GS15 Sarah Sentilles, God, Faith and the Creed

Sarah Sentilles, God and the Creeds

 Bishop Richard Randerson

Sarah Sentilles’ (USA) (Breaking up with God – a Love Affair), visited Wellington at a Writers’ Festival. The book tells her story of life and faith:

• A cradle Christian
• Key church member
• Had a strong sense of God’s love and protection
• Set out for ordination (Episcopal/Anglican)

But at university doubts set in

• How could God of love allow evil? – poverty, war, violence
• What use was prayer to such a God?
• The creeds were problematic

She decided to quit the path to ordination and the Church, and today is a teacher and writer, using art as a tool to peace.

Who of us would not identify with Sarah on some of those issues?

Some say the creeds with mental reservations over parts of them.

The problem of evil is only a problem if you think of God as a divine train controller without whom nothing moves.

We don’t put our faith in creeds. The creeds are merely signposts, words and pictures constructed by humans wrestling with some of the big issues about God and humankind.

The creeds point to God and can help us on the journey. Like an AA roadsign saying Wellington: we don’t confuse the sign with the city, but if the sign helps us on our way, it’s done its job.

Faith begins with an experience, not with a creed. Here are some examples:

Exodus 3: Moses at Mt Sinai (Horeb)

• minding his father-in-law’s sheep
• Hears God’s call and encounters God in the bush –burning but not consumed
• “Put off your sandals: this is holy ground”, God tells him.
• His vocation follows to liberate Israel from Egypt

Faith begins with an encounter. Seldom an encounter like Moses had at Sinai, or Paul on the Damascus road.

Fast forward to the same mountain c 850 BC: Elijah fleeing for his life from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, to Mt Horeb/Sinai, site of God’s covenant with Moses. God asks ‘What are you doing here? And Elijah pours out his tale of woe.

There follows the wind that splits the rocks; then earthquake; fire – God was in none of them. God was in the silence that followed, the ‘soft whisper of a voice’.

So our encounter with the living God is very often a small voice, an idea that comes in the night, or in a conversation, or seeing something that moves us on the media. As Joan Puls  says: “Every Bush is burning”.

In John 3 we read how Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus by night, searching, sensing that in Jesus something deeper of God is to be found.

Jesus tells him he must be born again, of Spirit, to which Nicodemus responds. Later he appears again helping to take Jesus’ body down from the Cross.

So we find Moses, Elijah, Paul, Nicodemus and countless others each encountering God in their own way, as does each one of us. What have been our own encounters with God?

But then, as the Church has always done, we try to put experience into words – doctrines and liturgies – which may or may not help.

When Moses asked ‘who are you?’. God replied: “I am who I am”. Tell my people ‘I am has sent you ‘

That very cryptic ‘I am’:  the word for being, essence, simply what is. No fancy words, no creeds. What lies at the heart of life: otherness, transcendence, energy, being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Sarah Sentilles adds similar words: mystery, love, justice, accountability, agency, creativity.

And as Jesus says to Nicodemus – the spirit is like the wind; you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. The spirit of God is on the move. Believing in God is a willingness to ride the divine wind and to let God take us where God wishes.

So faith is not primarily an intellectual exercise but a direct and personal encounter with the divine mystery.

Notice also the shift in emphasis in the creeds in our worship:

• p. 410 (NZPB): intellectual propositions
• p481:  ‘You’ – personal encounter…>>>

And it has an essential communal dimension which reaches out to embrace all people and all creation.

This captured in the doctrine of the Trinity. There’s only one word I find helpful to describe the Trinity – perichoresis (peri –around; choresis – dancing) – dancing in partnership.

Think of a divine dance, as in The Lord of the Dance. So the three persons of the Trinity are not three static entities. They are dancing together, bonding, alive, moving, responding, inter-acting, loving, relating, changing.

And that deeply symbolic picture of the nature of a dancing God reaches out to encompass all else that is.  It is the image for our relationships with one another – the most intimate of our relationships, as well as those of friends and whanau, society, nations and tribes.

It is the model of the Body of Christ – the Church -part of the divine dance of interaction, love and support.

It drives our commitment to justice and peace – as Moses was called to liberate God’s people:  dancing with the poor and oppressed.

And also, of course, dancing with all creation in caring for the environment, seeing all living creatures, sun, moon and earth as brothers and sisters with us.

So I’m sorry Sarah quit the Church, because everything she stands for, the Church stands for also. Our calling is to encounter the living God, to enter into the divine dance so that the fire that is not consumed lives in us, and through us sets all life and creation ablaze with love.