First Parish Church-Wintle Sermon What is God?

WHAT IS GOD?

A sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle

at the First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts,

on September 7, 2008.

The scripture readings were Exodus 3:1-14 and Acts 17:22-31.

“God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites,

‘I am has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14).

What reckless abandon, what summer-induced reverie, could possibly have led me to begin the church year by announcing a sermon title like “What Is God?”? The full extent of that recklessness did not become apparent until I turned on the computer and started to write.

The justification for such a large topic is that the various ways we might answer illustrates our worship theme this month of “pilgrims.” If there is any one point I want to make this morning it is about the importance of the journey from childhood notions of God to mature understanding, the journey from inherited Sunday School images to personally meaningful adult convictions. Some people don’t make that journey, that pilgrimage: they learned as a child about the white-bearded god on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, decided as a teenager that it wasn’t true, and closed the book.

But for others, the journey of faith leads to ever-greater questions and awe-inspiring visions about the nature of reality, the sense that there is much more to life than meets the eye. For some the goal of life is what Aquinas called the beatific vision, the summum bonum, the highest good: to see the face of God. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus, “for they shall see God.”

Wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome here.

So, what do people mean when they say the word “God”? What is it in human experience that draws people to speak of God? I want to suggest three things. God is The Way Things Are, God is The Way Things Will Be, and God is The Way We Get Through All This.

First, God is The Way Things Are. First and foremost in human history, people have talked about God as the ultimate reality, the reason why the world and the universe are the way they are. This is the idea behind God as the Creator, who set everything in motion. It’s also the idea of God as the impersonal force that fuels the sun and steers the planets. The universe does not lend its fullness to easy comprehension. As in the name of God given to Moses, “I am what I am,” God just IS.

God, you see, is like gravity. You can argue about it, but it just is. We need to adjust ourselves to the ways of gravity, not the other way around.

God, to me, has always seemed like the ocean. Picture the ocean – buoyant, huge, sometimes smooth as glass, sometimes storm-tossed, the surface reflects the skies overhead, the depths contain unknown mysteries. What a different image than a man with a white beard on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel.

God is The Way Things Are.

Second, God is The Way Things Will Be. People have known the tenuousness of life, someone can be here today and gone tomorrow, thus people have said “God willing, we’ll see you next year” (or in Texas, “God willing, and the creek don’t rise”).

It’s not just the Calvinist idea of predestination, but the idea that, for the most part, the universe operates in specific ways, ordained by God. A story:

A little old lady goes out onto her front porch every morning and shouts, “Praise the Lord!” And every morning the atheist next door yells back, “There is no God!” This goes on for weeks. “Praise the Lord” yells the lady; “There is no God” responds the neighbor. As time goes by, the lady runs into financial distress and has trouble buying enough food. She goes out onto the porch and asks God for help with the groceries, then says “Praise the Lord.” The next morning when she goes out onto the porch, there are the groceries she wanted. She shouts “Praise the Lord.” The atheist jumps out from behind a bush and says, “Ha! I bought those groceries. There is no God!” The lady smiles and says “Praise the Lord. Not only did you provide for me, Lord, but you got the atheist to pay for the groceries.”

The God who is The Way Things Will Be is a God who can even use atheists to do his work.

That leads to my third image of God: If God truly IS the Way things are and the way things will be, the real question is whether this God as reality is favorably disposed toward us? That is why I add: God is The Way We Get Through All This.

This is a real leap of faith. There is so much distress, war, innocent suffering, in this world, that one could say that God is indifferent to our situation, much as gravity is indifferent. That’s where the world’s saviors come in, spiritual giants who inspire us and teach us that God is love. Do you believe that? Can you hope that? Carl Scovel says that our spirituality, our yearning for meaning and fulfillment, is given to us as part of our very being, and that is evidence of what he calls the Great Surmise, which is this: “At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, to which we have at last returned. And this is the supreme reality of our lives.” Or as St. Paul says, this is the God in whom “we live and move and have our being.”

The Way We Get Through All This is because of those flashes of insight, those moments of inspiration, that seem to come out of nowhere, but which I think are gifts of the Holy Spirit. “I think God ‘speaks’ to us,” writes Marcus Borg, “I don’t mean oral or [heard] revelation or divine dictation … I think God ‘speaks’ to us – sometimes dramatically in visions, less dramatically in some of our dreams, in internal ‘proddings’ or ‘leadings,’ through people, and through the devotional practices and scriptures of our tradition … I sometimes have a sense,” he concludes, “of being addressed.” [The Heart of Christianity, 73].

On Sunday, July 27, a man brought a gun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church during a children’s musical performance, and opened fire, killing two people and wounding six others, before he was tackled. Greg McKendry, one of those who died, described as being built like a refrigerator with a head, stood up in front of the gunman and took the blast to protect others. The Way We Get Through All This is because there are those who hear the promptings of the Holy Spirit and act with courage and bravery.

III

So, my friends, that’s what I see at this point in my journey of faith: God is The Way Things Are, God is The Way Things Will Be, and God is The Way We Get Through All This.

Do you remember the “Road” movies – “The Road to Morocco,” “The Road to Singapore,” to Zanzibar? They were wildly popular comedies in the 50s and 60s. I have them all on video. And you know, they were not very funny. What made it all work was the partnership of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

It’s that way with us in church also – those with whom we travel on our journeys make all the difference.

Welcome back, pilgrims.