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A Sermon by
Donel McClellan
A Sermon by
Donel McClellan Hot Topics for the Summer: The Imaginary God Clergy friend John Severson shared
a story recently, called "Dining With God." When Seymour passed away, God greeted him at the Pearly Gates. "Thou be
hungry, Seymour?" said God. "I could eat," Seymour replied. So God opened a can of tuna and reached for a chunk of rye bread and they
shared it. While eating this humble meal, Seymour glanced down into Hell and saw
the inhabitants devouring huge steaks, lobsters, pheasants, pastries, and fine
wines. Curious, but deeply trusting, Seymour remained quiet. The next day God again invited Seymour for another meal. Again, it was tuna
and rye bread. Once again looking down, Seymour could see the denizens of Hell
enjoying caviar, champagne, lamb, truffles, and chocolates. Still Seymour said
nothing. The following day, mealtime arrived and God opened another can of tuna.
Seymour could contain himself no longer. Meekly, he said: "God, I am
grateful to be in heaven with you as a reward for the pious, obedient life I
led. But here in heaven all I get to eat is tuna and a piece of rye bread and in
the Other Place they eat like emperors and kings! Forgive me, O God, but I just
don’t understand." God sighed: "Let’s be honest, Seymour. For just two people does it pay
to cook?" Now just think for a moment. How does the image of God in that story relate
to your image of God? Since nobody has seen God, all we have to go on are our
images—our imaginary God. This is a source of great freedom and great
controversy. The freedom and the controversy revolve around what we humans see,
hear, touch, taste and smell. We generally agree that the world is indeed
composed of all we can see. The great question is, does what we perceive
comprise all of the world, or are there parts of creation which cannot be seen,
touched, tasted, heard or smelled? Of course, when I list the senses, I mean to include all the technological
amplifiers and processors which our emerging science used to extend our
perception from electron microscopes to radio telescopes. After circumnavigating
the globe a Russian cosmonaut reported, "I did not see God."
The statement came from a representative of an officially atheistic state. It
created no particular shock in the West however. Most ministers passed it off as
a naive observation but I considered it rather profound. To affirm that "I
did not see God" simply extends and confirms the uncritical scientific
faith of most Americans. The majority of our citizens claim to have a belief in
God, but frankly, there is little evidence that their belief in God impacts
society in any singularly discernable way. In other words, we talk the talk, but
we don’t much walk the walk. How does one imagine God in a time when science determines what exists and
does not exist, what is real and what is fantasy. From time to time I get into discussions with friends of our children. Most
of these friends are not actively religious in any formal way. At some point,
the discussion turns to the existence of God. They ask why I believe God exists.
I respond with a brief account of the witness of the historical community of the
church, the perspective of the Bible, and my personal experience. Then, they
play their trump card. How do I know, they ask, that my image of God is not just
a projection of my wish that there was a God. Those of us who took philosophy
remember Feuerbach who claimed that humans had a desire to live forever.
Therefore we have projected this infantile wish upon the universe and named it
God. I have never had a great answer for this charge until recently when I came
across campus pastor and professor William Willimon’s response. He said to one
such philosophical critic: "That shows just how little you know. If we were going to project a
God, we would certainly not have projected this one! We’ve demonstrated,
time and again through the centuries, that we are capable of producing many
more accessible and likable Gods than this one!"1 The modern concept that God is nothing but a wish projection probably had its
birth in 1907 with Sigmund Freud. That year he read a paper, "Obsessive
Actions and Religious Practices".2
In that paper. Freud claimed, on the basis of his work with neurotic patients,
that the "petty ceremonials" of religion are basically a
sort of personality sickness. God is only a symptom of deep inner insecurities. "One
might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological formation of a
religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and
religion as a universal obsessional neurosis." In other words,
according to Freud, only sick people could be religious. That fit well into a world in which the emerging discoveries of the physical
sciences where claiming the attention and the increasing economic support of the
West. It is the nature of modernity to reduce most human experiences to a category
of artificial reality. For the modern mind, there is no reality outside the
self, no values outside those which are self-generated, no aesthetic apart from
that of the most critical post-modern deconstruction. Therefore what we call God
is only a projection of something inside ourselves. What we call music is only a
series of sound waves bouncing around the atmosphere. What we call art is only a
pattern of forms and colors which stimulate the neuro-chemical processes of the
brain. Freud continued this line of thinking in The Future of an Illusion
(1927). There he dismisses "the fairy-tales of religion"
as only an illusion "derived from human wishes." "The
effect of religious thinking may be likened to that of a narcotic,"
says Dr. Freud. This, as you can imagine, was something like what Marx said when
he charged that religion was "the opiate of the common people."
