Deering Community Church

The Amazing, Inescapable God

Scripture: Jeremiah. 18:1-11, Luke. 14:25-33, Psalm 139:1-18

Where can I go from your spirit? You know me so well that you know when I sit down and when I rise up. I am surrounded by this amazing, inescapable God. According to the Psalmist, this God knit me together in my mother’s womb. I was intricately woven by God in the depths of the earth. What powerful words! I have always loved Psalm 139. When it appeared in the lectionary today, I immediately decided I wanted to focus on this scripture. As I reflected and read and prayed, I was led on quite a journey, a journey of belief and unbelief, a journey of hope and love. I want to share some of this journey with you this morning.

Who is this inescapable God that the Psalmist talks about? What are some of our images and words for God? Father, Mother, Spirit, Creator, King, Lord, Potter, Weaver, Shepherd, Mother Hen, Almighty, Jehovah, Yahweh — to name a few of the more common ones in our western world. Rabbi Berg has written a book entitled The 72 Names of God. The long list of names and images for God points to the fact that these words are metaphors. Metaphors are words or phrases applied to a concept that are not the literal meaning of the word or phrase but suggest a comparison to the word; for example, calling God a father means that God is like a father or a parent. God has no gender; the fact is that God transcends any definition we can come up with. God is ineffable, a word meaning that God is beyond being described or expressed in words. Anything that we say about God is incomplete. For me God is a presence that can be experienced but never defined. No human words can ever fully capture the essence of God.

Our main written reference to answer the question of who is this amazing, inescapable God is of course our Bible. From the beginning to the end, our Bible is the story of God. The Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament is the ancient Israel’s story of God while the New Testament is the early Christians’ story about God as revealed in Jesus. Marcus Borg, one of the Jesus Seminar theologians, explains that the Bible does not give a simple answer to this question; instead it imagines God in two very different ways. The way that many of us are most familiar and comfortable with is the personal imagery, speaking of God as being like a person, sometimes called anthropomorphic. When we take these images literally we see God as being “out there”; for example in the Lord’s Prayer we pray “Our Father who art in heaven”, out there not here within us. This God occasionally intervenes in the world but for the most part is described as being the Creator and always other. This way of describing God is regarded as theistic or supernatural. Before I describe more about theism, let me briefly mention the second way that the Bible imagines God. This way of conceptualizing God is seeing God as “right here”, an encompassing Spirit. Paul describes this God as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” In my understanding this is more the God of Psalm 139. When the author asks, “where can I go from your Spirit?”, he goes through what was understood in ancient times as the whole universe: the heavens up above, Sheol, the underworld, as well as the earth. Wherever this psalmist could imagine, God was always there, knowing and intimately relating to us. This second way is what Bishop Spong explores as being beyond Theism, or the non-theistic God. I would like to spend a little more time with both these concepts.

In seminary I experienced what most students experience in terms of having my faith deconstructed, torn apart, turned upside down. Because I had already done a lot of this work on my own and had ended up having what would be described as a fairly liberal Christian faith with a non-literal understanding of the Bible, the shock of this deconstruction was not as difficult as it was for many of the students. As I progressed through my classes about theology, the Old and New Testaments, church history and so forth, I believe my faith was then reconstructed with a much deeper and secure framework. What I didn’t realize then but now know is that I would continue to have these times of major disruption in my beliefs, all within a strong faith in God and desire to follow Jesus. One of these “shake –ups”, at least a mini-shakeup, happened as I was preparing for today’s sermon. Several weeks ago I began reading Bishop Spong’s book called A New Christianity for a New World, published in 2001. After reading the first chapter where Spong talks about the many things he does not believe in such as Jesus raising the dead, restoring sight to the blind, making the deaf hear as well as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection and ascension of Jesus to name only of few, I decided to put the book down, certain that it could not be helpful to me — that compared to Spong I was almost a conservative in my theology. When I picked up the book again I was in the thinking phase about this sermon and amazingly, I found much helpful information, especially about theism. Let me share some of this with you.

