Mythbusters: 2.5 Random Things About God

A message from the Exodus 1:1-15 by Don Heatley from Vision Community Church 3/1/0

If you’re on Facebook, I don’t even have to explain the phrase “25 Random Things About Me”.  For a couple of weeks, it seemed everyone I knew was listing twenty-five things they wanted me to know about them.  I even wrote a parody of such a list on my blog, but unfortunately few people realized it was a parody. Some of my friend’s lists,  I really could have done without.  Did I really need to know which foods caused the frequent irregularity of a college friend?  Not really.  Yet, some of what I read on those lists was quite moving.  I discovered things about people I thought I knew well.  I learned about personal tragedies and challenges that I never knew about before.  Some misconceptions about them were shattered for me.  I feel like I know them better now.

This is why I wish God had a Facebook page.  Being a social kind of guy, I am sure he too would have taken part in the “25 Random Things About Me” fad.  We could use a list to shatter some misconceptions about God. This list would come in handy because atheism is cool again.   Much atheism is based on misconceptions about God.

 In recent years, I have met people who describe themselves as atheists. This is a curious phenomena since I don’t think many of these people would have used that word in years past  If I were to ask them, just say back in the nineties, about their religious views, they most likely would have responded, “I’m not religious.  I really don’t go to church,” or “I’m spiritual, but not religious”.  Nowadays, however, more people are comfortable going the whole nine yards and saying, “I am an atheist.”  (Personally, I think people tell me this to keep me from inviting them to Vision.  It’s a great way to close down the conversation.  Much like when I Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my door and I tell them I’m a pastor.)

What accounts for this second great wakening of atheism?  Certainly, the popular culture’s attention on books such as Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” or Chistopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” accounts for some of it.  Yet few who boast of their new-found atheism have actually read those books.  Another factor is probably the general fatigue we all have with religious figures, everyone from Pat Robertson to Osama Bin Laden.  Together these influences have created an emerging consensus that religion and the idea of God have been responsible for more bad than good in the world.

Although it is tempting for the church to dismiss these critiques as mere trendiness or rebellious teen angst, there is something much deeper at work here.  For many people, perhaps even for some of you, the idea of God has stopped working.  It has stopped working because what you have heard about God seems naive, irrational and frankly, a little silly.  Rather than do the typical church thing and tell you that all you you need to do is be naive and have the faith of a child, or humble yourself and put your intellect on hold, I would like to actually take your concerns  seriously.  I think responses like those often reflect the church’s own insecurity about whether it truly believes in God.  Somehow, we have the mistaken impression the more improbable attributes we give to God, the more the more unreal we make God, the less unbelievable he becomes. 

What seems unbelievable about God?  As an atheist you my say, “I don’t believe in an old man with a beard who lives in the sky, or even (if you grew up in the seventies) a being of pure energy and light who lives in another dimension.  I don’t believe he’s a he.  I don’t believe he’s pulling the strings behind the scenes behind every event in the universe.  I don’t believe in a God who allows so much suffering in the world, or created most of the people in the world only to send them to Hell for choosing the wrong religion.  In short, I don’t believe in God so I am an atheist.”

Here’s what may surprise you.  If that’s your definition of God, then call me an atheist too, because I don’t believe in that God either.  That God does not exist.

“I knew it,” you’re thinking, “I knew Vision was some kind of New Age heretical church.”  Far from it.  Some of you may be wondering, “How can you say you don’t believe in that God?  You’re a pastor.”

I believe in God.  I just don’t believe in that God which atheists reject.  The reason I don’t believe in that God is because I don’t encounter that God in the pages of the Bible, in my own experience, or in the thoughts of many of the early Christians or those of theologians throughout history.  So there is nothing heretical in all this.    I find that most people’s definition of heresy is “something I didn’t already think about God.”  Ironically, thinking you have God all figured out - that is heresy.  Furthermore, everything I am about to talk about today, and the coming weeks, are concepts that have commonly been discussed in Mainline Christian seminaries for almost the past century.

  Since we don’t have the time to go through twenty-five random things about God this morning, let’s look at just three - or 2.5.  There are 2.5 things we can know about God from the story of the burning bush.  If God were posting on Facebook, I think the first thing on his list would be:

1. I am not a bearded old man.

There are old adages such as; if horses had gods they would look like horses.  Or, God made man in his own image and man promptly returned the favor.  I could not agree more.  Much of what atheism rejects about God is not really God, but our own anthropomorphic projections about ourselves onto God.  Yet that is not God whom Moses meets.

 When Moses encounters God, he doesn’t see an old man in the desert.  He sees a burning bush.  When Moses meets God, he asks God a question.  Stop and think for moment.  If you met God and, as Joan Osborne said, could “ask just one question,” what would it be?  For me the options would have been everything from “What’s my purpose in life?” to “What’s really in Area 51?”  What would you ask?

Moses asks a seemingly innocuous  question, “When I go back to the children of Israel, whom should I say sent me.  What’s your name?”

What kind of question is that?  You get one question with the Supreme Being of the Universe and ask his name?  Isn’t that like asking how much do you weigh, or what’s your favorite color?

Yet it was the weightiest question Moses could have asked.  In Moses’ world, people didn’t ask whether or not God existed.  The sacred was assumed. Instead they asked your God’s name.  To what tribe does this god belong? They didn’t ask if you believed in a god.  They asked if you worshipped that god faithfully.

