THE ONLY TRUE GOD

Scripture Readings: John 17:1-11

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God.”

The first god I believed in was named Katie. She was my mother. She was so sweet, kind, thoughtful, and loving that I was convinced she was perfect. I thought she was a kind of god.

I remember very well when I discovered my mom wasn’t perfect. I was about five years old. Her mother (my grandmother) had died and she and her sisters and brother had divided up her mother’s estate and personal effects. One day a truck came to our house and brought all sorts of things – tables and chairs and beds and boxes filled with silverware and china and linen. My older brothers and sisters were interested in these things and picked out what they wanted, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. There was nothing there that would interest a five-year-old boy until we came to the last and smallest box. Near the bottom of the box was an iron doorstop formed and painted like a small Scottish terrier. That looked kind of fun, so I claimed it for my own. But then my mother spoke up. This doorstop had been hers when she grew up and was still hers. I couldn’t have it.

That’s when I found out that my mother wasn’t perfect, and by not being perfect I meant that she didn’t exist solely to make me happy but had needs of her own. In short, that she was a human being, not a god.

I was disillusioned. Not that I went out and, at five years old, got a James Dean haircut, affected a permanent Elvis sneer, or talked about the proletariat all the time. I was literally disillusioned – I lost my illusions about my mother and came into a truer and more real understanding of who she was.

I would have a similar experience with my father when I found out in my adolescence that he had been engaged to someone else before meeting my mother. Egad – I could have had a different mother!

I make light of it now, but you know that such disillusionments can be difficult for children and take a while for them to adjust to. Just because it's true doesn’t make it easy, and yet today I am grateful for such experiences of disillusionment so that I could have a relationship with both my parents based on truth rather than illusions.

I’m sure all of you have had disillusioning experiences, particularly with your parents and with those closest to you. Sometimes those experiences are so jarring, the deception has been so deep and so long-lived, the truth so difficult to face that the relationship simply can’t continue after that. An even greater danger may be that we stubbornly cling to our illusions even after they have already been exposed and unmasked, preferring a convenient falsehood to a more difficult truth.

Those options, either giving up or living in denial, are attractive, but ultimately unfulfilling in our relationships.

There’s a wonderful story about the philosopher Diogenes who, one day, was sitting on a curbstone eating bread and lentils for his supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus disdainfully, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.” Replied Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.”

I believe Jesus’ words would be similar to those of Diogenes – “learn to live on truth, and the truth will set you free from living in illusions.”

It’s important for us to learn to live on truth, we who have been so frequently disillusioned in our lives. Think of the events of the last fifty years and what a sea change they have meant: the Korean War, Vietnam, the assassination of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Watergate, Iran-Contragate, the S & L bailout, Lewinsky-gate, the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, the World Trade Center attack, and the Iraq War. And looking to the church hasn’t brought much relief from our disillusionment. Far from it with television evangelists indicted for fraud; parish priests convicted of child molestation while their bishops seemingly look the other way; churches pouring their resources into institutional survival while their numbers dwindle; religious wars waged around the world while children’s bellies bloat and whole species disappear off the face of the earth.

It’s overwhelming, isn’t it, the disillusionment we’ve faced over the last fifty years. And this doesn’t begin to tell the story of the individual disillusionments that each one of us has faced. So many of you are here today, in this church, because of something that happened somewhere else, something that disillusioned you with your former church family. I’ve heard some of those stories and consider it a miracle that many of you decided to give the Christian Church a second, third or fourth chance.

And yet all of us know that we won’t find perfection here, either in the pastors or in the congregation. What illusions we have about such things will be shattered here as well. And this morning I want to make the case that such disillusionment can be a good thing.

The Gospel Reading we received this morning focuses on the glory that Jesus fully shares with God. It is a glory that was glimpsed in the earlier signs in John’s Gospel – turning water into wine, healing the man with the withered hand, feeding five thousand, even raising Lazarus from the dead. These were only signs, however, not the full glory, not the true and pure expression of God-with-us. We will only see that glory in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not with the signs - any good conjurer can imitate those - but the miracle of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Those come only from God. As Jesus says in our Gospel Reading, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God.” When Pontius Pilate asks later on in the Gospel, “What is truth?”, this is the answer, found only on the Cross and in the empty tomb.

What has that to do with us and our illusions? Well, I was serious earlier when I said the first god I worshiped was my mother. One of my favorite quotes is this one:

We are not human beings needing to become more spiritual –

We are spiritual beings needing to become more human.

One more time:

We are not human beings needing to become more spiritual –

We are spiritual beings needing to become more human.

The fact of the matter is that human beings are so naturally spiritual creatures that we will worship anything. And we won’t stop worshiping them until our illusions are shattered. We would settle for so much less than God, such small “g” gods, except sooner or later we become disillusioned. Disillusioned, thank God!

