Part I: The God ‘Out There’ or ‘Right Here’?

By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

I Samuel 2:1-2, 9-10; Ps. 139:1-3, 7-10, 17-18; Acts 17:26-28

Oct. 5, 2003

Defining the divine’how do you define God? Much of how you think of God depends on the way you picture God. I remember, as a child, believing God looked like a very old man with a long gray beard, a staff in his hand and a stern, angry look on his face. I think I must have seen a foreboding picture of Moses at some point and identified him with God. As I grew older, my picture of God was more in the form of Jesus, who I saw as a friend who would help me if that stern God was angry with me. But my healthiest image of God began to form in early adulthood, after I saw the movie ‘Oh God’ with George Burns! I came away from that hilarious movie with the feeling that, even though the movie was nonsense, perhaps God really did have as good a sense of humor as the movie God played by George Burns. And perhaps God really cared deeply, but was waiting for humans to take more responsibility for life on earth, just as the God in the movie.

Have you found that your image of God has changed over the years? It certainly is to be expected as one matures. It’s also to be expected because the Bible actually presents us with a wide variety of descriptions of God, not just one consistent picture.

In the Old Testament, which we prefer to call the Hebrew Scriptures these days, God is spoken of in anthropomorphic images. That means using human characteristics to describe what is divine, so God is called king, shepherd, lord, rock, warrior, potter, father and so on. Now God is not literally any of these things. How could God be a rock (a hardened collection of minerals) and at the same time be a warrior (who must be alive)? The sheer volume of metaphors for God means God can’t possibly be all of them in a literal sense.

These terms are metaphors, they suggest that God is like a king who reigns, like a shepherd who cares for his flock, like a lord who demands respect, like a rock which is solid to lean on, and so on. The writer Isaiah even said that God is like a woman in labor, giving birth to creation (Isaiah 42:5-9, 14-16). By the way, there are many, many feminine images of God in scripture if one looks for them, and I’ll talk more about the feminine side of God next week. These anthropomorphic terms are attempts by ancient people to describe in human terms, that which is not human, and furthermore is far beyond human understanding. We use these images because we want to feel close to God, and it doesn’t feel right to call God ‘it’, but these terms are very limited. God is personal, yet God is not like any person we know.

Marcus Borg, to whom I am indebted for the main ideas of this sermon, says that Usually these ancient people saw God’s relationship to the universe as a supernatural being ‘out there’ beyond the universe, someone who occasionally intervened in more dramatic events. But they tended to view God as not ‘here,’ most of the time.’ God is ‘our father’’ who is ‘in heaven,’ [out there] to echo familiar words.

Now, on the other hand, the Bible also describes God’s relationship to the universe as ‘right here’. The te’t we read from Acts 17:28 describes God in this way: God is ‘the one in whom we live and move and have our being.’ God is not somewhere else, but all around us: we live and move ‘in God.’

This way of seeing God imagines the divine as an encompassing spiritual force that exists, moving and surrounding all living beings. This is the God who is described as wind , or ruach, in the Hebrew Scriptures. When you read the phrase Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, think wind, because if you were reading it in the original Hebrew, the word that was used for Spirit was wind. I love imagining God as wind, which is an invisible but powerful force. Sometimes gales of wind are so strong they nearly knock you down, other times the breeze is so gentle, it’s almost imperceptible. I know a lot of people dislike the windy days we have in the prairie, but I love the wind, because it makes me fee like I am connected to something wild and free, and powerful and moving, something that may have come from half a world away and blown up above the skies before I felt it.

In the Christian scriptures, the New Testament, there is a word for God as Spirit that is similar to the Hebrew word for wind. It is pneuma, like the first part of the word pneumonia (which refers to breathing problems), spelled pneuma. Pneuma is the Greek word for breath. So when Christian Scripture says Spirit as pneuma, it means the Spirit is like breath, an invisible life force inside of you, the wind that moves inside of you. When those Biblical writers called God Spirit they used the words wind and breath. They were suggesting that we are surrounded by God as surely as we are surrounded by the wind, and God is inside of us as surely as our breath is the life force inside of us. We are in God and God is in us, like an energy that pervades the universe.

Personally, I am more and more attracted to this image of God as the Spirit of Life as I grow older. I don’t feel the need to imagine God in the same ways as the writers of the Hebrew Scripture who lived 2 to 3 thousand years ago. Those ancient Biblical writers who saw God as a shepherd or king also saw the earth as a flat, 2-tiered universe with a dome above the skies that they thought was held up by pillars. Would it really be wise to feel bound to their definitions of the earth or God? If those metaphors are helpful to you, then use them, but I’m glad that the Bible offers a wide variety of images for God.

Today I simply want to leave you with the knowledge that if your concept of God is still developing, it’s OK. That’s often a natural part of a maturing relationship with God. I also want to give you the gift of knowing that there is a very strong movement in Christian theology today, toward seeing God as encompassing Spirit, a force of love and truth that is very real, but which is a little different from the anthropomorphic images of God that many of us learned and still use.

Next week I will continue on this subject, telling you more about ways that we might imagine and define God who is, perhaps, beyond definition. May God bless our efforts to do so. Amen.