“Palo dado ni Dios lo quita”: My Mother the Process Theologian
August 1, 2021 • 10th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings: Hosea 11:1-4 & Matthew 7:7-11
Rev. Dr. Ignacio Castuera, guest preacher
View the worship service here:
iStock Image #924084052, by glebchik,
Used by permission
What a joy it is to return to the Church of the Village. And to be here live! Zoom has done marvels for us, and I want to be very grateful to whoever invented it. And I’m grateful to everyone involved with technical issues that allows us to spread the word. The Bible tells us to get to the highest point and proclaim from there the glory of God. And now the highest point is an electronic highest point, and I think the Church of the Village has found such a high point from which we can proclaim the word of God.
And, we can share wonderful things such as this photograph which was taken right after my holy communion. My mother, on the extreme right, her sister, Rocha, I’m holding my candle, my grandmother, Conchita, and my grandfather who was so tall. When they got married, my grandfather tells a joke that when I tried to grab her around the waist and almost choked her. Family. We are family. We learn the best about the love of God in our families. It is so sad that there are families who do not share that, but I was blessed. I was blessed with a mother that unbeknownst to her was really the theologian in my life, the first theologian. Its true she sent me to school and prepared me for holy communion and I learned that God is almighty, all powerful, omnipotent, and all that. And then at home when she administered punishment – she had not read the Bible – but later she discovered that the Bible said spare the rod, spoil the child, she would say to us “see, I was right!” Sometimes in the middle of that physical punishment she would say ‘palo dado ni Dios lo quita’ – a good beating not even God can take it away. So, I learned many years later about cognitive dissonance. God almighty but can’t take away the beating my mother was administering. So where is this almighty God? That seed eventually developed into my understanding of God in a different way thanks to process theology.
I’m so glad and so blessed that she was the one that created the cognitive dissonance that opened me up to think about God in different ways. She didn’t know it but that had been going on in our faith going back to the biblical record. The biblical record is a constant struggle between the religion of the temple with rules and regulations and the religion of the prophets who in the name of God say the rules, regulations, and sacrifices is not what it is all about. I want the good deeds, the love of the people, I want you to love the people. Jesus did not just come up with the loving ideas of God as an Abba, a daddy, a papito. He had been fed by the current teachings of the prophets. There we find the beginning of those tender elements. Not to the degree that Jesus taught them, but they were there. If you look in the Bible every now and then there is reference to God as someone who is like a parent. Some of those images are scary. God says I am like a she-bear defending her cubs. If you’ve ever done any hiking, they ask you to shout and make a lot of noise to keep the bears away. If it is a she-bear, forget it. Try to get away as soon as possible. So, that image of God, as a she-bear ready to defend her cubs, is a powerful image that has a little bit of tenderness (defending her cubs), but it really is a scary one.
The one that was read today, which comes from the prophet Hosea, is a little bit more tender. I was fortunate that I was blessed being the oldest, I have a sister 9 years younger and a brother 13 years younger, and I had the opportunity to ‘teach them’ to walk. Now, we don’t actually teach them, but we help them as they start walking. So that image of God saying it was God who taught Ephraim to walk is one that is filled with tenderness. Jesus is building on that. Our faith, our Christian faith, echoes that strong division in the Bible between the faith of the religion of rules, regulations, and rituals or the
temple, and the faith taught by the prophets about a loving God, a caring God, a God who wants us to love each other and to spread that love. That is echoed in the history of our faith. Because it started with the teachings of Jesus. In that tenderness of a papito, an Abba, who could not possibly do bad things for the children. And that image of Jesus saying ‘if you, filled with faults as you are, can give good gifts how much more your heavenly papito, your heavenly Abba. So that image is really one that impels the early church to become the force that it was in the Roman empire.
But Constantine saw that that force could be used for his purposes, and he took it over. And the Caesars of Rome were the ones who then became the theologians of the church and the images of power. All of the attributes of Caesar were then given to God and the vision of tenderness that Jesus and the prophets had given us almost disappeared. Whitehead says that vision flickered through the ages. Id like to think one of those flickerings was that statement my mother gave about God not really being omnipotent which opened the idea that there are other ways to talk about God.
Process thought really starts with a major challenge to the religious rituals, rules, and regulations of the temple. The religion of the God with the attributes of Caesar to build on the religion of love, of a caring loving God. It is not omnipotence that is important for us as followers of Jesus. Instead, it should be love. We should go out of this place and start every day by affirming our own image of God and go out and say you are a child of God, building on that deeply theological foundation that God is love. God is tender. God is a member of our family not somebody far removed from us.
Our official rituals of the church, even the prayer that Jesus taught the disciples, betrays the teachings of Jesus. We should not say our father who art in heaven. We should substitute, at least in our heads and our hearts, the most tender image we can possibly summon and use that as the opening of the Lord’s prayer. Papito. Abba. My dearest friend – whatever and whoever has been for you the most loving image of the most loving God – that is what the beginning of that prayer should be. That is what Jesus meant when he used the Aramaic Abba.
A theology that starts there is going to take us to very different places from a theology that starts with images of power. We really want to discover the kind of power that flows out, really believing that God loves me and loves everybody around me. Not just the bipeds that sometimes think they are the ‘primates’ in creation and evolution, but everyone. The molecules and electrons, the ants, the beasts of the jungle, fish in the ocean, etc. – all of them God loves – each and every one. God doesn’t only love the little children or the children of the world regardless of their color, God loves all of the creation.
You can see why process theology is becoming more and more popular now that our whole household, nature, and the threats to it, we can see that threat is the consequence that we didn’t acknowledge that God loves all of creation. That love that I can feel deeply from God is a love that is extended to the whole of creation. So, it is not a leap to ask people of faith, believers in Jesus, followers of his teachings that we now must be the defenders of the Earth. In one of his books, John Cobb says, Jesus’ followers must become ‘earthists’ defenders of the Earth. That why he wrote a book called Is It Too Late where he is talking about defending nature. He wrote that back in 1969. If people had only begun to listen we would not be in the difficulty we are in now. This is what we now must do also. That omnipotent God is not going to come in from out of nowhere and “save creation” by his own power as our conservative people claim. Many conservative ‘Christians’ say no we don’t have to worry about it, God will do it all. God will come in. This a false sense of security that comes out of a false image of an omnipotent God is what’s part of the actions and attacks upon the earth. We, who really believe, that God is not omnipotent, but that God is loving, loves everyone, we then should be the ones who lead the way in the defense of the creation.
When the Pope wrote Laudato Si, those of us who are in the process camp thanked God that someone with the voice of authority that the Pope does have can begin to move the official churches, not just the Catholic church, but the official churches closer and closer to the vision of Jesus and farther and father away from the religion of the empire.
We, here, are a reflection of the religion that Jesus wanted to see. One grounded in love and is spread out to others, other human beings, and to the whole of creation.
Amen.
2021 (c) Ignacio Castuera
All Rights Reserved