We find out sooner or later that mother isn’t god, dad either, nor money, nor careers, nor marriage, nor children, nor presidents, nor pastors, nor nations, nor churches. None of those is God. All of them might contain signs of God’s presence, but they are not God. If you think they are, you’re living in a dream world and, sooner or later, you will get disillusioned.

Yet, I know that disillusionment is not an easy thing. Especially when you become disillusioned with God. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “One man I know, mourning the death of his infant daughter, confessed the depth of his loss. ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whom to pray to, or what to pray. I tried to be a good person; I did the best I knew how, and it didn’t do a bit of good. If God is going to let something like this happen, then what’s the use of believing at all?’”

It’s a dark place, the place where our notions about God have seemingly come to nothing. From such a place perhaps comes Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. For the atheist, the place of disillusionment is the place where faith goes to die. But for us it is a place where faith becomes it reborn. It’s a hopeful place because, while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth. The question is, will we give up the faith quest in our disillusionment, or will we dare to seek what is true?

There’s a wonderful story from Hassidic Judaism about Abraham the cobbler. The word had gone around in a little Eastern European town that one of its most respected citizens, Abraham the cobbler, had become an atheist. The whole town was shaken by the news, though it was only a rumor.

On the following Sabbath, however, for the first time in thirty years, Abraham the cobbler did not sit in his customary seat in the synagogue. Could he be sick? No. For when the services were over, they found a healthy Abraham the cobbler walking quietly in the street. All stared at him, and finally Yussel the tailor, with a sudden burst of bravery, pushed forward and asked, “Abraham, there is a rumor that you have become an atheist. Is this true? Do you no longer believe in God?” Abraham looked quietly at Yussel and turned away without a word.

Everyone was stunned. The community was in an uproar. The next day it was clear that no work would be done in town unless this matter was cleared up. So a delegation was appointed, with Yussel the tailor as its head. They confronted Abraham in his shop and Yussel said, “Abraham, we must have an answer. Tell me, are you now an atheist?” Abraham replied quietly but unequivocally, “Yes.” Yussel was astonished and asked, “Then why didn’t you say so when I asked you yesterday?”

Abraham’s eyes grew wide with horror, “You wanted me to say I was an atheist on the Sabbath?”

Isn’t that a wonderful story? While it doesn’t tell us what experience made Abraham believe he was an atheist, it does give us reason to believe that Abraham has not ended his search for God. Perhaps Abraham had become disillusioned and no longer believed in his illusory god. And in continuing the search, he will come into contact with “the only true God” that Jesus spoke of, the true and glorious God that Abraham had found in the Sabbath.

How about you? Can you have the faith of Abraham the cobbler, one that doesn’t stop reaching for God even when it becomes disillusioned? Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “(for the persistent seeker) every letdown becomes a lesson and a lure. Did God fail to come when I called? Then perhaps God is not a minion. So who is God? Did God fail to punish my adversary? Then perhaps God is not a policeman. So who is God? Did God fail to make everything turn out all right? Then perhaps God is not a fixer. So who is God? Over and over my disappointments draw me deeper into the mystery of God’s being and doing…”

There’s a wonderful story in the Gospels of a distraught man with a very sick child coming before Jesus, begging him for healing. Approaching Jesus, the man says words that I cherish, words that to me are the most Christian words in all of scripture: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

I believe if we are to truly glimpse God’s glory, truly to know the one true God, we must be disillusioned again and again, discarding the false gods and easy answers of our illusions, in favor of “the only true God,” the true and glorious God we have glimpsed in the cross and empty tomb.

Many years ago, a film called The Man Who Played God was released. It features the great character actor, George Arliss, playing the part of a prominent, rich musician. Early on in the film, he loses his hearing and becomes embittered and cynical. Not only does he turn his back on his friends, he turns his back on God. He moves into a penthouse where he begins to learn the art of lip-reading. From his penthouse window overlooking a park, he looks through a set of high-powered binoculars and tries to read people’s lips.

One day he concentrates on a young man whose lips are moving in prayer. He determines what it is the young man was praying for and then dispatches his butler to deliver it to him. On another occasion he read the lips of a woman who is telling another about something she needed and wanted desperately. Again, the wealthy musician sees to it that the need is met. Each time he performs one of these services, the cynical musician looks heavenward and laughs in God’s face. He finds it laughable that he is playing God but doesn’t even believe in God.

But as time goes by, and his eccentric method of meeting people’s needs continues, something strangely wonderful began to happen. The man who played God finds God! Through the game he was playing – the game of serving people’s needs – the very God he didn’t believe in becomes real to him, because God is a God of loving service and sacrifice. What begins in disillusionment ends in glorious faith.

There is nothing strange in the disillusionment we encounter, the times our faith is tested, when we say to Christ, “I believe, help my unbelief.” No, those are times for us to be helpfully disillusioned, as long as we continue to reach out for what is true, so that we may touch the unfathomable riches of real relationship with “the only true God,” the one who who first touched us through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon preached by Reverend Steve Savides at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on May 4, 2008.