The answer God gives is absolutely sublime.  When asked, God does not answer with a proper name.  God answers with mystery.  God responds, “ I am who I am.”  Or “I will be who I will be.”  It is a name that does not provide a concrete answer, but instead invites us to explore the questions, to delve deeper into the very mystery of existence.  Later on, the Hebrew people would try to capture that answer in proper names like Yahweh, or German scholars inept attempt to translate it as Jehovah.  Yet those insufficient names all point to that original response of “I am who I am.”

  Paul Tillich, a 20th century theologian, caused a lot of controversy in his day.  As with our own time, his was filled about debates as to whether or not God existed.  Tillich, a Christian theologian, shocked many Christians of his day by saying, of course God does not “exist.”  Existence is something that things like chairs, rocks, people and animals do.  They exist within reality.  God, Tillich said, does not exist like that.  God does not exist in reality alongside other things.  God is the ultimate reality.  The I am.  Not a “being” like us, but the “ground of being” itself.  God is “Being” with a capital B.

Saying “I don’t believe in a super-being called God” is easy.  It’s like not believing in Bigfoot or UFO’s.  Claiming “I don’t believe in the ‘I will be who I will be’ or in “ultimate reality’” is a little trickier.   After all, hopefully, we all live in reality, do we not?  Reality is where, as the apostle Paul said, we live and move and have our being.  It is very near and very close to all of us.  Reality is about as intimate as you can get.

Which brings us to the second thing that would be on God’s list:

2. I do not live in the sky.

  God is not up in the sky somewhere, looking down at us like ants.  Just as we hear every Christmas, the name of Jesus, Immannuel, means “God is with Us.”  Likewise, when Moses encounters God, that meeting happens not in vision up in the clouds, but right on the ground in a burning bush.  This God does not say, “I am the God of the sky whom you have never met before.”  Instead God tells Moses, “I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”  In other words, “I AM the same God your ancestor’s encountered.  I AM part of your story Moses. I AM part fo your life already”

Sometimes people say to me, “I believe in a higher power, but why do I have to call it God?”  Actually, you don’t.  It’s not about us naming or labeling God.  That is  not crucial.  What is crucial, for a follower of Jesus Christ, is acknowledging that that we are encountering the same ultimate reality that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses encountered.  To say we believe in God is not so much choosing a belief system from alongside other belief systems. It’s not like choosing a Mac vs a PC.  It’s more like taking our role in the story of sacred encounters seriously.

God always defines God’s self through relationships.  Calling yourself “I AM that I AM” sounds rather impersonal, but it really isn’t.  This same transcendent God also comes to us in very personal ways, through stories about ordinary people.  You claim to not believe in God, but as Huey Lewis asked, do you believe in love?  Do you believe in relationships, in meaning, in purpose?  Do you believe in justice? While these wonderful things aren’t identical to God, they do point us to something larger and more mysterious in life - the source of all those things - God, the I AM.

There is no need to disbelieve in a God who is improbably “up there’ or “out there.”  God is right here to be experienced now in relationship with us.  We come here every Sunday to celebrate that.

Which brings me to what I think would be 2.5 on God’s list:

2.5 I am relational not controlling.

This one is tough for us to understand.  When we hear that phrase “God Almighty” we think of an all-powerful being who micromanages and controls every single event in the universe.  We assume that since, if we were all-powerful or omnipotent, we would try to control everything.  So God must do that too.  Like the image of a bearded old man, we project, not just the qualities we possess onto God, but the ones we wish we possessed as well. 

One of my professors in seminary was Catherine Keller.  She points out that there is no term in the Hebrew Bible that can be translated as omnipotent.  She says, “The closest notion ‘The Almighty’ is actually a mistranslation of El Shaddai, ‘God of the Mountain’ - literally in Hebrew ‘the Breasted One’!”  We won’t even go there. 

None of us wants a controlling spouse, or parent, or boss.  Most healthy people see those behaviors as dysfunctional.  So why do we attribute behavior to God that we find distasteful in human beings?  Worse, why do some people find the idea of a controlling God comforting?  Worse still, this misguided image of a controlling God and all the illogical conclusions it presents, is precisely the reason many people don’t believe in this God in the first place.  It is totally unnecessary.

Read the Bible.  These are stories of a God who has relationships with human beings, who loves, grows closer, gets jealous, gets angry, sometimes even changes his mind about important stuff.  God loves us and the Creation passionately.  This is not a disembodied, immovable and controlling super-being in the sky who can be proved or disproved with logical arguments.  This is a deep and personal reality, a Living God, who like the people we love, resists any attempt to be confined by dogma and description.

I believe in God the Father Almighty.  We are so quick to either believe in or dismiss a God whose almighty power is used to control, manipulate, or destroy.  Yet the God we meet in the Bible shows his omnipotence not in infinite destruction, but infinite love, forgiveness and justice.  This God’s idea of omnipotence is to be tortured by his own children and hung on a cross - and forgive.  That is true power.  That is true omnipotence.

That is what we mean when we say, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty.”  Christianity is more than the our Sunday School or CCD preconceptions.  Christianity is deeper than the simplistic belief system found in many Christian bookstores.  It is also richer than the caricature so easily dismissed by contemporary atheism.  That simplistic caricature deserves the criticism it receives.  That God deserves to be written off, because that God does not exist.  That is not the God we affirm when we say the Apostle’s Creed.  Our creed points us to a God of ultimate mystery and reality, who is both transcendent and immanent, who has the infinite capacity for love, forgiveness and justice. 

“I believe in God the Father Almighty” points us to a God who is simply too real to be disbelieved.

Next Week's Myth to be Busted: You Can't Accept Evolution and be a Christian