Saving God from Religion: A Minister's Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age

by Robin R. Meyers

Overview

A revelatory manifesto on how we can reclaim faith from abstract doctrines and rigid morals to find God in the joys and ambiguities of everyday life, from the acclaimed author of Saving Jesus from the Church

“In this book of stories from four decades of ministry, Meyers powerfully captures what it means to believe in a God who’s revealed not in creeds or morals but in the struggles and beauty of our ordinary lives.”—Richard Rohr, bestselling author of The Universal Christ

People across the theological and political spectrum are struggling with what it means to say that they believe in God. For centuries, Christians have seen him as a deity who shows favor to some and dispenses punishment to others according to right belief and correct behavior. But this transactional approach to a God “up there”—famously depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—no longer works, if it ever did, leaving an increasing number of Christians upset, disappointed, and heading for the exits.

In this groundbreaking, inspiring book, Robin R. Meyers, the senior minister of Oklahoma City’s Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ, shows how readers can move from a theology of obedience to one of consequence. He argues that we need to stop seeing our actions as a means for pleasing a distant God and rediscover how God has empowered us to care for ourselves and the world. Drawing on stories from his decades of active ministry, Meyers captures how the struggles of ordinary people hint at how we can approach faith as a radical act of trust in a God who is all around us, even in our doubts and the moments of life we fear the most.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984822512
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,009,293
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Robin Meyers is a Christian minister, peace activist, philosophy professor, and writer on progressive Christianity and Western society. He has been a syndicated columnist and an award-winning commentator for National Public Radio and the senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City since 1985. He is a distinguished professor of social justice in the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University, where he has taught since 1991.

Read an Excerpt

1

Made in the Image of Humans

How can an infinitesimal part of the universe understand the whole? We are drops of water trying to understand the sea.

—Will Durant

The phone call came late, and every pastor knows what that means. The voice at the other end was both frantic and forlorn. I recognized my parishioner immediately, calling me with news about her niece.

“She’s lost another baby,” she said.

“A miscarriage?” I replied, fearing something even worse.

“No, the little boy is dead in her womb. She is six months along. They will induce labor in the morning, and she wants you to baptize the baby.” She gave me the room number, and I repeated it back, because by then she had started to cry.

It was the mother’s second stillbirth—both boys. I had performed a kind of funeral service for the first one, an early miscarriage, and then she had had two healthy girls. Now a second boy had died in her womb, this one a viable fetus. Apparently, in some rare instances, the presence of a Y chromosome causes the mother’s body to reject the fetus as it would a foreign object. Who knows why? Who ever knows why? But as I put on my shoes and walked out to my car, I knew that was exactly what the mother would ask me. Why?

I’m a preacher. I don’t often find myself at a loss for words, but there are some important things they don’t teach you in seminary. For starters, no one taught me to how to baptize a dead baby. To be honest, no one taught me how to baptize a living one either, but you figure these things out. You dip your fingers in the font, make the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead, and recite the baptismal formula. Then you do the most important thing. You pose for family photos. Chances are no one remembers what you said anyway, but one thing is certain: It is a joyful occasion.

I have always taken the infant in my arms and spoken to the child, letting the parents and the congregation overhear. But on this day, there would be no adoring congregation, no flowers, and no sunlight streaming into the sanctuary. Nothing I had said before would work. This mother was about to deliver a tiny corpse. She would never nurse it or rock it to sleep, never hold its warm and scented head against her cheek. What was I supposed to say when I walked into the room? Got any ideas, Reverend? Remember, you represent a God of love and justice.

The mother asked that I come after the delivery, so that a photographer could take pictures of her dead son to share on Facebook. I was having a hard time imagining this, but it is not my job to judge what brings comfort, only to bring more. I rehearsed some lines in the hospital elevator, but they all sounded hollow. Will she want a baptismal certificate? I wondered. Of course she will, and you forgot to bring one. I made a note to fill it out later, using the full given name of the deceased.

At least I remembered to bring the chalice to hold the water. It was the same silver bowl that I have used for all the baptisms I have performed over thirty-five years serving the same church. It was also the same chalice I had used to baptize the mother. When I opened the door, she looked up and recognized it immediately.

“Oh good, you brought the chalice.”

