What We Don't Believe

What We Don't Believe--October 21, 2016

"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits--who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's." [Psalm 103:1-5]

There is an old cliché that says when you cross paths with someone who is fiercely certain that there is no God, the best response you can make--rather than getting defensive and shouting Bible verses at them or threatening them with descriptions of hell--is to start a conversation with this invitation: "Ok--tell me about the god you don't believe in."

Like I say, that is by now a fairly well-worn line, so you may well have heard it, or even used it, at some point before.  But there's a reason that clichés are cliché, after all--there is often something durable about them, something reliable that makes us keep going back to them like wells on the family farm.  And in this case, there is a decent amount of value in reframing a conversation with the sentence, "Tell me about the god you don't believe in," because it does something both to the devout believer and the hardened skeptic.  For the diehard, devoted, Bible-reading crowd, it forces us to consider that if people have come to doubt the existence of God it may well be at least in part because we who say we believe in God have sometimes been terrible P.R. people for the divine.  And for those who struggle with faith, it opens the door to the possibility that maybe the caricature of God in pop culture isn't what Jesus had in mind anyhow when he prayed to his Abba.

Quite often, the skeptic who cannot bring him or herself to a faith in any sort of deity has only ever heard religious people talk about a god who looks more like the old Greek Zeus than the Spirit of God who brooded over the waters of creation in Genesis.  Quite often, people have been given this picture of the divine as a bearded old man, who wields lightning bolts and capriciously throws them at mortals who break his arbitrary rules about what thou shalt and shall not do, and who sides with the strong, the popular, the well-to-do, and the winners. 

Quite often, in other words, the picture of "God" that is propped up in the wider world is a sort of two-dimensional underwriter of the status quo.  You're rich?  Well, that's a sign of divine favor rewarding you for all your hard work.  You're poor? Clearly, punishment from the same celestial CEO in the sky who is punishing you for being lazy.  Ostracized and excluded? You must be an especially reprehensible sinner that any respectable deity would never associate with.  You came out on top against your opponents?  You must have received divine favor and a heavenly endorsement. 

There is a word for all of that thinking, and it is the primary ingredient in fertilizer. 

None of that, at least, is what the real voices of the Scriptures have in mind when they talk about who God is and what makes God great.  The God of the Old and New Testaments is decidedly less predictable--forgiving stinkers who seemed to be just itching for lightning bolts, lifting up the lowly, promising good news for those who have been labeled losers, outsiders, and unacceptable, and who, in Jesus, seems much less interested in decreeing rules than we would have expected.  And instead of being some sort of cosmic stamp of approval on "the way things are," the Scriptures give us this rather subversive story of a God who takes on tyrants, emperors, pharaohs, and other assorted pompous blowhards, and takes them down a few pegs, from freeing the slaves under Pharaoh's nose, to planting resistance to Nebuchadnezzar and his gold statues meant to trumpet his own greatness, to Jesus casually mocking out the puppet king Herod, to secretly getting the apostle Paul sent to the capital of the empire to bring the liberating news of Jesus to the very center of communication in the ancient world, and making it all happen on Rome's dime.  It's Mary's song, praising a God who takes down the overly-inflated powerful and "winners" from their boardroom amchairs and fills the hungry with good things.  It's the promise to Paul that weakness is where divine strength really gets seen.  It's the hype in the book of Revelation looking for a Lion to appear, and then discovering that the hero is a Lamb all along.

None of that is what people usually assume when they talk generically about the existence or non-existence of God/gods.  Usually, it is just a question of whether you believe there is a great white-bearded man in the sky keeping order and preserving the way things are. 

And so, part of our calling as witnesses is to remind folks--ourselves included--that we do not believe in Zeus, nor in some generic, store-brand version of Zeus, either.  The God we have come to know and see in the Scriptures is decidedly less interested in zapping, and infinitely more invested in healing.  The God of Israel, the Abba on whom Jesus calls, doesn't prop up emperors and tyrants, but whispers to the heartbroken and bone-weary, "It will be all right--I will be here with you.  I will make you whole."

That is the God in whom we believe.  That is the God the psalmist cries out to--not a celestial CEO firing us when we mess up, but the One "who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases."  When we cross paths with people who are dead sure there is no god, it is worth asking if they are picturing the first or the second--because it just might turn out that we don't believe in that false first god, either.  Not a cosmic man behind a curtain pulling levers like the Wizard of Oz.  Not a celestial Boss figure doling out punishments with reckless ease.  Not a crutch for history's powerful to exploit the weak.  But rather the living God is the Healer of our sicknesses, the Liberator of slaves, the One giving hope to the captives and exile, and the Source of mercy for the world.

Who do we really believe God is?  And can we speak honestly and graciously about the God we have met in Jesus, the God who is praised here in the psalms--the God who heals this world full of sinners and sell-outs as a gift of sheer grace?

Lord Jesus, we praise you for who you are to us and for us--thank you for healing and for mercy.  Let us re-present you for the world as you really are... the source of grace for all things.