2023.08.13 | God Is Nowhere
God is Nowhere
1 Kings 19:9-18
Preached by
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
13 August 2023
1 Kings 19:9-18 | Español
Anybody out there see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? Yeah, me neither, we choose Barbie. Awesome movie by the way. “I’m just a Ken.” Back to Indiana Jones--which is so much more than a Ken, right?--he instilled in me as a kid a real passion for adventure and ancient faraway cultures. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a globetrotting archaeologist with a bullwhip and a cool hat? Maybe rid the world of nazism along the way. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Professor Jones had to beat the Nazis from recovering the Ark of the Covenant. Because, with that ancient lost relic, it was believed one could harness the power of God, and make an army invincible. This morning, I’d like to explore together how the idea of the Ark of the Covenant, or the idea behind the Ark of the Covenant, an imageless God, points to the contrary. And in true Indiana Jones fashion, take us to a few faraway places along the way.
During the period of our scripture reading this morning, set in the ninth century B.C.E., there was a lot of zealous competition among allegiances to deities. El, one of the Hebrew names for the God of Israel, also happened to be the Father of the Canaanite pantheon. They were probably one and the same. The father of gods was also known as Dagon by the biblical Philistines. El, with his wife Asherah, had children who were also deities. Among them were the storm god Ba’al Hadad, who we know from the Bible, and his sister Anat. While the biblical account dwells much on Ba’al, it’s his sister that is to be even more feared, Anat, God of War and the Hunt. Like the Hindu god Kali, she delighted in the taking of heads of enemies and making necklaces of them.
In the Ugaritic Ba’al Cycle, written much before the Bible, from modern-day Syria which borders northern Israel, Ba’al is eventually killed by Mot, the god of death, but it is Anat, who slays Death to avenge the killing of her brother. And Ba’al Hadad resurrects and takes his rightful place on Mount Zephon.
A little disclaimer: I’m going to pronounce the unpronounceable name of the LORD, known as the Tetragrammaton today to help us distinguish the different Lords or Gods. I usually refrain from uttering the name in worship and use the Jewish HaShem, the name, or adonai, the Christian “Lord” instead. But using the name Yahweh, will help us hear important differences in our texts.
The cults of Ba’al and Yahweh were in competition to outpace devotion for old El, the Father of Gods, whose influence was waning. Ba’al had Mount Zephon, Yahweh had Mount Zion. The ancient Israelites understood this, as we can read in Deut. 32:8-9, “When God Most High or El Elyon, gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of El. For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.” Conversely, Ba’al would have the Philistines. Elijah’s name literally means Jah or Yahweh is my God, “Eli.”
As the Bible--even the Old Testament--was written much after the Ugaritic or Canaanite accounts, we can hear echoes of these old gods, who liked to make grand entrances. The Psalms, Israel’s book of worship, is filled with such imagery.
Take Psalm 29 for example:
Acknowledge the Lord, you sons of gods,
acknowledge the Lord’s majesty and power.
Acknowledge the majesty of the Lord’s reputation.
Worship the Lord in holy attire.
The Lord’s shout is heard over the water;
the majestic God thunders,
the Lord appears over the surging water.
The Lord’s shout is powerful,
the Lord’s shout is majestic.
The Lord’s shout breaks the cedars,
the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes them skip like a calf,
Lebanon and Sirion like a young ox.
The Lord’s shout strikes with flaming fire.
The Lord’s shout shakes the wilderness,
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The Lord’s shout bends the large trees
and strips the leaves from the forests.
Everyone in his temple says, “Majestic!”
The Lord sits enthroned over the engulfing waters,
the Lord sits enthroned as the eternal king.
The Lord gives his people strength;
the Lord grants his people security.