I stepped into the room and looked into a tiny crib next to her bed. There he was—smaller than a doll and dark purple, the color of eggplant. He looked like a tiny wax figure, dressed in a tiny baptismal outfit with a tiny crocheted stocking cap on his head.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” she said. “Isn’t he perfect?”

I decided that silence was the best response, but that silence became unbearable for the mother’s father. Standing near the foot of the bed, he made a crude political joke about Hillary Clinton. I did not laugh. Why is it that human beings have so much trouble with silence? I wondered. Isn’t that the only response to such a moment? The baby’s father was also in the room, his head cupped in his hands. A second stillborn son. In his mind, he had already signed the boy up for Little League.

At that point, I did something I had never done before. I picked up the chalice and asked for the full given name of a dead baby. In unison, Mom and Dad spoke his first, middle, and last names. I dipped my fingers into the chalice, filled out of habit with warm water (because that’s what living babies prefer). I then pushed up the tiny stocking cap and placed my fingers on the baby’s cold, lifeless forehead.

My fingers traced the sign of the cross on inert flesh. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

When I looked up, I saw the grandfather crying. This was no joke.

 

The God Problem

I left the room full of sadness and questions that wouldn’t go away. If the ritual brought comfort to the family, then wasn’t that reason enough to baptize a dead baby? My gut said yes—but infant baptism is a covenant between the living and the future. The parents promise that they will practice unconditional love in the way we are told God loves us. So what does it mean to baptize a baby whom no one will raise? Surely no God worthy of worship would wait on such a ritual to decide the baby’s fate. I could not bring the child back to life, so from what was he being cleansed, and to what was he being restored?

I walked out of the hospital and into the light of a perfect September morning. It was Indian summer in Oklahoma. My car was parked in the spot reserved for clergy, because in this deeply evangelical state, we still enjoy special privileges. But in my mind, the God questions would not stop. I know countless clergy who ask these questions in the privacy of their minds but never admit it to anyone. What had I just done, and why had I done it?

It is not uncommon for ministers to say something like this to a mother who has lost her child: “I know you are devastated, but believe me, God had a plan for your little one. Maybe God wanted her in heaven early, to be with the angels.” Really? Who could say such a thing? Those who believe in original sin would explain that even a stillborn baby needs forgiveness. If I believed this, I would immediately turn in my ministerial credentials and get a real job. It gives new meaning to the idea that we would be better off without religion.

I attended a funeral once that included a “viewing” at the end of the service. This is the peculiar and very expensive ritual that makes a dead person look alive—sleeping, perhaps. “So natural,” the mourners say. As the family passed by the open casket, the minister was asked to say a few words of comfort. He looked at the widow and said, “Aren’t you glad that your husband has gone to be with Jesus?” Without hesitation, she looked up and made eye contact so intense it resembled a laser. Then she said, “No. No, Reverend, I’m not glad. I would much prefer that he was still here, with me and the girls. Is Jesus going to pay the rent?”

In Oklahoma, we watch the sky for tornadoes, and when they drop down like ropes of death, they are truly terrifying. In the town of Moore, where tornadoes occur so frequently that the town could be mistaken for a kind of bowling alley for twisters, most people do not have basements. So when the sirens wail, and that roar “like a freight train” is heard, terrified parents will crawl into the bathtub with their children and pull a mattress over them—holding the straps as tightly as they can while their house explodes around them. Recently, the news media reported something too painful to imagine. During one such tornado, an infant was sucked from her mother’s arms because she could not hold on to her baby tightly enough. The little girl was found a quarter mile away, wrapped in a tree like so much storm debris. Later, when a preacher dropped by to comfort the mother, he said what he thought he was supposed to say, instead of just saying nothing. It was yet another version of this twisted idea that God calls some people home early and they are now in a “better place.”

I do not know how the mother responded, but if someone said that to me, I would need to be physically restrained. If clergy are going to continue such theological malpractice, they should probably be accompanied by law enforcement.

As I near the end of my career as a parish minister, I can’t help but think of what it means to be ordained and charged with speaking truth to power in America at a time like this. Our God language has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, even as the world has changed dramatically around us. In sermon after sermon, we speak of God’s love for us as constant and unconditional, but then try to explain tragedy in ways that make God seem utterly capricious, even incomprehensibly cruel. A man confessed to me once that as a child he loved to sing, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

“It was enormously comforting,” he said, thinking of God holding the world in his cupped hands. “Until I got old enough to discover that he frequently drops it.”

