Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

God is an integral part of the center of creativity and it is here that I wish to focus. I wrote the story of God’s role in the motorcycle accident twenty years ago to illustrate God’s intimate and persuasive presence. I have deepened and enlarged my vision of God since then, first in a book, Eight Paths to Forgiveness, and more recently in a sermon I offered at Trinity United Methodist Church in East Wenatchee. This enriched vision follows.

It may seem simple to say that God is a Persuasive, Intimate and Gracious presence, yet these three qualities make a world of difference. I will explore each, beginning with a brief description of these three words.

The word  persuasion, points in the direction of calling, luring, inviting, influencing, beckoning, offering or bringing. Scripture speaks in Genesis of God “moving over the face of the waters,” Moses confronts the burning bush and hears the divine call: “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt,” the prophet Isaiah hears the words, “Whom shall I send?” In contrast, there are many images of God which speak of the Lord, King or Almighty who commands. It is in the realm of persuasion versus command where this new understanding of God contrasts with those images.

A new vision of power is announced. Instead of God making happen whatever God wills to happen, God persuades others to create what will happen. Rather than being able to do anything whenever God wills, or have complete unilateral power in the life of humans and the universe, God totally and completely employs persuasive power. Indeed, it is the only form of power which God possesses. This divine power seeks to expand both the freedom and creative power of persons and delights when they employ that power.

I was delighted when I first heard of the power of persuasion. Parts of me were totally disbelieving, having known forceful, coercive, violent power so well. It was as if I entered a candy store!

For me the finest word picture of Grace is Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner. [Mt. 20.1-15] I love the story and return to it again and again. The theme is simple: the owner pays all the workers the same wage even though some have labored in the hot sun all day while others entered the vineyard at later times, some only an hour before the work day ended. The late comers were dumbfounded and utterly surprised while the early risers were downright angry. When confronted by the angry workers the owner replied, “I paid you the daily wage we agreed upon. Would you deny me my generosity?”  

I delight in the vineyard owner’s statement, “Would you deny me my generosity?” It is one of those phrases which has lived and bubbled within me for years. I think his words and actions exhibit grace, giving that which is totally undeserved and unearned rather than deciding by rule, tradition, fairness or justice. I have come to see God in these terms, loving, accepting, gifting without regard to law, rule or justice.

I now understand God’s intimacy as a presence closer than the very words forming within us and, indeed, participating in the very formation of those words. The intimacy is greater even than those with whom we usually associate that word: father, mother, sister, brother, spouse, children, or beloved. Whispering is a word I like to use to describe this closeness. Even more, God is empathic to the utmost, feeling every feeling we experience in just the same tone and intensity as we do. I delight in a description of this closeness in Psalm 139 where the psalmist exclaims that he just cannot get away from Yahweh. If he ascends into the heavens, God is there, and lo, if he descends into Sheol, God is right there too. He simply cannot shake off God. I am convinced that I cannot either. On my desk I have a beautiful plaque which I bought in Sedona, Arizona several years ago. It reads “Bidden or Not Bidden God is Present.”

Even more powerful and authoritative for me is the word used by Jesus to address God: Abba! This Aramaic word, usually translated Daddy or Dadda, is the language of a small child. Since there were a number of other names by which God was addressed during worship, any of which Jesus could have used, it seems to me he must have spoken from the depths of his own experience when he chose this word. A name taken from the nursery rather than the sanctuary is clearly quite a departure. I find it true that Jesus knew God in his daily life as Dadda.

There is some basis in scripture to assume that God’s presence in each of our emerging centers of creativity is intimate. In my own experience, I ponder whether the tender woman who comforted me when I was a lonely and sad boy may have been a moment with the grace of God. At that stage of my life I would not have recognized some symbol of God, but a woman, Yes! Dr. Marcus Borg calls such moments of intimacy, “thin places.” I agree!

Fitting these three words together like pieces in a puzzle allowed me to picture God’s active presence in each of my ongoing centers of creativity. My concept of God developed into the following: God is intimately present in every occasion of my experience, persuasively offering realistic possibilities of my becoming more complex, intense, and beautiful. God graciously felt all that I experienced in the previous moment before offering these possibilities for my new becoming moment. God feels my enjoyment or sadness about the new being I create. God then offers new possibilities which take into account whom I became in the previous moment.

