It is one heck of a charge to level at humanity. What is gathered in with charges like these is the blame for the violence that takes place in the name of religious belief. If we can deny the transcendent, then the full weight and responsibility for the horrors that humans can commit upon their fellow human beings falls directly back into our laps.
It would be very disheartening to learn that the vocation I have chosen to devote my life to is in fact a construct of the human mind. To put it another way, it would be disheartening to find out that the Creator that I worship, whom I recognize in the beauty of God's creation, is in fact created by we, the pinnacle of the Creator's creation....
However, there is some truth in the charge that humans create their own divine reality. We seek explanation for that which we cannot explain. Imagining the Sun to be a golden chariot that is drawn across the sky by a higher level being, it kind of makes sense in that frame of reference.
I have a different explanation for it. I believe that we humans are created with an innate sense of the transcendent. We know at some deeply spiritual level that there is something more. As a Christian pastor, I have the humble arrogance to believe that the Biblical revelation of God is that transcendent reality.
When we consider the Trinity, the way the Church has come to understand the revelation of God to us, we see in it the work of a God who is not trying to mystify us, but rather One who is at work to help us wrap limited, created minds around the unlimited, uncreated things of Perfection and Eternity.
Our human attempts to create divine systems to explain that in which we live, they reveal the gift of the knowledge of the transcendent, and our struggle, as creatures of meaning, to find meaning in the Great Beyond.
That connection is the goal of the Sermon for this Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019.
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