Faithful Pathways: Understanding

After Jesus feeds 5000, we see him walk on water, then heal a "boatload" of people when he gets back on dry land. This has been a series of stories that shows us God's power...Jesus as God incarnate exhibits the same power. It asks the unspoken question over and over, "Who is the Jesus?"

I suppose it also asks the question "who is God?" Reading a new book of research on the "spiritual but not religious," Belief Without Borders, one of the primary questions explored is "who is God" to you.

The answers astound me. Very few people define the God I understand to be God. God, for them, is a deity who created the world, but absents Gods-self from it; a white-haired-old-man sitting in perpetual judgment; a therapeutic presence available in trouble, but otherwise content to let us live as we wish; some force of nature; negative energy...the list is literally as long as the participants.

A God that creates the world so that all may live to their fullest, creating us with "free will" so that relationship might be authentic and meaningful (instead of forcing us to be in relationship with God), and then constantly working to right our "wrongs" as we fail to live in community with each other--no one seems to define God this way. Understanding God as unfathomable, self-giving love in this process or correcting and reconciling and transforming is simply absent.

Which challenges me...why don't more people understand God the way I do? Perhaps they do, and they are in some institutional congregation...not self-defined as "spiritual but not religious."

The Bible seeks to have the conversation...sometimes more effectively than other times--how human is that. But the ultimate conversation is around the love of God for all of us...and the work of God to bring us back to God and to each other.

We simply have to learn how to have this conversation with people as part of the pathways we are asked to walk as disciples. People are not going to come into the church to hear the preacher say it. We cannot depend on TV preachers to come anywhere close to what needs to be said, what needs to be lived....

So we must start with understanding it ourselves...that may take a lifetime...but in the space between birth and death, we should talk with a boatload of people....