In my youth there was a song which began, “Three little words….” Naturally, those words were “I love you.” The continuing lyrics of the song went on to say what a difference these words made. Giving and receiving love trumps everything else. The lover and the beloved dance in the street, in the rain, anywhere! I am saying that about persuasion, intimacy, and grace. They make a dramatic difference by offering a new pair of glasses which transforms the way I see myself and the universe around me. It is that transformation I now wish to share.

I will focus on creation, evolution, human freedom, scripture, the sacred-secular division, and the future. It has long been held that God created the universe out of nothing, “ex nihilo.” From the vision of a center of creativity it would be stated that God lured and persuaded whatever was present into increasing levels of complexity and intensity. Rather than God commanded, it would be “the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.” The difference is between an almighty God, who totally controls by using unilateral power over entities which have no power or creativity within themselves, and a persuading God who calls, “Come forth.” Those early entities which lacked the consciousness that we humans possess still were subjects who had freedom to create and transform themselves. I affirm that “God moved over the face of the waters” and continues to “move over” all of life and the universe.

I am able to chart a middle course between creationism, and its later form as intelligent design, and deterministic Darwinian evolution. I affirm that God played a major and  continuing role in the emergence and transformation of the universe and so I would agree with creationism and intelligent design on that point. I would not agree that random mutation and natural selection tell the whole story. On the other hand I would affirm the theory of evolution in its description of a universe that came about through many fits, starts, jumps, leaps and tiny transformations over billions of years rather than the seven day creation which Archbishop James Ussher writing in 1660 determined occurred in the year 4004 BCE. I am compelled to believe, by embracing the center of creativity, that this same process was occurring with all entities over all time. I doubt that there is one theory which explains the evolution of atoms, molecules, cells, plants, and animals while an entirely different theory explains human evolution.
   
A persuasive God allows me to celebrate true human freedom. I affirm that we really do make our own decisions. God invites and we decide. I contrast this with the view that God makes everything happen that does happen. God is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who commands in a unilateral fashion every event in the universe. A variation of this view is that God could make everything happen but chooses to allow certain events to occur. Problems arise when we have acts of evil, the holocaust, the 9/11 tragedy, and the shootings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. I am unwilling to search the mind of God to try to fathom why God either caused or allowed such events.

There are persons who say that we cannot know the mind of God, nevertheless these events somehow fit with God’s grand plan, which we will know in heaven. Others say that we need to look at the good which so often comes from such evil. I recall a client, a young mother of two children who was involved in an auto accident in which another woman in the other car was killed leaving two children motherless. She asked, “Why did God take her but let me live?” After I listened to her deep sorrow and survivor guilt, I asked if she would be willing to consider another way of understanding the accident. A God of persuasion who lures each event and who feels fully with all involved in the event has proved convincing to me. She began to heal as she saw that God had not willed the death of the other.

Scripture is another area in which persuasion makes a difference. If God is offering new possibilities to each human event, including those in which a person is composing scripture, then all such creative moments are a blended product of both the divine and the human. God’s whispers, lures, and invitations are always expressed through human voices. In this manner I am unable to name scripture the Word of God, as if it represents pristine, pure, timeless revelations of the divine, while I am ready to call it the interpretation of God by that person or that community in that situation at that time.

The division of the sacred and the secular has been with us for several centuries. Some things are holy, others are not. I have learned to see all things as sacred, because God is present within them and in vastly varying degrees has played a role in their coming into being and continuing. The influence of God may be tremendous or God may be totally ignored. I applaud the psalmist who affirmed: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”[Ps19.1]  I have come to see the universe as a vast array of minute bursts of energy in which God is creating.

A radical difference caused by affirming a persuasive God is found in the understanding of the future. While I will focus at length on this subject later, at this point I can say that if God is persuading and humans and other entities are deciding, then the future is not known until these decisions are made.

I turn now to the vision of God as intimate. Several images have been helpful to me: web, encircled, embedded, intertwined, bound together, connected. God is like the glue which holds everything together. God is within me in my tiny moments of creativity and God is within everyone and everything, thus also beyond us all. I find this concept mind-blowing, but I like it and it rings true. God is close and empathic, feeling what we feel, affecting us and being affected by us. Both the depth of intimacy and the vastness of intimacy speak to me of the grandeur and mystery of God.

I have found that a number of quite practical thoughts may be drawn from this divine intimacy. Every war is a civil war to God, as God creates and feels with all participants, whether combatants or civilians. I recall a vivid scene from All Quiet on the Western Front in which a French soldier jumped into a bomb crater in no man’s land and is immediately killed by a German soldier. Trapped by streaking gunfire over the crater, the German soldier slowly approaches the dead one, looking at photos in his wallet and coming to see that he too, though called enemy, is a part of the human family to which they both belong.

