“Living and Moving and Being”
Acts 17:22-31
John 14:15
Who among us has not spent frantic minutes (or even hours) looking for our 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 not 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 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 recognize 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.
It could be that many of us are groping for God even now—knowing what we used to believe but not feeling sure of much of anything any more.
It could be that we who have found our way to this community of faith are groping for God together, making meaning together as we try to follow Jesus, and, along the way, getting glimpses of the Spirit in ourselves and one another and in the loving and giving and advocating that we do.
We are not creating our own religion, but neither are we mindlessly following “pre-outlined beliefs.” Instead, having recognized our own wounds and acknowledged our capacities to hurt ourselves and others, we have come seeking healing. Having seen the brokenness of the world and felt our own spiritual hunger, we are choosing to live by a power that is not ours. Having learned something of Jesus of Nazareth, we have seen in him and his teachings the face of a loving, living God.
In our best moments, we are claiming an abiding love and creating a holy space where we and others can find and experience the God of extravagant mercy and grace. In our best moments, we can know ourselves loved by the God who made the world and everything in it in that space, no matter who we are or what we’ve done or what we believe or don’t.
In our best moments—those times when we know in our hearts that God’s Spirit abides with us and is even in us—we are letting God’s love heal us and transform us and flow through us.
The good news is that God wants to be found by us—and that we don’t have to look far to find her. The good news is that God is not far from us, that in fact he is right here, and that God is glorified by our groping, and that God wants so much to be found that they have left love notes in every corner of our lives.
That whole spring thing? That’s an entire book’s worth of love notes from God.
That whole baby thing? That’s God’s best idea, contained in a tiny human package.
That whole joy thing? That’s just a taste of what is available to us when we let ourselves receive God’s gifts.
That transcendent feeling we get when we’re doing what we love or spending time with our beloveds? That’s a taste of life with God or, as some people say, heaven.
The oneness with others and creation that we experience when we can see the big picture? That’s God’s Spirit calling, saying, “Yoo-hoo, over here! This is where life is!”
That mysterious meal of bread and wine? That’s God’s way of saying, “I know you’re hungry. Here’s some Jesus for the journey; a cup of my blessings to go.”
And those tears that start in your heart, get stuck in your throat, and well up in your eyes when you hear words that ring true and see things you never believed possible? Oh, that’s God showing off, saying, “Yep, I did that. Yes, he’s mine, alright. Yes, I made her. Isn’t she grand?”
We are surrounded and infused by the Holy and constantly bombarded with evidence of God’s presence and, still, many of us—like the Athenians in Paul’s day—are most comfortable with an “unknown God,” or maybe a capital-U Universe or a Higher Power.
Maybe it’s because we’re 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. Maybe it’s because we can’t connect with the Bible. Maybe it’s because we’re not quite sure what to do with Jesus. Maybe it’s because we’ve bought into all the cultural myths about hard work, and so we think the spiritual life is about being good people, or that we have to somehow earn a place in God’s heart.
Oh, honey, Paul says.
I see you trying to cover all the bases, he says, making room for an unknown God. 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.
Many of us think the life of faith is primarily about what wedo, but Paul says it’s about what God does.
Some of us think that God, like so many institutions, cares most about keeping us in line, but Jesus says God is most interested in loving us into wholeness, peace, and joy.
Some of us think the heart of our faith tradition is Christ’s death on the cross, but Paul says nothing about that in this speech on Mars Hill. 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.
The good news is that God is forever revealing God’s self to us, and that not even the worst things humanity and tragedy can do can separate us from the Love of God in and through Christ Jesus.
And if we’re wondering what Paul’s philosophical discussion with the people of ancient Athens has to do with our lives today—with a world on fire, a government that doesn’t care about people, courts that invite racists to limit voting rights, and nations that take what they want by obliterating entire cities and populations—perhaps we should look at our political, social, and economic landscapes the same way 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.
By meeting all people—especially those different from us—where they are, and by trying to understand their perspectives.
By understanding that we are all connected—in and through God.
Some 300 years after Paul preached in Athens, Augustine of Hippo explained that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
In the 1600s, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal said 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 said “the universe is not separate from God, but in God”; and that while we are not God, we live 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.
So let us never stop groping for God. Let us never stop resting in God. Let us enjoy the Holy One who delights in us.
Let us live in God and with God—together.
