Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 29 – Monday after 5th Sunday of Lent

To Read:

One day I was stopped by Sunday School Teacher.  Sunday School Teacher asked me, no, told me, to instruct Anna to behave herself in the class.  I asked what it was that Anna had done or had not done and was told:  one, that Anna interrupted, two, that Anna contradicted, and three, that Anna used bad language.

Anna could, I admit, use a pretty good cuss-word at times and I tried to explain to Sunday School Teacher that, although Anna sometimes used language badly, she never in fact used the language of badness.  My arrow missed the target completely.  I could well imagine that Anna had interrupted her and also that she had contradicted her, but she wouldn’t tell me the circumstances of this episode.  That evening I spoke to Anna on the subject.  I told her that I had met Sunday School Teacher and told her what had been said.

To Reflect:

‘Your God is too Small’ a book written by theologian and Bible translator JB Phillips in 1953 – 15 years after Anna’s story and 20 years before her words were written down – laid out the problem of thinking we know everything about anything and especially about knowing all there is to know about Mister God.  

Phillips lists the names of some of our ‘small’ Gods – you may recognise a few;

The Resident Policeman, a Parental Hangover, God the Grand Old Man,  Meek-and-Mild Jesus, God-in-a-Box – the challenge faced by Anna’s Sunday School teacher, and (Lord please deliver us from this one) Jesus the Pale Galilean!

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion was making the same protest.  My very naïve critique of that work though is that Dawkins does not always see that he is himself speaking from the God-Box of his own privileged background and education at Oundle School which, as did, and sometimes still do, many schools of that ilk, demanded that God fits in a box called ‘Chalkie the Headmaster’.

Too often when people talk about God they presume how they know God is how everyone should, even must, know and meet God.  This can never end well.  

My curacy parish was in the small town of Kriel in Northern Mpumalanga Province.  Every one of the then 4 500 souls who lived there worked for Eskom or for the coal mines that fed their power stations.  In that small dorpie there were 15 different churches; all of them thought they followed the one true God and none of them had large congregations nor much of an impact on those who didn’t attend church.  Putting God in a box doesn’t ‘rescue’ people (remember the difference between being ‘saved’ and being ‘safe’) it just separates them. South Africa in the 1980s had far too much church-backed separation with the evil system of Apartheid…

And when we put God in a box, like Sunday School Teacher, we won’t (we can’t even)  ‘let Mister God get bigger.’

Whenever we put God, or our belief system, or our ethical structures into a box we render them powerless and end up re-making the things that should help us grow and flourish into our own image.  

Novelist and Christian Mystic Evelyn Underhill has this too say about how we box God in;

‘If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.’   (Evelyn Underhill)

‘Your God is too Small’.  Admittedly it is safe to keep God in a box.  There we can limit God’s demands on our lives.  There we can mould God into our image and force God to hate the people we hate and love only people like us.

And on that road lies only darkness and despair.

Let Mister God get bigger!

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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