How Do You Imagine God?

Acts 17:22-31

April 27, 2008, Sixth Sunday of Easter

A number of years ago Joan Dennick, a former member of our church who is buried in the Memorial Garden sent the following to me.

The man whispered, “God, speak to me” and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear.

So the man yelled “God, speak to me” And the thunder rolled across the sky. But the man did not listen.

The man looked around and said, “God, let me see you.” And a star shone brightly. But the man did not see.

And the man shouted, “God, show me a miracle” And a baby was born. But the man did not notice.

So, the man cried out in despair, “Touch me, God, and let me know you are here.” Whereupon, God reached down and touched the man. But the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.

The person who originally wrote this then writes:

I found this to be a great reminder that God is always around us in little and simple things that we take for granted…even in this electronic age…so I would like to add one more:

The man cried “God I need your help” and an email arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement. But the man deleted it and continued crying.

The good news is that you are loved. Don’t miss out on a blessing because it isn’t packaged the way that you expect.

In many ways our passage today from Acts is about how we package God, or perhaps more succinctly, how we understand God as being packaged for us.

Paul has walked around Athens and sees various altars to various Gods, and one to an unknown God. I call this the catch-all altar – kind of the insurance policy altar. But who is the real God? An average person wandering through Athens at that time, might have felt that he was involved is some Let’s Make a Deal game show – is the real God behind Altar number one, or two, or number three? Who is the real God?

Paul tells the people that he can tell them about the real God – the one they call “unknown.” However, before I get to that I want you to understand where and to whom he is talking, because the context of this passage is very important.

As a place, the Areopagus was a marble hill halfway down the hillside between the Acropolis and the city of Athens. Dan Clendinen writes concerning the Areopagus:

The Areopagus was the most prestigious and venerable council of elders in the history of Athens, so-named because it met on that site. Dating back to the 5th-6th centuries BCE, the Areopagus consisted of nine archons or chief magistrates who guided the city-state away from rule by a king to rule by an oligarchy that laid the foundations for Greece's eventual democracy. Across the centuries the Areopagus changed, so that by Paul's day it was a place where matters of the criminal courts, law, philosophy and politics were adjudicated.

So Paul is speaking in the midst of lawyers and philosophers, politicians and others. These people were seeking for the truth in criminal matters, and the truth in all knowledge and being, and in governing. And here we have Paul telling them the truth about God – not an easy thing to do.

I’m reminded of the words of Marcus Felix, a 2nd and 3rd century Roman Christian apologist who wrote:

"God cannot be seen—he is too bright for sight; nor measured—for he is beyond all sense, infinite, measureless, his dimensions known to himself alone" (XVIII.7), and "the majesty of God is the despair of the understanding"

How does Paul talk about that to a group of men, and maybe a few women, seeking the truth? How do we grasp this God today? Can God be known? Or is this an exercise in futility better left to the minds of people, who as the Wizard of Oz says, “Think deep thoughts.”

My answer to that last question is No. It is important for me as a pastor, obviously to think about God and God’s relation to us, but it is just as important for you, the people in the pew to think about God and God’s relationship to you. As Marcus Borg titles a blog on this subject, “How we imagine God matters.”

To begin, to talk about something that is so otherworldly is difficult, because our language seems to be unable to say what we want it to mean. To help with this we use symbolic language, but the symbolic language has its problems. Our symbolic language is language we use for things here on earth. This process is called anthropomorphism, where we use human terms to talk about non-human things. In terms of God we talk about God as father, mother, lord, king, warrior, shepherd, potter. Another way to think about anthropomorphism is that we seek to personify God. And it is not just us, but we also see these words and images being used in the Bible to talk about God. On the one hand this is understandable because we don’t have any other language to talk about God. However, it does become a problem when we allow these images to become our literal images and understanding of God. Because the Bible talks about God as a father then God is a father – a male. The problem with this is that we begin to have a supernatural theistic understand of God. Borg describes this understanding as:

That is, we see God as someone "out there" who created the universe a long time ago as something separate from God.

God's relationship to the universe is seen this way: from "out there," God occasionally intervenes, especially in the more dramatic events reported in the Bible. And most of the time, God is not "here," but "out there." God is "our father" who is "in heaven," to echo familiar words.

But Paul tells us of another way that we can think about God, and I believe that it was because of his understanding that some of the Athenians were able to grasp what he was saying. Paul writes:

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ ²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

God is not out there. God did not set things in motion and then sit back and watch the show. This understanding directly contradicts understandings like those of Julian Huxley a 20th century English evolutionary biologist and humanist who said:

God is a spectator, benevolent perhaps but ineffective, of the workings of the cosmic machine . . . his sole occupation throughout eternity is to enjoy the verification of his predictions . . . Instead of ruling a kingdom he merely holds a watching brief.

There are many today who, without realizing it, espouse Julian’s supernatural theism. Paul says this kind of thinking is not the truth. God is all around us. We live and move within God just as we live and move and breathe in the air around us. The writer of Psalm 139 said it so well when he wrote:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. (139:7-10)

By talking of heaven, sheol and the farthest points of the sea the Psalmist has covered the entire universe, everything above, underneath, and on this level - and God is there. In God we live and move and have our being. Paul Tillich the 20th century scholar and preacher had a wonderful way of thinking about God as the ground of all being. As Dr. John Spong writes:

Dr. Tillich would not use personal words to talk about God, not because he believed God to be impersonal, but because the God he sought to speak about was so far beyond the categories of the personal that he found personal words offensively inadequate. So it was not a Being, but the Ground or Source of All Being, that became Tillich's definition of God.

Thus Tillich is saying that “every ontological being has its power to be in being itself, participate in the ground of being.” (James Wu – 1999) All human beings have the power to participate in that which gives us our being – God. I like to imagine God as the primordial waters underneath all of life that give life to all living things. It is a personification of God, but it helps me. Without those waters nothing could exist.

God is not “out there,” but God is in everything around us and in us. But the question then becomes “Can we use the anthropomorphic language about God; the language that talks about God as father, mother, and so on?” We can use them, but we must understand that they are only giving a small piece of God – a piece that we are trying to understand or experience. They do not express the whole of God.

To think of God as all around, the ground of all being, or even as spirit, allows us to be close to God, to know and experience God-with-us rather than on some far off place just watching things happen. It certainly makes for a more intimate and personal God, and we don’t have to worry about missing God’s blessings because of the way they are packaged, because we know that God is as close as the air we breathe.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters