Jeremiah 2:4-13,   Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16,   Luke 14:1, 7-14

One of the reasons I am an Episcopalian, is that our church expects us to grow spiritually, both as individuals and as a church. Another reason I chose the Episcopal Church, is because we can tolerate a spectrum of beliefs and positions about important matters of our faith. If you look back at our history, both these reason arise from our beginnings: in the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I created a church which embraced both catholic and protestant theology. And in the 18th century, after our Revolutionary War, Anglicans in the new United States rebuilt the old Church of England parishes as Episcopal Churches, complete with an American form of governance.

So we expect to use our minds fully in our lives of faith, and we accept disagreement among ourselves, as part of our spiritual growth. These are the reasons that you would expect to find a library in an Episcopal church--not a library of dusty old volumes, but such a library as we have, full of the current trends in theology, the latest discoveries about the Bible, and the best books on spirituality.

Today, I want to use one of our Scripture readings to show you how my understanding of God has changed over the years, as I have continued to read, to discuss with others, and to grow, in this church which cherishes our minds as well as our souls and our bodies. In our first lesson, Jeremiah the prophet accused the Hebrew people of violating their covenant with God, by adding the worship of Asherah and Baal to their worship of the Lord. The prophet insisted that they had committed themselves to exclusive worship of the Lord.

What I have learned over the years, is how strongly these passages were influenced at the time they were written, by the cultural beliefs of their day; and also, how strongly our own cultural beliefs influence the interpretations we make, and the meanings we find. Usually we can discern the biases and assumptions of previous generations better than we can our own. So I expect to go on learning, discussing and thinking about what it really means, for the rest of my life!

Now, the accusation Jeremiah makes is that the people of Judah have failed to keep their commitment to worship only the Lord. They have in fact worshipped other gods, namely the fertility gods Asherah and Baal. They have also made offerings to the sun, the moon and the stars; they have engaged in sacred prostitution, and they may even have offered human sacrifice--you can read about this in II Kings 23. The interpretation I learned 35 years ago at Harvard Divinity School, was that the Hebrew religion was a great moral and intellectual leap forward from those pagan fertility religions, which were primitive, and which mistakenly saw the presence of God in nature. In reality, God was not to be found in nature, God was to be found in the covenant and the commandments. The natural world was created by God, but it did not reveal God. I accepted this understanding of God, and believed that God was only interested in human beings and human history.

What archaeologists and historians have learned since I was at Harvard, is that the prehistoric societies existing all around the ancient world for 1000's of years before the invention of writing, all worshipped the mother goddess, who was identified with the earth, with nature, and with the basic life-force that enabled seeds to grow, and babies to be born. Around 3000 B.C. when writing was invented, there was a great cultural shift away from matriarchal religion toward patriarchal religion, which meant that the mother goddess gradually was demoted, first becoming the consort of the male god, and then becoming a secondary god, and then, as with the Hebrew religion, disappearing altogether. The sole trace we can find of the mother goddess in Hebrew religion, is the personification of Lady Wisdom, who was God's agent in creating the world. You can read about Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8, and in the Wisdom of Solomon.

So I went through a time when I consciously shifted my image of God, no longer speaking or thinking of God as being like a father, but trying to think, and occasionally to speak, of God as being like a mother. I made a different interpretation of such passages as our lesson from Jeremiah, namely that the Hebrew people had probably continued to worship the mother goddess Asherah alongside their worship of the Lord, but the priests and the leaders had written her out of the record. It was simply a matter of the new religion of the Lord, displacing the older religion of the goddess. And I learned in some detail how this rejection of the goddess religion had led to the rejection of nature, the rejection of our bodies, and eventually, to the rejection of all female persons, as coming from the Devil! These attitudes were expressed in the 3rd century AD by the theologian Tertullian, and in the 4th century by St Augustine. Studying this history resulted in a pendulum swing on my part, away from patriarchal religion.

And then for the last 10 or 12 years, I have come back to the middle, which looks quite different than either extreme. Here in the middle, I believe that God includes mascinline and feminine, and also that God is beyond masculine and feminine. I believe that language about God is important, and try to provide a number of different ways to speak of God, to speak to God, and to imagine God, in our worship. I also believe in one of the central messages of the fertility religions, namely that God is indeed to be found in the natural world: in the incredible beauty of glaciers and mountains, in eagles and whales, in trees and mountains, as well as in human beings. And if God is to be found in all of creation, then we have an urgent and crucial responsibility to rescue the earth from destruction. Some theologians today are calling themselves ecofeminists, combining the words ecology and feminist, because it is through feminist theology that they have discovered the sacredness of the earth.

So today, when I hear the accusation of Jeremiah, that the people have forsaken God, I listen between the words . . . and what I hear is that we have put ourselves in the place of God, by trying to control the land, the rivers and the animals. We have turned away from the Creator and lost sight of the natural web of connection which holds all things together. When Jeremiah says, the people went after worthless things, I think of our consumer culture, and our desire to have the latest fashions, and the newest technology. When Jeremiah says the people have forsaken the fountain of living water which God is, and dug out cracked cisterns for themselves, I think of the disappearence of the rainforests, and the pollution of the air, and the creation of movies filled with violence.

So there is the prophecy itself, which was first heard by the people of Judah around 620 B.C., and there are the interpretations of that prophecy made by generations of Jews and Christians, and then there are my own changing interpretations of the prophecy___AND, there is the Creator of the Universe, the Holy One whose words are alive today in this text, challenging me and perhaps you also: have I pursued worthless things? Do I have cracked cisterns in my life? But you--you may have an entirely different interpretation of this prophecy: perhaps it calls you away from dabbling in astrology, or perhaps it demands a stronger commitment to your faith, or perhaps it challenges you to make your life reflect your faith more closely.

Today, we celebrate the use of our minds in our Christian journey, and we give thanks for this church where we can worship together even if we make quite different interpretations of the Bible. We remember with gratitude that moment 25 years aso when our 2nd rector Bill Cowans asked Carol Campbell to gather up all the books belonging to St. Thomas, and to start a library. At that time in 1978, the library was created in the corner of the church where we now have our chapel, and it held 250 books. Soon there were volunteers to work with Carol, and there were benefactors: Rich and Betsy Randolph donated the card catalogue as the first gift. In 1985, two small classrooms in the office wing were remodelled to created a new, larger space, and this effort was dedicated to Carol's parent, Herbert and Rita Gardner. The Book and Bake Sale began in 1981 to fund special library projects, and many faithful volunteers have worked with Carol over the years. In 2002 they pruchased the software program for the online catalog, and recently the library has acquired its 6000th book. Along the way, Carol and her committee have been active in the Church and Synagogue Library Association, and have provided much assistance to churches in our diocese (and beyond) who wanted to create a parish library.

This summer on my sabbatical, I took a course called, The History of the Book. That word, book, has a double meaning: a book is first of all a text, a novel, or a play, or a theological treatise. Secondly, a book is a physical set of pages sewn together, on which the text is written or printed: a codex. The very first texts were written on long pieces of paper that were rolled up, and sometime during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, the codex began to be used more and more frequently. I was fascinated to learn that the codex is very closely associated with the growth of Christianity. We know this because of the use of a special abbreviation for the names of Jesus, found in the earliest codices. Christianity is a religion of the book; we at St. Thomas stand in that tradition, as a parish where books strengthen our faith, like honey from a rock.

Amen