February 17, 2002
Psalm 8
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Acts 17: 16 - 28
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“COMMENTS I HAVE HEARD: 
I Don't Know What You Mean By God.”

David and Mary have come to the Church, just as they have most Sundays since they joined. They arrive in the building, are greeted by pleasant greeters, ushered to their spot –– and it is their spot because that is where they sit every Sunday –– are given a bulletin, and they sit down, to wait for the service to begin.

Even with this familiar sequence, David and Mary feel a certain discomfort.  Despite their best efforts, they feel a sense of doubt, and they wonder if that is natural; in fact, they feel guilty that doubts even occur in their thinking.

During the silent prayer and the pastoral prayer, their doubts are real and troubling.  Does God hear prayer?  Does it do any good to pray for others?  Is there even a God who hears our prayers?  And then there is the sermon:

Does the preacher really believe what he is preaching?

They always come to Church hoping . . . expecting.  They enjoy the people, and they love the music; but they always go home wondering about words they have heard: God, savior, love, forgiveness.

To be sure, these are fictional names, but they are also people whom I meet every day.  In 46 years of being a minister, never have I encountered so many as I do today, who say, “I really wonder if there is a God.”  Or “I’m not sure any longer. I have so many doubts.”

Today, I want you wade with me into the deep waters of Christian theology.  My topic is, “I don’t know what you mean by God.”  It is, I’ll wager, a topic that all of us have thought about at various times and a topic about which we feel inadequate when someone asks us, “Do we believe in God?”

To put it another way, what do you say when your children or your grandchildren say to you, “I don’t know what you mean by God,” or, tougher yet, “I don’t believe in God.”

My first reaction, when I hear such a statement, is that the person talking isn’t a disbeliever in God; rather, he or she is a disbeliever in some concept of God.  If I ask you to concentrate on God, what is the picture of God that you see?  I tried this once with some teenagers, and one girl said, “I have an image of an old man with a white beard who looks like my grandfather.”  That is not an uncommon mental picture.

Well, let us begin by acknowledging that none of us can adequately explain God. God is beyond our ability to comprehend or explain.  If we were able to fully explain God, we would have succeeded only in lowering him to the level of humanity.  Yet, we are humans, and we see God in the images of humanity.  It is therefore actually ludicrous that we try to explain God; yet we must try.

First, let me assure you everyone has doubts.  In fact, I would go so far as to say we need doubts.  Doubt is a gift from God.  As Galileo once said, “Doubt is the father of discovery.”  Doubt is essential if we are going to get beyond our childhood understanding of God.  We must know that God is not captured in childhood understandings, and an agnostic must separate God from the images of God that are too small to excite any belief.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite writers, says that doubts are “the ants in the pants of faith.  They keep it alive and moving.”   Suffice it to say then, that all believers have doubts.  It is through doubts that we are forced into new and deeper thinking, so that our faith is made strong.

Are you surprised if I say to you that the Bible is not much help in having you understand whether or not there is a God?

The Bible operates on the assumption that there is a God.  It begins in Verse One of Chapter One with the words, “In the Beginning, God!”  From that point on, the Bible is indispensable in considering the ways that humans have thought ABOUT God.  The Bible reveals that the idea of God has evolved as circumstances have risen which cause humans to reevaluate old ideas.  The idea of God goes through radical reinterpretation between Genesis and the religion of Jesus.

Harry Emerson Fosdick capsulizes the growth of the idea of God in the Bible in this fashion in his great book, “A Guide to Understanding the Bible.”

“Beginning with a storm god on a desert mountain, it ends with men saying, ‘God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.”

Beginning with a tribal war god, leading his devotees to bloody triumph over their foes, it ends with men seeing that “God is love,” and that “he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.”

Beginning with a territorial deity who loved his clansmen, and hated the remainder of mankind, it ends with a great multitude out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, worshipping the one universal Father.

Beginning with a God who walked in the garden in the cool of the day or who showed his back to Moses as a special favor, it ends with the God whom “no man hath seen . . . at any time and in whom we live and move and have our being.”

Beginning with a God who commanded the slaughter of infants and sucklings, without mercy, it ends with the God whose will it is that “not one of these little should perish.”

Beginning with a God of whom at Sinai the people shrank in fear, saying, “let not God speak with us, lest we die,” it ends with the God to whom one prays in a solitary place and whose in-dwelling spirit is our unseen friend.

Beginning with a God whose highest social vision was a tribal victory, it ends with the God whose worshippers pray for a world-wide kingdom of righteousness and peace.”  (“A Guide to Understanding the Bible,” page 53f)

To believe in God is to accept the fact that the idea of God has evolved and is evolving. To believe in God is also to realize that to stagnate at any one of the positions is to believe in and proclaim a God who is not relevant to the contemporary mind or believer.

It is for this reason that we do not want to give our children a concept of God that is frightening and manipulative.  We want them to love God and grow in the knowledge that God loves them and thus in freedom of thought, their understanding of God grows with their Biblical and faith development.

People have always tried to “prove the existence of God.” Without the leap of faith, I do not believe it can be done.  A believer will look at the beauty of a sunset and see the handwork of God, a non-believer will look at the same sunset and proclaim the beauty of the universe and the interplay of sun and clouds.

