January 16, 2005
By Jack Price

Tomorrow is a national holiday set aside to honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.  King’s understanding of God’s nature shaped his life and the Civil Rights movement he helped begin reshaped this nation.  He came to believe that God was, in the words of the OT prophet Isaiah, doing a new thing in his life and the life of his country.  This new understanding of God, firmly based in the New Testament yet misunderstood by most Christians throughout the years, was truly the old, old story. 

King’s cry, “Let freedom ring,” echoed the very best of Jewish and Christian belief.  In God, there is no segregation.  All people are equally valuable. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. led the struggle for civil rights in the United States through non-violent protest.  His expanded vision, that racial equality also included economic justice, cost him his life in 1968.  Yet, his life had already been given to that new vision of what he believed.  He lived it in the power of faith.

Today’s scripture lesson, Acts 10: 34-43, is one New Testament example of a new understanding of God that changed the lives of people and, for a time, the direction of the Christian Church.  Peter, the apostle, embraces a new paradigm for God.  He has a vision in which God commands him to eat non-kosher food as a sign that whatever God makes acceptable, no one can make unacceptable, including people.  As a result, Peter goes to Caeseria, to Cornelius a gentile, and there he shares the story of Jesus his whole gentile household.  They receive the Holy Spirit and baptism.  And Peter is able to say, “[Now,] I truly understand that God shows no partiality, that anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable.   Peter can be taught and there is hope for the rest of us!

Paul, the apostle, also came to a new understanding of God.  Though trained as a Pharisee, he championed the understanding that new Christians did not have to become Jewish first!  He said that God is no “respecter” of persons and believed fervently in grace as a gift to all.  This was a radical change for the dogmatic and judgmental Paul.  Peter’s and Paul’s examples show us the dynamic balance between questioning and trusting that is vital for a growing faith.

From the beginning of the Bible to the end, there is growth in understanding of what people believe about God.  There are some pretty radical shifts along the way.  Many of the Old Testament prophets, in response to the reality of exile, proclaim that God is doing a new thing

Jesus virtually exploded the old paradigm built around a system of sacrifices and other ways to appease God.  He spoke as one who knew GOD about God’s essential nature.  As a result, we have received the tradition that God is an active presence in time and space through people and is the God of all people.  Jesus’ is a clear message of liberation and acceptance for all.

            What do you believe about God?  Today begins a four-part series in which to examine what we believe?  Next week, we’ll consider what we believe about Jesus?  Then, what do we believe about church followed by what do we believe about life?  Today is the big one, however.  What do you believe about God?  What do you say is God’s essential nature?  Is God all-powerful?  How about all-knowing?  Is God indeed all-present?  Would you describe God as perfect love?  What about ultimate creator?

            The recent tsunami disaster as well as other natural disasters and the deadly conflicts between peoples of faith around world and even here in the US challenge us in terms of our understanding of God.  The ancient question still haunts us:  “How can an all-powerful, all-knowing, and good God allow this?  How can we worship a God like that?

One option seems to be that God is good, but not all-powerful or all-knowing – essentially not really GOD.  Another option is that God is all powerful and all-knowing, but not good, at least the way we tend to define good.  A third option is to consider a different understanding of God.

The thirteenth-century Sufi sage Jalaludin Rumi tells a now family story about an elephant, belonging to a traveling exhibition, that was stabled near a village where no elephant had been seen before.  Four curious citizens, seeking a preview, sneaked into that stable after dark.  Since the stable had no light, their investigation took place in the dark.  The first citizen, grasping the trunk, believed the whole creature was like a hosepipe.  The second touched an ear and perceived the whole creature to be like a large fan.  The third found a leg and became convinced that the whole creature was a living pillar.  The forth climbed onto the back and discovered that the whole creature was like a giant throne. 

No one had the complete picture.  Each touched a part.  In addition, they had to describe it in concepts and language they already knew.  We understand God only in part and our descriptions always use terms and concepts we already know.  We are thus reminded that our understanding of God, our interpretations of our experiences of the divine, are not identical with who God is.

Contemporary author Gerard Hughes, in God of Surprises) tells us that the notion of God is always mediated to us through people such as parents, teachers, and clergy.  We do not come to know God directly and the experience of the mediation affects our experience and understanding of God, and the ways we relate to God. 

Bishop John Spong (New Christianity for a New Millennium) believes that what led people to an awareness of God was that uniquely human dawning of self-consciousness and self-awareness.  When we became aware of our own mortality, like in the Genesis story about the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were more than afraid.  We were filled with “existential anxiety.”  When you know you will die some day, it’s only human to seek security and to seek for greater meaning beyond life.  Early on, human beings interpreted this ultimate, God, in terms of a big “us” – a supreme “being”. 

Scholar Karen Armstrong (History of God), calls this interpretation supernatural theism.  It is based on the idea of an earth-centered view of the universe.  The supreme being lives outside time and space and enters on occasion to change the natural order by miracles or healings.  The biblical understanding of God reflects a lot of this understanding.

There is another interpretation that is very ancient and also very familiar.  Most people today who believe in God share something of this understanding, that everything is in God.  God is reality itself.  The new term for this understanding literally means “everything is in God” – panentheism.  God is not a particular being in terms of time or space.  In fact, God is not a “being” per se.  No one can stand outside God and observe God objectively because God cannot be known that way. 

At the same time, God is personal.  God is available for relationship and God is knowable subjectively.  I find this latter understanding helps me to see myself and our lives more clearly in relation to what is ultimate.  We are all within God and God within us, and the universe reveals God to us.

What we think about God is important because it reflects our worldview and affects how we relate to others.  It also affects our understanding of natural disasters such as the recent tsunami.  But our understanding of God is not the same as God.  Our interpretation of our experience of the divine is not God. 

Faith is more than a thought process.  It involves our trust.  It involves our perspective on life and also our commitments.  The essential questions involve where we place our trust and how does that affect our living?

Theology is a mirror of our own souls.  What we trust and our we interpret that basis of that trust is, in many ways, a reflection of who we are.  Francis Dewar, in his devotional book of Invitations offers these questions.  I offer them to you for you consideration, reflection, and perhaps transformation. 

·        What is your conception of God?

·        How did you come to that way of thinking and by what stages?

·        What people or events in your life have influenced how you think of God?

W. J. Connolly (“Notes on the Spirit Exercises”) says, “A person must be in contact with his own reality if the Lord is to be real to him.  Ultimately, faith is not a matter of thought, but a commitment of life. 

Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game) writes, “The deity is within you, not in ideas and books.  Truth is lived not taught, so be prepared for conflicts”.  To approach a knowledge of God, we must learning to ask honest questions.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet) speaks to all of us:

I want to beg you … to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, be living along some distant day into the answer.

With such deference, let us approach the knowing of who God is.  This is not a  knowledge of ideas or doctrines.  It is a truth known in relationship and a a knowledge lived.  God is.  Let us learn to ask honest questions and live patiently and devotedly into the answers.  Faith invites and challenges us to commit our lives to refining the questions and to embracing the answers we know.  To the extent we seek to live in the divine presence we experience, we will find that life has been lived in relationship with ultimate truth.

What do we believe about God?  I believe God is ultimate reality.  I also believe that God is personal and known through relationship.  God is strongly for you and me.  We can believe in God because God believes in us.  We can trust God because God trusts us. 

The blessing of God, eternal goodwill of God, the shalom of God, the wildness and the warmth of God be among us and between us now and always.   Amen.  (Prayer at Night -- Jim Cotter)