Sermon: The Images of God in the Reversed World
(Scripture: Matthew 22:15-22)
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| After the ConXion service, Oct 23rd, 2022, celebrating the Matty's Birthday at Broad View United, Victoria |
“The Images of God in the Reversed World” Doesn’t it sound like a fiction title, something like my teenager would read from his favourite Japanese animation? ...
... What are the images of God for, and in, the Reversed World... the Kingdom of God? ... The world Jesus was proposing, “A community resistant to the programme of Rome”?
The images of God in and for a community resistant to the dominant power, that counters the normalization of oppression. ...
... This world in reverse would also encompass Jesus’ eschatological vision (which means the end of the world of as it is now, anticipating the alternative world to come). In this vision, in this world of reversal, the last becomes first and the least and the lost are not only found, but lifted up. What are the images of God that we are called to lift up?
Some years ago, I had the pleasure of leading a youth group, and one high school kid, Kelly, said the Kingdom of God almost sounds like an “inverted” world. He liked the word a lot, inversion. He said he learned it from Physics class. So, in our discussion on Sunday morning, myself and a handful of young people were journeying towards insight… We caught something about the character of the Kingdom of God… It is different from the power and order of here and now, of the present world… or of the past. It’s at least inverted. It’s a world in reverse. The key principles about life, the definition of abundant life, is turned upside down. The table of the Roman Empire is flipped.
Some years ago, I met Marie at church. (I changed the name. The person gave me the permission to write this story in sermon.) She came to a Sunday morning service just after New Year’s Day. Her hair was handsome and short in a two-block cut, just as mine is now. Her eyes sparkled with intense interest, looking forward to something. She was looking for something. After worship, I approached her and asked, “Tell me one thing about you and one thing you are most interested in today.” She said, she has been reading Kwok Pui-lan’s book, (Pui-lan is a super-renowned scholar, known globally for her Asian American women’s theology). I knew right away we could be friends. To get to know each other as clergy and parishioner, and also as friends, one spring day, we walked beside the river at the Forks (where “the two rivers meet” in Winnipeg), and she told me a story about something that sustained her through the most difficult time in her life.
When she was in school, a professor brought up a question… What if? … Or Imagine … Or just LIVE as if, and not just as if, but truly as if the world is in reverse. Even here and now. As if the world has been turned upside down. A world in reverse.
The world upside down or backwards or as it could be.
Marie told me, in that moment when her professor put the question forward, she thought of a world where all of us were queer, or most people whom she met were queer… and then, that reversed reality would change her life and her engagement with the world. She understood, then, that even in the world of now, she can live “the As-If-World”, with confidence, authenticity, and trust and love about herself and others.
Have you ever been in a lake, or on a river, and seen another world reflected on the surface of the water? (Show the picture). The forest above, and the forest in the water. And you stand on the horizon in between, looking at the two forests. It also could look like the water holds two kinds of heavens above and below, when the water is a mirror for them. I love Emily Dickinson’s poems; in one poem, she illustrated that sitting under her favourite tree, she realized that she was in the middle of the two kinds of tree: The tree above her and the roots under her and under the ground, which must be the size of the tree above. The world is full and filled with two BIG trees. Leaning against her tree, Emily Dickinson sits and composes herself between the two trees, the two worlds. The three worlds: The skyworld, the rootworld, and her poem. (I use these three images from the Call to Worship this Sunday).
That’s one image of God… The Root. The image of God in the reversed world. It is specific, concrete, but at the same time it requires us to imagine with the power of wonder. The image of God is not something you can inscribe on coins permanently; you can only touch it through who you are, through your struggles and your pursuit of justice. Touching our strength is constant work. That’s the image of God I am suggesting… The image of God, in the world, reversed in order. The order of who is the last, first, lost, and found.
Then, the next question for you, and for me: How specific can an image of God be? It’s our theme question this Sunday. How specific can an image of God be, in and for the world of radical reversal? What is the Root Image that would enable the tree of hope, love, justice, to grow with vigrour, above the ground?
When I first encountered the term, or the phrase, or the image, “Gay God” in “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology”, written by Patrick Cheng, I was shocked. Quote: “For example, the September 1972 issue of the Gay Christian, a newsletter of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, featured a number of articles about “gay theology”. Howard Wells, the pastor of MCC New York at the time, wrote a provocative piece called “Gay God, Gay Theology” in which he described how the gay community has the right to refer to God — whom he called “our liberator, our redeemer” as our “Gay God”.”
I was shocked because the concept of God, the image of the Resurrected One, was, in my mind, too specific. That was my first response. Can an image of God be so specific, such as Gay God? Hadn’t I learned over the years in Theological School, and also at church, that God’s love is Universal, and God is Universal for ALL? Is this very specific image of God as Gay God or any other specific image, able to, even is it legitimate, serve the world? I will leave the answer to you, to your own power of wonder.
How about Father God? Isn’t that image also very specific? What kind of specific and alternative image of God can empower the “disenfranchised” in the world? A new understanding of God has the power to change how we engage with the world, how we live in and for the world in reverse, the Kingdom of God. When God’s image is too abstract and distant from our life, here at the grassroots, it might serve, without being questioned, the agenda of the powerful.
Wonder is one way to practice queering religion, queering faith, queering the world. Jose Munoz, the deceased queer theory scholar in Cuba, said, in Cruising Utopia,
“Utopia lets us imagine a space outside of _________ (for him, heteronormativity). It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and activities that are not constrained by ________ (please add your reflection here).”
Try imagining, in that blank space, a Kingdom that is not constrained by, “on-going colonization” “racism” “fossil companies and banks that fund a climate emergency” and see what they feel like.
Munoz continues, “More important, utopia offers us a critique of the present of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be.”
One more Munoz quote: “Queerness is … not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.
Queerness is essentially about ___rejecting_____ (he said “rejection”. You can use other wording.) the here and now and an insistence on the concrete possibility of another world.”
Could this be inviting us to get closer to the fuller definition of the Kingdom of God? Just like when Kelly in the youth group wondered if, perhaps, the Kingdom of God is like the world, inverted by the radical love of a Queering, anti-normalizing God. God who empowers the disenfranchised, lifting up the lost, least, last first and loving them first. Loving all first.
This is for now. Today, I shared with you just a few examples of the images of God in and for the reversed world.
We can look for more, search more, find more, celebrate more, because we have lots of time. Advent. Lent. Easter. Pentecost. Today, with the spirit of stewardship, let us invest in the images of God in the reversed world. Let us turn the table of _________ (your words here, for Empire) upside down in faith and wonder.
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