And from Psalm 104:
Bless the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers. (Ps 104:1-13)
These psalms are very ancient, probably appropriated from Cannanite worship of Ba’al. You can just hear the imagery of the storm god. His voice over the waters, the thunder quaking, the lightning flashing, the wind so strong that it splinters the giant cedars of the coastal highlands. Scholar Mark S. Smith in his books the Early History of YHWH and God in Translation describe these processes of a god’s appropriation of other gods’ attributes as convergence, while some attributes would completely fall away in the form of differentiation.
The image that you now see is a late bronze age Ba’al over the waters. Jesus, who would also be resurrected like Ba’al, would also be known for commanding yet calming the storm, a subtle but important difference.
Destructive natural forces have throughout history been associated with divine presence. If you recall from the blockbuster movie Twister, which they’re making a sequel to be released next year, storm chasers referred to an F-5 tornado as “the finger of God.” Like Jesus calming the storm, God as depicted in our passage this morning is not one of primarily destructive forces, like other sons of El, Anat or Ba’al, but one of deliverance or salvation, as in the very name of the prophet, El-i-sha, which means literally “God is my salvation,” “El,” which is God, “-i” the first person possessive infix, and “-sha” from yeshua, meaning salvation, also the name of Jesus. To be sure though, the ancient Israelites and Judahites loved to emphasize the mighty arm of their Lord before battles.
What we read in this portion of the Elijah cycle this morning is the anticipation of the God of Israel being in the storm, in the quakes, in the lightning, in the special effects, as with Psalm 29. But as much as televangelists would like us to believe, God is not particularly in the hurricane hitting the shore, or particularly in the earthquake wreaking havoc, nor in the flames lapping at houses. In our passage this morning, God is surprisingly not in these very natural phenomena, but rather in the absence of them, in the silence. In the sheer silence.
And while this has a contemplative side to it, this was primarily a polemical affront to the Ba’al cult. The Elijah Cycle here definitively states that Yahweh is not a storm god, like Ba’al. We have unapologetic differentiation. And to our horror the passage ends with a promise to spare the lives of those who have not paid allegiance to Ba’al.
This being the case, and to much dismay of the early prophets, the storm god made his way into the Israelite canon of worship anyway. Just as today we still sing old familiar tunes with some pretty wacky theology for the sake of tradition, the Yahweh cult couldn’t get around some of their oldest hymns either, so they simply substituted Yahweh for Ba’al, just as we saw earlier in Psalm 29.
Last week, Pastor Brenda brought to our attention the very novel idea of Christian contemplation. And the week before that Pastor Pepper in her parting sermon left for us to dwell on a poem that described all that God is not. To invoke our memory, here are a few stanzas:
“God
is beyond words
but lives in poems
God
is neither he nor she
but answers to either
God
is inside and beside me
but I still look up.”
Much of our Christian Theology and some Jewish thought that preceded it, and as it appears so also Canaanite cosmogony, is dedicated to the right thought of the deity, describing with fair degrees of certainty what or who the deity is and how they act. This was as some may call it today, “a fellowship issue.” In many flavors of Judaism and Christianity and Islam today, what you believe, determines with whom you gather. At many points in history, as in our passage this morning, a quote “wrong” belief about God would have deadly ends. This intensified into the Axial Age, where much of our Christian cataphatic theology, or ways of knowing God affirmatively come through actual non-biblical Greek axioms, such as omnipotent or all-powerful, omniscient or all-knowing, omnipresent or all-present, or omnibenevolent, or all good. But none of these would apply to the God of Israel in absolutes as depicted in the Bible--or any other deity for that matter. However, they do make for good philosophical formulas in a vacuum. But just ask Job how these theorems actually hold up in the real world. Not so well. This certainty of knowing about God and the way that God worked was concretized even more during the horrific period of the crusades and later inquisition, mirroring ancient cultic rivalries.