Spong defines the theistic God as “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will.” According to Spong, theism was a human definition that was developed by newly self-conscious human beings who were frightened and overwhelmed by the powers in the world of nature. Every force in their existence was assumed to be the result of either a benevolent or demonic spirit, possessed by supernatural power. In the reality of primitive humans this God was created as a human coping device. It is through this theistic understanding of God that the Gospels interpret Jesus. It is this theistic interpretation of Jesus and God that leads to much of the unbelief, even atheism, in our modern world. I can not begin to do justice in a brief sermon to this topic that Spong and others have written books about. If you wish to explore theism more fully, I recommend checking out Spong’s book.

When we come to defining the non-theistic God, both Marcus Borg and Bishop Spong refer to that “Ground of Being” that Paul describes in Acts. This God is the ultimate source of life, very present here with us right now. It is the Spirit in Psalm 139. The word for spirit, ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek, can also mean wind and breath. Borg sums it up as, “God is like the wind that moves outside of us and the breath that moves inside of us. We are in God, even as God is also within us.” Imagine God with the psalmist as one who searches out my path and my lying down, and is acquainted with all my ways. “Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. . . . I come to the end — and I am still with you.” God is part of who I am and who you are. Not only is God the ultimate source of my life but the ultimate source of love. The presence of love is the source of both life and growth. It is love that allows human beings to go beyond the boundaries of safety, to risk losing ourselves, to allow us to dare to transcend barriers of class, sexual orientation, race, religion. This love, which is God for me, shows me how to live without judging, without holding grudges, without excluding some and including others. Love allows us all the freedom to give ourselves away. Sharing love for me is sharing God; it is holy and sacred. When I see great love, I see God in the life of that person loving. This is certainly the case with Jesus and other holy men and women. It is also true with you and with me. It is this love and life that gives us, to use Paul Tillich’s phrase, the courage to be.

I am not ready to give up all of my theistic orientation. I believe God is prodding us to continuously reflect and grow; often times creating a new thing; other times holding on to the old. Only you can decide for yourself the rate and direction of that growth. The UCC motto of God is still speaking; don’t put a period where God has put a comma rings true for me.

For Jeremiah, a somewhat crusty prophet of ancient times, God could be imagined as a potter who could reshape the work of God’s creation. Just as the potter at the wheel, reshaped the blob of clay, this inherently good creation that had been flawed could be reshaped; but first the clay had to be collapsed, a little bit like the deconstruction of our beliefs that happens in seminary and elsewhere. For Jeremiah it was the people of Israel that needed reshaping. “Turn now, all from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.”

If we listened to all of today’s scriptures we could start thinking and acting towards reshaping the church as well as ourselves. From Luke’s Gospel we again heard that things are not easy when we follow Jesus, that we need to prioritize, that there is a high cost to discipleship.

I don’t know why each of you came to church today. Some of you folks are in the habit of Sunday church worship and are always here if you possibly can be. I’m thankful for that. I think that often what causes people to give up a lovely summer morning — when there are so few summer mornings left — is because deep down you share my desire to be made new again. That in spite of the horrible things that are happening in the world, as Christians, we are a people of hope. We believe in God’s gifts and God’s grace. Further more I hope you believe with me in the power of transformation, that life — giving power of God, revealed to us in Jesus. This belief is much more important to me than whether you believe in a theistic God or not. Every one of you can be transformed and become a fully alive, hopeful and faithful person. And with many or just a few of us faithful people, we can reshape this church and reshape our community. We can destroy indifference and apathy, and we can increase compassion and caring for not just a few, but for all of God’s children. The world and we, my friends, will never be the same again. Thanks be to God, the power of life and love. Amen and Amen.

Copyright © 2003 Deering Community Church
Last modified: 03/06/2006