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Night God Fell from the Ceiling 3

1 Made in the Image of Humans 19

2 Quantum Physics and the Common Good 47

3 Sin as the Illusion That We Are Home Alone 72

4 Faith as Trust, Not Belief 93

5 Prayer as Access, Not Petition 119

6 Every Move We Make: A Theology of Consequence 150

7 The Center of the Universe 180

Epilogue: Above Us Only Sky 207

Notes 219

Acknowledgments 225

Reading Group Guide

1. Have you ever wondered where the idea of God itself came from? Much has been written about humans being “created in the image of God”, but sometimes it seems as if God has been “created in the image of humans.” Discuss.

2. When you hear someone say the word “God”, or make claims about what God has done, or will do, does it ever make you uncomfortable, even angry? Share your feelings when it comes to the “God talk” in your world.

3. What do you think are the most common images for God and what do they say about our understanding of the divine? Is God male? White? Possessed of human emotions like jealousy and anger? Have these images changed for you since childhood?

4. Quantum entanglement has been called the most important discovery in physics. In chapter 2, it is explained and contrasted with Newtonian physics. But what does this have to do with God? Does what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” have theological implications? Why is God compared with a “luminous web” and what does it have to do with the common good?

5. Chapter 3 is entitled, “Sin as the Illusion That We Are Hole Alone.” What does the author mean by this, and how is it different from the way we usually think of sin?

6. How do you define “faith?” Is it a belief system based on the doctrines of a religious institution that you agree to accept without doubt? Or is it a form of trust in the uncertain journey of life? Discuss the relationship between faith and certainty and between trust and uncertainty. What does faith look like in your life?

7. Prayer is both expected of all religious people and one of the biggest stumbling blocks for those who question the way we pray—or even why we pray. What are the different kinds of prayer mentioned in chapter 5, and what defines prayer for you? If you pray, how does it change things?

8. We’ve all heard of chaos theory, and yet we have seldom thought of it in religious terms. Yet if we live in a cosmic field and there is no separation, every action and reaction chains out into infinity and we can make the world better or worse with every move we make. Think of your life as the sum total of the decisions you have made and discuss how everything would have been different if you had decided or acted differently. This is both frightening and powerful. Discuss.

9. The idea of God has been centered in a distant deity, far removed from everyday life. But what if there is no difference between the sacred and the profane? What if holiness is found in the utterly ordinary, a present reality that masks a daily miracle? What if when it comes to God, we stopped looking up and started looking around? Have we been taught to look for the holy, the sacred, in all the wrong places? Discuss those moments when you experienced a mystical union, a new way of seeing and feeling that changed everything.

10. When John Lennon sang “Imagine,” some people saw it as the ballad of an atheist. Study the lyrics carefully and see if you agree. Is Lennon questioning the existence of God, or what we have turned God into? Does he ask that we imagine no God, or just no religion? What’s the difference? In what ways does our view of God determine our view of religion, adding to the fires of nationalism, rising inequality, and sectarian violence? Would we be better off without religion, or could we change our understanding of God in ways that revolutionize religion? Discuss this and any other ideas or insights you gained from the book. What was your favorite story, and why?

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2020

Meyers (Morning Sun on a White Piano), senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, Okla., makes a plausible case for progressive Christianity in this credible, engaging work of popular theology. He opens with a critique of a distant, hierarchical God that fails to meet modern needs, and draws on personal anecdotes and understandable, if skimpy, discussions of quantum mechanics and chaos theory as he articulates a theology of consequences, in which choices have natural and complex repercussions rather than divine rewards and punishments. He expands this to define sin as acting as if one can control or avoid the effects of one’s choices. Faith, he argues, is trust rather than intellectual assent and is opposed not by doubt but by anxiety. Meyer provocatively applies Old Testament prophets to show that the kind of prayers that are litanies of requests can be more harmful than helpful—creating a relationship with God of expectations and rewards. He closes with two chapters about how all people are interconnected and religion’s purpose is to help people act in certain ways—rather than believe specific doctrines. Traditionalists might balk at his application of theoretical science to Christianity, and hard-core skeptics may want a bit more rigor, but Meyer’s case stands as a promising, contemporary reframing. Progressive Christians looking for a fresh spiritual orientation will be moved by Meyer’s clarity and conviction. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