Another way of approaching the thought of God, is actually through another type of theology than cataphatic, called apophatic. Cataphatic is from the Greek, Kataphatikos, meaning positive or affirmative. And the prefix “-apo” in Greek signifies “other than,” so apophatic is other than affirmative or positive, that is negative or a denial of knowledge. An apophatic approach to theology or the study of God then acknowledges a qualitative difference between us and the deity, and so we can never truly know the divine nature, even if we are made in its image. So, the via negativa or more contemplative or negative theology concerns itself with less of the more affirmative ways of knowing God’s attributes and true nature as described in some of the Psalms, Greek philosophy, or even the ancient Israelite divine attribute credo that we examined last month. In the via negativa God is in the sheer silence as with Elijah, and in the whirlwind as with Job, but not the whirlwind nor the earthquake, nor the fire.
This path toward conceptualizing the divine too is very old. Rather than depict a known deity, in the Levant, some folks began to imagine an imageless deity. The Iron-Age Syro-Hittite temple in Ain Dara discovered in 1955, which is in now modern-day Syria in northwest Aleppo, has a pair of large footprints about a meter each in length carved into the portico outside of the temple entrance, which bears much resemblance to the later temple of Solomon. The inference here is that the deity could not be seen, but evidence pointed to his entrance into the temple. It can be understood here that the deity, while anthropomorphic, was beginning to fade from total conception and comprehension. One could see the evidence of the god, but no longer the god, and so one could not behold the deity. Sadly, this temple was mostly destroyed in 2018 by the Turkish air force.
A later tenet of ancient Israelite religion would be to abhor idols, like the one we saw earlier of Ba’al. The Ten Commandments starts off with recognizing other gods, and commanding henotheism, the worship of Yahweh the god of Israel above all others, and quickly shifts to forbidding graven images or idols, which eventually leads to the transformation of summodeism into monolatry. With the lack of images, comes the lack of certainty. Like the footprints at the temple of Ain Dara, the cherubim upon the ark of the covenant point to but a space for sacred presence, but as the prophet Ezekiel lets us know, God will be held in no box, no tabernacle, no temple, no people. Sorry, Indiana Jones.
Like the poem that Pastor Pepper shared with us, God is in the not’s. The Jewish and Christian and Sufi mystics of old practiced such a sort of negative theology that counter-intuitively, like the divine response to Job in the whirlwind and the sheer silence of Elijah’s encounter, make our perceived conceptions of the divine much more expansive, indeed even surpassing all our understandings.
I leave us with a few sayings from one of my favorite mystic poets, the 17th cent. German Johann Scheffler or better known by his Catholic name, Angelus Silesius. He wrote of the Deus Absconditus, or the hidden God:
God is the purest naught, untouched by time and space
The more you reach for God, the more God will escape
The more you know of God, the more you will confess
That what God is Godself, you can name less and less.
One knows not what God is. Not spirit and not light,
Not one, truth, unity, not what we call divine.
Not reason and not wisdom, not goodness, love, or will,
No thing, no no-thing either, not being or concern.
God is what I or you, or any other creature
Has never come to know before we were created.
God far exceeds all words that we can here express
In silence God is heard, in silence worshiped best.
It’s worthy to note that Silesius’s formative years coincided with Europe’s Thirty Years War in the first part of the 1600s, which started as a Catholic-Protestant feud, but resulted in the loss of some 8 million lives, leaving many to exclaim that God is nowhere.
Embracing the incomprehensibility of God, accepting the imageless space above the ark of the covenant in the temple, allows for a great deal of flexibility and disallows ownership of God, or putting God in a box. If we accept the ineffable God, then we relinquish the possibility of having a monopoly on God--there is room for multiple understandings and no need for uniform consensus or councils that result in sanctioned right thought about God that will eventually be transgressed.
And once we overcome right belief, or orthodoxy, then we can get on to orthopraxy, or walking the walk, but contemplatively minding the pauses, as Jesus taught us.
If we embrace the uncertainty that God may not be in the wind, the earthquake, the fire, or other events or images, we run the risk of seeing God nowhere. But in that sheer silence, amid the enveloping clouds of unknowing, we realize that for us no-thing has changed, God is now here. Amen.