhaps it should be our ardent hope that, like Hans von Ohain, we can bring ourselves to the brink – where we will also be able to say “I may not be comfortable with it always, but I have no trouble believing it!”