Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Rev. Jamie

Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Jamie
A Few More Thoughts about God
One of the things I usually say about God is that God is not an old, white man. God is, especially, not Santa Claus in a robe instead of in a red suit. God is not a man or a woman, for that matter. One of the ways that we can think about God in a realistic sense is to go beyond our images of people and try to consider that God is spirit. Of course, that makes God really hard to visualize, but it also frees up our concepts of God to allow them to be bigger and deeper than what we may have considered before!
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God is love. Even in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), while God is sometimes portrayed in the human style of being angry, there are plenty of references to God’s love for people. God is referred to as a shepherd, for instance; it’s one of the most endearing and attractive pictures of God in the whole Bible! The prophets, admittedly, talk about God’s anger with people’s failure to treat each other with justice, fairness and kindness, but they also portray a deity who is angry because of offered love that is rejected time and again. However, forgiveness is always possible in these depictions of God.

I try to remember that God is omniscient, that God knows everything. When we pray, if we can remember that God knows what we are talking about even before we utter anything, perhaps our prayers could look more like a comfortable friendship where not many words are necessary, where just “being with God” is enough.

God is more than we can imagine! Theologians have argued for centuries about whether or not God changes. I don’t see what the attraction is to a stagnant being who doesn’t ever change its mind! If God doesn’t change, why do we pray? Don’t most of us at one time or another ask God to change, to ease up on us or those we love, to bring peace to the world, to help the poor?

Our understanding of God must grow with us. God is revealing things to us all the time if we are awake and aware. Go stand outside on a clear, starry night and see if you don’t experience some of the hugeness of God. Stand on a mountaintop with waves upon waves of mountains before you and realize just how big God is. Walk on a dark beach at night, with the deafening sound of waves crashing and feel what it is to be in awe of power and might. Our vision of God needs to grow and change. It’s a constant challenge in our spiritual walk.

There’s so much more to say about God than you want to read here. This Lent, one thing to give up is a limited understanding of God. If God is doing a new thing, as Isaiah 43: 19 says, then possibly, that new thing is continuing. The old has passed away, St. Paul says in 2nd Corinthians. If God is doing it, we can be part of it!

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