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“Seeing God”
Acts 14:8-18
A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
How many of
you have seen God? I know that’s a bit
of an esoteric question, but it’s a question worth asking, don’t you think? Jesus told Thomas and the others, “you believe because you see.
Blessed are those who believe but don’t see.”
We see God
all the time, don’t we? Some people have
seen God in creation. Others have seen
God in visions. Some have seen God in
acts of good will and courageous stances.
We are all made in the image of God, or so it says in the book of
Genesis. So I guess we could say that as
we look at each other, we have seen God.
Mary Daly
said in her book, “Beyond God the Father” that God could be and perhaps should
be seen as a verb instead of a noun.
Think of God being an action, not only an action figure.
So if God
is everywhere and we have seen God, what difference does that make? It all depends upon what we do once we see
and recognize God.
Acts
14:8-18 recounts the humorous story of when Paul performed a healing. The people of Lystra
immediately called Paul and Barnabas gods.
Then they began offering sacrifices to them and worshipping at their
feet.
Now, the
people had never heard of Jesus. What
they had heard about was the story told by Ovid, that two gods once visited the
town of
Paul and
Barnabas received gifts. The people
didn’t want to take any chances and incur the wrath of the gods. Lesser healers may have taken the gifts and
let them believe they were gods. Who
would it hurt, really? I can just see Paul and Barnabas basking in
the glory, imagining the social programs that could be launched with the
proceeds of the offerings of the people of Lystra. But they were honest people. Paul and Barnabas told them that they served
God, but are not gods. They then told
them about Jesus and this God that they served.
We know of
God through scripture, don’t we? We see
all sorts of wonderful things around us, but we define it as God because of our
knowledge of scripture.
How do we
give authority to what we hold as scripture?
Is it holy because it makes the
most sense?
Is it holy because it’s familiar, like
a good old shirt?
Is it holy because other people
said it’s holy throughout history?
If so, does that mean that we read
history from the perspectives of the winners?
What if we were to read history
from the loser’s perspective—the marginalized, the outcast? Would it change our faith, make it better,
weaker?
Some of us
have ventured into examining ancient texts that have not made their way into
the Bible. We have such great
questioners and thinkers here in this congregation.
One of you
wrote to me this week, “Which miracle would be greater, God using a group of
self important men with an agenda to create his gospel, or God allowing these
other gospels to be preserved through time against the best efforts of these
men? While I still find that question interesting, the bigger question
for me has become; Does God even work that way? Also I wonder what level
of historical fact is necessary to make ones faith genuine. If I
found out for instance that Mary was not a virgin, (I think that she probably
was not) then would the foundations of my faith be destroyed? What do I
personally require as proof of legitimacy to follow any set of teachings?”
While I
don’t pretend to have all of the answers to all of those questions, let me pose
this response. If you see something
beautiful, redemptive, something that gives you hope, then that is of God, no
matter what mask of what religion it wears.
If you see something that embodies
the ways of love, mercy, compassion and peace, then it is of God. Given this criteria, we have seen God.
It seems to
me that we are too interested in who has seen God and who hasn’t. We’re too interested in saying “my god’s
better than your god”. We condemn those
who don’t believe like we do without seeing the spark of God within them.
My friend and mentor George Williamson wrote a book a number of years ago that never got published, perhaps because of its dangerous content. It was called “Religious Evil and the Breakthrough of God.” He reminds us that there is a whole lot of evil in the Bible. There is violence and human sacrifice and wars and bloodshed and oppression. A lot of it is written as coming from God. The Bible in this context becomes a divinely sanctioned manual of religious violence. And yet, within the pages are the places where God breaks through. God breaks through with a message of liberation, of compassion, of mercy, of peace. Some of the breakthroughs of God are the exodus, the numerous healing stories, the lifting up of women’s leadership, the audacious prophetic rumblings of Amos and Hosea and Jeremiah calling the people back to their heritage of mercy, compassion and peace. The Sermon on the Mount and its alternative universe of blessing is a breakthrough of God. In our time, we can see the Suffragist movement, the anti-war protestors, the LGBT uprising that has a growing component of religious-based inclusion all as examples of the breakthrough of God. These are ways that we see God.
So where do
you see God?
I see God
in the actions of this faith community.
I see God
in the knitting and crocheting of prayer shawls.
I see God
in the faces of those who serve food and who are served when we do Loaves and
Fishes.
I see God
in the bursting forth of lilac buds and tulip flowers after months of tundra
dormancy.
I see God
in the compassion that we continue to share in the midst of a world that says
compassion is weakness and an affront to real success which is known as personal
monetary wealth. This is the popular
view of salvation and it is antithetical to the God I know and love.
I see God
breaking through the pages of scripture when we have the courage and the
stamina to wrestle with texts that don’t seem to make any sense.
I see God
in the people who take to the streets to call for an end to bloodshed.
I see God
in a baby’s wondering eyes, so alive with possibility.
I see God
in works of art that suck you in and make you look hard to try to get into the
mind ad heart of the artist.
I see and
hear God in the music that we share together and that we hear from our choirs.
I see God
in the scrapbooks of our lives and in the waking up to face a new day.
I see God
in the mountains and the rivers, the sky and the ground, the fire and the ice.
I see God
in the animals that nibble on our tulips.
For better or worse our gardens are a part of their food chain.
I had a
conversation with one of you this week.
One of you said, “I’m not always sure there is a God. But when there’s an opportunity to do
something that I can do, I do it and stop intellectualizing. Maybe that proves God’s existence more than
any books I read.”
I encourage
you to look for God.
Look for
God in the bursting forth of the greenery of trees this past week.
Look for
God in the tulips busting forth.
Look for
God in the presence of friends and family.
Look for
God in the beauty of music.
Look for
God in the eyes of a small child.
Look for
God in the actions of those trying in our own fallible way to do good in this world.
Look for
God in the cycles of life, birth, sickness, death, healing.
The point
is, look for God. If you look, you might
just see God. That’s the point, really,
isn’t it?
We believe
and we see. Thanks be
to God.