In this book of stories from four decades of ministry, Meyers powerfully captures what it means to believe in a God who’s revealed not in creeds or morals but in the struggles and beauty of our ordinary lives. In unrelenting detail, he shows how all of creation is anointed with the presence of God, before leaving us with the hope that such anointing might also include us.”—Richard Rohr, bestselling author of The Universal Christ

“Several years ago now, Marcus Borg said to me, ‘Keep your eyes on the work of Robin Meyers—he is a forerunner, a man of courage and comment,  empathy and compassion.’ In Saving God from Religion, Meyers invites us to reimagine God as we look around at our web of existence. He never lets us ‘fly off the page’ into some abstract, unwieldy realm but rather calls us to existential trust, where the sacred and profane meet. Meyers insists ours is a life in and with God, a collaborative, elegant, grounded play of awe and wonder in which outcomes are not guaranteed, but the possibility of goodness is endless.”—Marianne Borg, founding chair of the Marcus J. Borg Foundation


“Conventional religious language inspires some with warm and nostalgic feelings, but it triggers others with nausea or the hives. At the center of our religious language problem is the word God, but too few ministers and theologians have shown the courage to wade into the deep waters of what we mean when we say God. Robin Meyers has that courage, and in Saving God from Religion, he invites us to join him in the deep end. You’ll be glad you did. You might even experience this book as a kind of baptism into a deeper, freer, wider faith.”—Brian D. McLaren, author of The Galápagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey
 
“Powerful, persuasive, and provocative, this book’s challenge negates both the accepted God of theistic religion and the rejected God of atheistic skepticism. Beyond the interactive irrelevance of both those options, a transcendent vision still glimmers over, under, around, and through our quantum world and our evolutionary universe. Think, with this book, about internal earthly consequences rather than external heavenly punishments; about prayer as contact and empowerment rather than petition and thanksgiving; about the evolutionary arc of the universe bending toward justice. Think!”—John Dominic Crossan

From the Publisher

12/01/2019

Meyers's (philosophy, Oklahoma City Univ.; Saving Jesus from the Church) gifts as a preacher are on full display in this latest work. He has the ability to connect meaningfully such dissimilar topics as John Lennon's song "Imagine" and words from the letters of the Apostle Paul. One has the sense in reading the book that Meyers is as comfortable musing on the hidden nature of the quantum world as he is conveying ever new depths to his richly interpreted Bible stories. The work is illuminated throughout by intriguing metaphors (the luminous web) and by conversations with parishioners. This style of narrative helps diversify or loosen the ideas about God that we've adopted over time. VERDICT More conversational than theological, Meyers reveals a God that is expansive, mysterious, and immediate. This book will appeal to those who enjoy popular, probing works on religion.—Denis Frias, Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont.

Library Journal

2019-09-29
A radically new way for churches to see God: Look around, not up.

If the church is to survive, writes pastor and author Meyers (Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance, 2015, etc.), it must start relating to God in a different way. Believers must focus less on what they believe and more on what they should do. As a map for what the path that he believes the church should follow, the author points to the Sermon on the Mount, which contains every detail Jesus ever taught but says nothing about what one must believe. The sermon focuses entirely on action and the importance of working for justice, which, Meyers points out, is the same gospel that the Hebrew Bible's major prophets preached many years earlier. The author argues that in order to manifest this new approach to religion, we must stop looking for God "up there" and start seeing God as existing on our level, literally in our relationships with others: "Instead of concluding that we are ‘a little lower than God,' we might consider something that is both more frightening and more empowering: that we are the very image of God, and that our treatment of one another is our treatment of God." Meyers is blunt here: If the church doesn't make working for justice its reason for being, it will continue hemorrhaging members until it dies. However, the author is not all doom and gloom. He firmly believes that if churches make justice their primary concern, they will become relevant again and continue to be a source of wisdom and transformation. This may not be a book for all believers, but Meyers believes a significant audience is waiting, which he characterizes as "everyone who is struggling with the old and narrow definitions of God but has yet to see any coherent and comprehensive way to reimagine the Ultimate Mystery."

A bold case for seeing God in a whole new way.

Kirkus Reviews