Religion is a cheap drug. Ana-Maria Rizzuto charged, in her book, Birth of the Living God: A
Psychoanalytic Study that contemporary psychoanalysis has never been
able to break free of Freud’s prejudiced, reductionistic, vehemently negative
account of religion. Rizzuto notes that human being are inherently imagining and projecting
creatures. In order to live in the world, we constantly projecting images on our
mental screens, images that may be accurate or inaccurate representations of the
world. For instance, I know a two-year-old who has a fixation with a baby blanket.
Whenever he feels insecure, he grabs his blankie and feels better. Why?
Obviously the blankie is a reminder of the comforting presence of mommy and
daddy. When he is holding the blanket, the toddler feels close to the parent.
This feeling of closeness is a projection—an act of imagination. But it is not a lie. Because, the child who is busy projecting the comforting
presence of the parent, through the object of the blanket really has a parent
somewhere. There really is a connection between the child’s projection of the
parent and the parent, the child’s feeling of security when holding the
blankie and a parent who's hugs and comforting make the child secure. Rizzuto notes how such a projection is absolutely essential to our
self-definition. We are busy painting mental pictures of the world in order to
live in the world. These mental pictures. though sometimes inadequate, though
often limited by our imagination and our experiences, are nevertheless connected
to the world. Without them we cannot survive. One of the reasons science works for us is that it is such a successful
illusion and projection. Science makes theories about the way the world is. It
has ways of testing and confirming its theories. But even when its theories are
not completely confirmed, they are helpful ways of construing or imagining the
world. And even when the theories of science are confirmed, they are still
theories, images of what is going on in the world. Our imaginary illusions are not false, they are not lies; rather, they are
projections from the richness of human experience into our consciousness through
which we organize and make sense of experience. Those who make theories of the
world are busy assembling information about the world in such a way as to enable
the rest of us to live in the world with a little less anguish and confusion.
This is not some kind of naive, sick endeavor, but our natural human attempt to
live creatively in the world. Maybe the reason Freud’s thought is so abusive toward religion is that it
sees perceptively that religion is a major competitor for the question of,
"Who gets to define the real world?" Jesus said: I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If any eat this
bread, they will live forever; the bread I will give for the life of the
world is my flesh. Is this a literal statement, or does is call upon us to use our imagination
to understand it? I think it is obviously a metaphor, but one which the faithful
have taken with great seriousness over the centuries. Today, I simply want to
note that John claims that this "living bread" came down from heaven.
That is to say, Jesus came to us. That causes me to wonder. What if the world I live in is not only my
projection, but also God’s? Think about that. Christians claim that the God of
Israel and the church, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Mary, is more than
a helpful metaphor. This God is a reality. What if the Bible is right in its claim that God is busy acting and speaking
to us? What if my images of God are not simply my projections out of my own ego
needs, but gifts, gifts from a ceaselessly revealing God who is determined to be
known? I confess that, when I think, I am busy projecting certain images upon the
screen. But what if God is also busy projecting images upon the screen? What if
when I say "God," I am not just throwing my projections and wishes out
into the universe, but I am also being bombarded by images: the good shepherd,
the waiting parent, the crucified Savior, the patient teacher, the bread come
from heaven? These are images that have been projected upon me by the Christian
faith. What if I myself am God’s projection, a construct in the mind of God,
something that God is working on as a project? Surely you have wrestled with some difficult problem and suddenly had that
"Aha!" experience. The solution unfolds itself almost miraculously.
Normally, we think of these experiences as self-derived. We say things like,
"In that moment it all came together for me. It all came to me. I figured
it out." But what if those moments are literally times when "it came to me"?
What if this Sunday, your faith is not something that you summoned forth within
yourself, but rather something that has been given to us from the outside,
placed upon us? In today’s gospel Jesus says, "I am the living bread that
came down from heaven," Christ comes to us. Comes to us from outside our
consciousness, bringing something to us we could not have had on our own,
showing us something about God we could not have merely imagined on our own. God
comes to us before we come to God. Think about it. Amen. Notes: 1. William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, August 20, 2000, p. 32. I am
indebted to Dr. Willimon for many of the ideas in this sermon. 2. The story is from Robert Coles, "Freud and God," pages
104)120 in The New Christian Humanist,
Gregory Wolf, ed., 1997.
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