An invocation as it is usually offered is totally unnecessary. I speak from personal experience as one who offered invocations for fourteen years in the Wenatchee North Rotary Club and as a pastor who is the one always called upon to bless the food. We simply do not need to “invoke God” to be with us at table. “Be present at our table Lord, be here and everywhere adored….” God is always intimately present! For me it is more appropriate to express gratitude for God’s presence, the gifts of the earth and offer an openness to God’s invitations during this gathering.

Some years ago it came to my awareness that since God is intimately present with all persons, then it follows that God must experience every sexual embrace from both sides. I must admit at that moment to feeling some envy of God! It feels so good from one side, imagine how delightful it would feel from both sides. Expanding that thought I considered that if the embrace is forced, violent or hurtful, the perpetrator also hurts God as God feels with the other. It does cause one to pause, then, in considering how to be loving, kind, tender, and mutual in a sexual embrace.

The intertwining of God’s intimacy among all the creation also leads to some interesting conclusions. God is utterly, absolutely, fully, completely relational. If God is supreme in any way it is in relatedness. The ancient Hebrews who created the three-storied universe of heaven, earth and hell designated angels as the messengers of God, flying their courses between heaven and earth. While I know people who have experienced angels and I do not doubt their encounters, I think that angels as known earlier are outdated. If God is intimately present with all at every moment, what is the need of the messenger?

I find the web of God to be evident in a number of fascinating experiments which appear to reveal our interconnectedness and our affect upon each other. Prayer affects the growth of plants. Cutting a tree, as measured with sensitive electronic equipment, affects nearby trees.. Dropping live shrimp into boiling water in one room affects living shrimp in the next room. Water is affected by written words facing inward to the liquid in the jar, according to Masaru Emoto in The Secret Life of Water. Positive words yield beautiful complex crystals while the negative words bring forth undeveloped, gnarled and distorted crystals. Healing at a distance has been studied and yielded positive results.

The arts and humanities have spoken of our ties to one another. The lyrics of a song popular during my early adulthood states: “You are always in my heart, even though we’re far apart….” John Donne, the 16th English poet, upon hearing the village church bell tolling a villager’s funeral, writes: “Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

I find all of these ideas fascinating as they speak of an intimate God. This stands in stark contrast to the Greek God who was totally separate from the world and totally unaffected by the world. Intimacy speaks a different language than both the God of Greek philosophers and the God of Deists. These seventeen century scientists, who following the image of the Strassburg clock, knew God as the great Clockmaker who made and started the clock then let left it with natural laws to run on its own.

I affirm that the third quality of God is grace. God always acts in a gracious manner. We are loved and persuaded to love in each of our moments of creativity. God never becomes distant, never is estranged, never leaves, never abandons, never gives up on us, never turns away from us. Regardless of how we create ourselves or how we act, God is graciously present.

Affirming this means that I had to re-think forgiveness, in which traditionally we begin by feeling distant and estranged from both the person we had offended and God. In worship we cry out, “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison,” Lord forgive, Christ forgive! I concluded that we should express our regret over our action and thank God for God’s continuing gracious presence. Our acts do have consequences for us and for God. If I pull the trigger or thrust the knife, rather than dropping the weapon, which God would wish me to do, God feels that violent moment with me, feels the excruciating pain of the victim, then offers new relevant and realistic possibilities for my next moment. They are quite different depending on whether I squeezed, thrust or let go of the weapon. But God does not leave us!

I still recall an image of God offered by a person in a study group. He said that God is like a bird dog! Well, that got our attention as we all broke out in laughter. He explained. The dog sights a pheasant in the field and immediately freezes in a pointing position. If the hunter ignores this signal and walks in a different direction, the dog simply breaks the position and moves on through the field beginning a new search and possibly a new point. We all gained a new and playful insight.

I projected this image of grace onto the common picture of judgment. It seems that many of us learn that God is gracious now but will judge later. Watch out! In the lives of individuals that would happen at our death when we “meet our maker.” For humanity it would mean judgment day when Christ returns in glory to judge all the peoples of the earth. Since I do really affirm that God is grace, then to me neither of these is true.

