“In God”
Acts 17:16-34, as rendered in The Message
Who among us has spent frantic minutes (or even hours) looking for reading glasses or our keys or our phone—only to discover that they were on our head or in our hand the entire time?
The apostle Paul says our search for God is like that. While we’re tearing the house apart looking for our glasses, while we’re searching for meaning in all the wrong places, God is with us the whole time, lighting flares and sending signals, just waiting for us to notice.
Who among us has wandered the world looking for home, only to conclude that home is where we started or that home is not so much a place as wherever our dear ones are?
Paul says God is kind of like that: the capital-L Love that created not only humans but also every living thing—especially babies and bald eagles, sunsets and rainbows, lovers and friends, asparagus and tomatoes, bird song and Bach, oceans and seashells, snowy owls and snow-covered trees, deep canyons and jagged mountaintops—just so we could live abundantly and so that we could see, attend to, enjoy, experience, and maybe even know God.
So that we could know God and feel God and maybe even delight in God’s goodness whenever we feel joy, whenever we feel our smallness in the vastness of the universe, whenever love makes us go all gooey inside, whenever we’re awed by the natural world.
And what better revelation of God is there than Jesus?—so radically loving and endlessly annoying to the religious and political powers, so tenderly human and so fiercely alive. And so many humans manage to reveal God’s love and goodness, even people who don’t know God, that it’s hard to imagine God isn’t involved in it somehow.
Who among us is so fed up with the ridiculous images of God as an old white man with a long white beard who looks down on us from above, and so tired of trying to understand the God of our scriptures, that we prefer to speak in terms of the capital-U Universe or a Higher Power or something totally nameless to which we can attach our own particular philosophies and points of view?
Nice try, Paul says, but you’re putting the cart before the horse, you’re actually putting the creature before the Creator. I understand your need for control, he adds, but the God who made you and loves you wants you to know the freedom of living and moving and being. The God who made you and loves you wants you to understand that you were made in the image of the living God, that you are nothing less magnificent than God’s offspring.
Who among us—either because we grew up in church or because we were shaped by the American idols of hard work, success, and material wealth—thinks the spiritual life is about being good people, or that we have to earn a place in God’s heart, or that even in our spiritual lives we’ve always got to be doing something?
You poor thing, Paul says. I see you trying to cover all the bases, making room for the unknown God amidst all the little-g gods you have created. I see you trying to escape the emptiness you feel. I see you living out of your fears. I hear you saying you feel uncomfortable worshipping big-G God when all the while you’re serving little-g gods like money or security, image or reputation, political views or rugged individualism.
Who among us thinks the life of faith is primarily about what we do?
Paul says it’s about what God does.
Who among us thinks God, like so many institutions, cares most about keeping us in line?
Jesus says God is most interested in loving us into wholeness, peace, and joy.
And who among us, like so many Christians, believes the heart of our faith tradition is Christ’s death on the cross?
Paul says nothing about that in this speech on Mars Hill in Athens. He speaks only of Christ’s resurrection, about how God raised Jesus from the dead to make sure we know that when all is said and done, Love will have the last word.
And if all this sounds a little theoretical, if we’re having a hard time wrapping our mind around any of it—well, how could it be otherwise? If God’s love is higher and deeper, wider and longer than we can even begin to imagine, is it any wonder that we would have a hard time explaining who or what God is?
And if we’re wondering what Paul’s philosophical discussion with the people of ancient Athens has to do with our lives today—with climate change and racism, the plight of immigrants and other desperately poor people in a world where there is more than enough, with what appears to be discrimination against trans youth even here in the Amherst schools—well, I invite us to search our hearts, to look at our political, social, and economic landscapes much like the Apostle Paul looked at a city full of idols.
With compassion—and with a burning desire to share the good news of God’s all-encompassing and transformative love.
What Paul saw in Athens were people searching for meaning and security, hope and understanding, much as God designed us to do. Sound familiar?
Paul tried to meet them where they were, quoting Greek philosophers who said said it is in God that we live and move and have our being.
Some 300 years later Augustine of Hippo would say that God made us for Godself, and that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
In the 1600s another philosopher, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, would say that there is within every person an “infinite abyss” reserved for God.
In the mid-1900s an American philosopher and theologian named Paul Tillich would speak of God as ”the ground of all being.”
And by the end of the 20th century, progressive Christian scholar Marcus Borg would bring the discussion full circle, describing God “as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.” Borg would say that “the universe is not separate from God, but in God”; that we ourselves arenot really separate from God, and that while we are not God, we are in God.
We are like fish, swimming in the ocean of God and not even realizing it. We live and move and have our being in the God who is love, the God who created us and just can’t quit us, no matter how badly we mess things up.
Or, as Jesus said, “Abide in me as I abide in you. . . . I am the vine and you are the branches. Abide in my love just as I abide in the Parent’s love. I have said these things so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
Abide. Rest. Be Grounded and healed, changed and raised to new life.
In God.
With God.
Together.
May it be so.