The teleological argument is that God is seen in the design and purposefulness of creation. Only a universal mind could cause the vastness, yet predictability, of the universe. We know the sunrise time and sunset time for years in advance.  We know how to calculate a rocket shot from the earth, have it leave a spinning planet, travel hundreds of thousands of miles in rotating orbits, plot its return and have it enter the earth at the place and angle that insures it returning to a specific location.

Or on the other end of the scale, we are told that the molecules in one drop of water, if magnified to the size of a grain of sand would furnish enough sand to cover the United States with a sand bank 50 feet deep.  It is said that the proton of an atom is about 1/400,000,000 of an inch in diameter.  The electron has its own kind of solar system, traveling 10,000 miles per second within a spherical limit of 1/100,000,000 of an inch.

You have doubts about God?  Try believing that all that just happened by chance.  The one, who believes that chance is the reason, truly, is the one with faith.

A man in Los Angeles claims that he has a meat grinder that is composed of 10 parts.  He can teach a person how to quickly, take those 10 parts and assemble them into a hand cranked meat grinder.  Now, take those same 10 parts and put them into a spinning clothes dryer, and think how long they would have to spin before they fell into place as a perfectly assembled meat grinder.

I am much more persuaded by Paul Tillich, in his Systematic Theology book, when he says, “God” –– that is, the term, God –– because God is not a name; it is a term for that which is beyond our understanding.  God is the answer to the question implied in the human’s finitude.  God is the name for that which concern humans ultimately.  To put it another way, your ultimate concern is your God.

Now there are many things that concern us, but whatever is our Ultimate Concern must transcend all finite and concrete concerns.  Unless that which concerns us is truly Ultimate, then our gods will be finite and devilish, which is what they are for many.

What makes our understanding of God difficult to explain is that the infinite Ultimate Concern can only be explained in finite, or human, terms because that is all we have as creatures.  There is nothing wrong with that, so long as we recognize that the characteristics we ascribe to God are our human characteristics and that the God of the universe is beyond what we can comprehend or communicate.  To put this into theological language, Tillich suggests that God is the Being beyond being, because God is the Being upon whom we mortal beings depend for our existence.

Thus, God becomes our Ultimate Concern, because we as humans are thrust against the possibility of non-being.  Because we are finite and limited, we always have doubts. How can a finite being comprehend the infinite?  We must always live therefore, risking our lives –– which is faith –– and faith always takes courage.  Those who are not willing to be courageous enough to risk their lives on God as their Ultimate Concern will rest their lives on lesser values, which become their gods.

Let me try and sum up what I have trying to say by stating my own belief.  I do this with some trepidation, for fear that you will accept my thoughts without taking the time to think and pray about that which motivates you to believe in God.

I believe in God because even though the universe and its parts, small and large, are beyond my grasp; they speak to me of order and design much more than of accident and chaos.

I believe in God because I find that when humans seriously seek to follow the teachings of God, they are better people, with loftier goals.  I grieve daily at the misguided attempts to make God as the possession of a person or a group who do horribly unreligious things in the attempt to enforce their way of believing.  I lament the fact that such a large portion of Christians has never grown beyond the religion of their parents or their youth.  Such a faith will not suffice when the perils of life crash in on us.

I believe in God because history has shown that whenever humans have sought to ban God, or dismiss God, or ban the worship of God, they have never succeeded. In fact, it is in these times of persecution and living faith, at the peril of one’s life, that faith in God has prospered.

I believe in God because of the testimony of Jesus Christ.  When all is said and done, Christians get their most graphic impression of what God is like, from Jesus Christ. In Christ, something new came alive.  As Fosdick suggests, “Old frameworks of thought were carried from Jewish tradition, and new ones were added from the Hellenistic world, but for Christians, the portrait in all of them was, “The face of Jesus Christ.”  To put it simply: in Christian thinking, “God became Christ like;” thus we say, “God loves the world.”

I close with the words of William Willimon, who, incidentally, will be the Bible lecturer at this year’s annual meeting of the NACCC in Spokane, Washington.  In his little book, “The Gospel For The Person Who Has Everything,” which impacted my life, Willimon writes:

“The Bible says that true conversion, turning around, change rebirth, comes at the point when a person realizes that the God who was once considered to be a powerful enemy, who was to be avoided or bargained with, is in reality a friend who is to be trusted.  Just when we expect to get clobbered for our guilt, we get clobbered by grace.  We realize that in our frantic search for peace and happiness, we have been looking in the wrong places and have overlooked the God who has always been looking for us.  God does not have to destroy us in order to deliver us.  We do not have to give or say or pay anything.  In Christ, it has been given, said, and paid for us.  In Christ, love has been dealt our way.  And it is permanent love, which does not walk out on us and slam the door when we have been naughty; which does not threaten us; which does not desert us when we are poor and sick and ugly.  It is a love which loved us before creation and loves us now with only one thing in mind: to love us through eternity.   (Willimon, p. 25)

Neil Swanson, a former minister of this Church said,

 “I believe that God is that spirit upon which the universe depends for its functioning and with which a creature of the universe must harmonize his life for the realization of his highest potential.”  (Neil H. Swanson; “To The Unknown God;” 13)      

That is a definition of God which I find helpful.

God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.  That is the hope for all of us.  That is love, personified, and that is what I mean by God.