The God You Don't Believe In

Written by Bill Weisenbach

Saturday, 26 April 2008

The God You Don't Believe In Text: Acts 17:22-31    “Tell me about the god you don’t believe it,” I asked one of confirmands.   It was the first class and he announced to me that he didn’t believe in God, but his parents said he had to attend.  “Tell me about the god you don’t believe in,” I said, “I probably don’t believe in that god either.”   William Barclay, writing in his Spiritual Autobiography, tells of a great tragedy.  Barclay's twenty-one year old daughter and her fiancé were both drowned in a boating accident.  One day there came an anonymous letter to Barclay.  "Dear Dr. Barclay, I know now why God killed your daughter; it was to save her from corruption by your heresies." Barclay says in his book, "If I had the writer's address, I would have written back, not in anger…, but in pity.  And I would have said to him, "Your god is the god I don't believe in."    In a way, this is what the Apostle Paul was telling the Athenians as he preached in the middle of the Areopagus.  He begins by complimenting them, acknowledging "in every way you are very religious, your souls are alive."  This impulse to worship is a good impulse, and they had it.  Their only trouble was that they were worshiping everything and everyone, and hence, in reality nothing.  Their desire to worship was right, but the object of their affection was wrong.    In Athens, years earlier, there was a terrible pestilence.  It was widespread and many people died.  To appease the gods Epimenides came forth with this plan.  A flock of black and white sheep were to be let loose throughout the city.  Wherever a lamb lay down, it was there sacrificed to the nearest god; and if one lay down not near any shrine one was built, and the lamb was sacrificed to "The Unknown God."  It was one of these places of worship that Paul was reacting to in our text.  "What, therefore, you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you."  And he described this limitless God by contrasting it to the limited gods that surrounded him, the kind of gods not worth believing in.   First he said he did not believe in a god that lives in shrines and is made by human beings, he believed in a God who made the whole world and everything in it, and who is, in fact, the Lord of heaven and earth.  He is not limited to statues, or holy water, or holy lands, or holy places, or even church buildings.     Second, Paul does not believe in a god who needs anything.  God does not need any help from human beings.  That doesn't mean that God won't use us.  It means that God’s hands are not tied even if we do nothing.  Oh, I know the saying, and I like it, about how God has no hands but ours, but if we refuse to be those hands, others will respond.  Our God acts through the good acts of people, but God is not limited to a decision by them, or us.     Further, note also that Paul does not believe in an exclusive god, a god who loves only one tribe, one people, one nation, one color, one country, one sex, one income category, one anything.  If your god is the god who always defends America, and who loves only America no matter what she does, that is the god Paul does not believe in.  If your god is never active in the affairs of other nations, then that is the god Paul doesn't believe in.  Paul’s God is bigger and broader, and embraces every nation.      J. B. Phillips wrote a book many years ago called, Your God Is Too Small.  In it Phillips makes clear the gods he doesn’t believe in.  God is not, he tells us, a "resident policeman," a "parental hangover," a "grand old man," a "pale Galilean, or a “God in a box," to name but a few.  I know it is easy to be loyal to what is in our box, but we have a God who has no boundaries, who does not recognize walls, or rivers that divide countries, or any other man-made division.      Paul does not believe in a God who only dwells up on a mountain, or in the sky, or in a pillar of fire, or in some mysterious place that we cannot inhabit.  He does not believe that God is always distant, always far removed, always trying to catch up and to understand us.  Paul’s God is a God who keeps up with the times, for "He is not far from each one of us, for `In him we live and move and have our being ...., for we are his offspring"'  ('In him we live and move and have our being': some scholars understand this saying to be based on an earlier saying of Epimenides of Knossos (6th century B.C.). 'For we too are his offspring': here Paul is quoting Aratus of Soli, a third-century B.C. poet from Cilicia.)    We have a God who is as near to us as our next breath.  Take a deep breath.  Right now.  God is that close to you.  In Hebrew the word for spirit and breath is the same.     Next to last, Paul does not believe in a god who is created by the imagination of human beings.  "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.”  Paul, when he wrote to the Church at Rome, also made this point (Rom 22-24) "...they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, or birds, or animals, or reptiles."  Paul does not believe in a god that exists only in our minds.   Finally, Paul does not believe in a god who demands nothing from us, expects nothing from us, who is passive in the face of outrageous injustice.  He does not believe in a god who would wind up the universe and then leave it alone to run down.  "Now," says Paul, God "commands all men everywhere to repent, because He had fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He had appointed, and of this He has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead." The God that Paul knows is a God who has great expectations for all his people on earth.  He is a God who wants us to look at our lives and see that we can do better.      Being a Christian is to be on a journey, not to arrive at a destination, and if one thinks that he or she has arrived, it is but more evidence that he or she has not journeyed very far in the Christian life.  The Bible is full of demands, and commands, and expectations that God has of us.  The Spanish theologian, Juan Arias , has written: No, I shall never believe in the God who loves pain;        The God who blesses the new Cains of humanity;        The God who “sends” people to hell;        The God who does not know how to hope;        The God whom only the mature, the wise,      or the comfortably situated can understand;        the God who sometimes regrets having given us free will;        the God who is interested in souls and not in people;        the God who says and feels nothing about the agonizing        problem of suffering humanity;        the God incapable of making everything new;        the God who has never wept,        the God in whom there are no mysteries,        who is not greater than we are;       the God who is not love       and who does not transform into love everything God touches;                         I believe in the other God.   So do I!  Amen

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