 I think that even a third grader could figure out that in these scenarios there is an inconsistency between who God is now and who God is later. I am convinced that God is grace through and through, today and tomorrow. I think that we have gained many of our ideas about God’s harsh judgment from Dante’s 12th century Inferno. He portrays how all those evil citizens of Florence whom he loathed will get their just due in hell. In each case, the punishment symbolically fits the evil doing, the one who embezzles ends up covered to his neck in sticky goo!

It is true that our acts do have consequences now and later, but they are of a different order. As we die and enter God’s life, we will expand both our awareness and our empathy. We will become aware of who we could have become through God’s invitations in each creative moment and will feel the exact feelings of others when they heard our words or experienced our actions. We will feel what they felt! Look out, Adolf Hitler! Blessings, Mother Teresa! This description of life following death is only touched upon here, and I will elaborate later.

For me, one of the most powerful implications of God as total grace is a need to re-think our Christian tradition of original sin and salvation from sin. I have never liked this story and it became increasingly clear to me why. As I teach, I like to draw two large circles on the white board, one in which I write two words, Grace and Righteous, in the other one word, Grace. The story of the “fall of humanity,” or the entering of “original sin” into the world, tells of the disobedience of the first humans and the biological inheritance of an inclination to sin from one generation to the next. Later generations simply could not avoid inheriting this sin and by their continuing disobedience compounded that sin. Humans were helpless, they could not keep from sinning.

God is both righteous and graceful. God demands that there be some consequence, some payment for all this accumulated sin. This payment was understood by the Hebrew ritual in which sin was removed through the sacrifice of an animal to God. This sin offering was accomplished by the sinner taking a pigeon or lamb to the priest who would slay it and place the body on the embers of the altar. The rising smoke would offer a pleasant scent to God and lead God to forgive.

An equally powerful image was the community gathering for removal of their sin. The priest takes into his body all the sin of the people, places his hands upon the head of a goat standing in their midst and transfers all the sins of the community to the animal. The goat is then led into the wilderness to die either by starvation after being tethered to a bush or driven off a cliff. This is the “scapegoat” in contrast to the lamb who served to take away the sin of an individual. God’s righteousness demanded such a price, payment, sacrifice for the generations of accumulated sin.

Thus, there was a need for a symbolic pure lamb or goat without blemish, an offering not contaminated by inherited sin. Only one born of a virgin, thereby avoiding this contamination at birth, who had lived a pure life without sin could possibly pay the price. This is Jesus Christ, who though without sin died on the cross for the sins of the world.

I am moved to share a few words of my understanding before returning to the second circle of grace. I have never imagined that my sin could be removed by someone else, let alone by the death of an innocent animal. This job seemed to be mine. I am not an ancient Hebrew. Thus, I reject the Hebrew methods of removing individual and community sin. But even more seriously I am stunned by the image of God as one so violent as to require blood for the removal of sin. I am dumbfounded by what this says about the basic nature of God. I am disgusted by the idea of a father exacting the death of his son, since I thought that infanticide went out of practice when Abraham dropped his knife an instant before the sacrificial slaying of his son, Isaac. For me, this form of payment or retribution does total violence to a God of grace. In addition, there is no forgiveness offered without payment, which seems contrary to the message of Jesus. Surely, we can do better in our understanding of God and God’s relationship with humanity.

I turn to the other circle illustrating God which contains the one word, grace. If this is so, then there would not be a demand from God for justice and righteousness, and no necessity for the unblemished and sinless savior. This means that we are freed to see the person of Jesus and hear the message of Jesus in different terms. Rather than focusing on the blood of Christ, we could attend to the words of Jesus as revealing God.

I am excited about the words of Jesus, aphorisms, his wonderful one-liners, and parables, his short pithy stories of everyday life always ending with a surprising zinger. I will sing their praises later as I share in greater depth about Jesus. Now, I will express my conviction that Jesus knew a graceful God in the depth of his being. I conclude my present discussion of how a totally graceful God brings forth fundamental changes in some traditional doctrines.

I celebrate the God of persuasion, intimacy, and grace. I am deeply satisfied that this is the God who infuses every becoming moment of my life. I am comforted to know that this God is with me in life and beyond my death. Yes, I have sung “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” many times in the Hallelujah Chorus not because I believe those acclimations, but because I love to sing. I sing authentically of the Divine Lover, The Poet of the Universe, The Caring Friend, The Companion, The Fellow Sufferer Who Understands, and Dadda-Mama. I live with the assurance that the Graceful One, in every waking moment of the day and in every moment of sleep, offers the invitation: “Come Dance with Me!”