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Who do you know God as?
When I was a child, my first grade religion teacher, Sister Louisa, was trying to explain to us what heaven was like. It was the place that God lived, she said, and it’s the most wonderful place you could ever be. But a group of 6-year-olds couldn’t picture that. So she said, “Imagine your favorite thing in the world. Like, the thing you love the most and always want to have with you. Now, multiply that to infinity. That’s what heaven is like!”
Well, when I was 6 years old, my favorite thing in the world was Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. The orange powdered cheese kind. So I imagined heaven as the most glorious, endless bowl of glowing cheesy covered noodles. And the God of that sort of place? Well, that God was pretty awesome, to give everyone their own personal utopia. That God must love me very much. Must love everyone very much.
I was lucky, I believe, to know God in this way from my formative years. And so it was particularly devastating for me when that understanding of God totally changed. I was 13 years old and my beloved grandfather was dying of cancer. I remember praying so hard, harder than I’d ever prayed before, hoping beyond hope that if I prayed hard enough that God, who loved me and everyone including my grandfather so much, would cure him and let him live. But instead, he died. God became utterly confusing to me – and quite the traitor. I knew God as dispassionate and detached from us, with ears deaf to our prayers and a heart unmoved by our suffering.
It probably goes without saying that I came to know God in more positive ways again as the years went on – and eventually I came to know God as one who is bigger than any one church, who might even call an awkward scared Armenian girl to step beyond the boundaries of her diasporan community to follow a call her own culture forbade. I came to know God as the God of liberation, of justice, who is beyond culture or gender, and even beyond doctrine and church walls, but never beyond love.
Who do you know God as?
Paul’s words in front of the Areopagus draw us toward this question. “As I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things… For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”
Paul’s message was not merely about religion. It was about revelation.
Not what humanity imagines God to be — but who God has revealed Godself to be.
How we know God shapes how we live, how we worship, how we suffer, how we hope, and perhaps most importantly in these times, how we witness. We cannot tell of something or someone that we do not know. So who do you know God as? How has God been revealed to you?
Perhaps you see God as distant and detached, uncaring and unmoved by our suffering. Perhaps you’ve prayed for a miracle, or been diagnosed with cancer, or been betrayed by the church, and any knowledge of God as loving is called into question. The Palestinian theologian Munther Isaac says that for Palestinians, living under violent occupation, “When we talk about the nature of God, we think of the crucified God. We think of the incarnate Jesus who cried on the cross ‘my god my god why have you forsaken me…’ the God who entered our world and challenged injustice form within, being himself a victim of injustice.”
He echoes the words of Paul reminding the Athenians who search for God and perhaps grope for God that “indeed God is not far from each one of us.”
Who do we know God as?
We don’t know a lot, but we can know this: God is near. Near to us.
Throughout history, humanity has searched for God through philosophy, religion, wealth, power, pleasure, and achievement.
But the gospel tells us that while humanity was searching for God, God was pursuing humanity.
And because God is always beyond what we can ask or imagine, our search for God can often lead us to create our own idols when we grow frustrated with the unknowing.
Paul challenges the idols of Athens:
“We should not think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone…”
The Athenians had carved gods they could manage, control, and contain.
And while our idols may look different today, we still create them. We create idols of money, success, politics, comfort, technology, relationships, status, and even ourselves. An idol is anything we trust more than God, anything we love more than God, anything we fear more than God. The danger of idols is not merely that they are false —it is that they shrink God down into something manageable.
We don’t know a lot, but we know God as one who cannot be reduced to idols, because are God’s offspring. And that is important. We don’t know what God looks like, but we know God as our Source — one in whose image we are all created. And if we reflect God, in all our incredible diversity, then we can only know God as one who can never be reduced to an image, a golden statue, or a single person.
Who do you know God as?
You might know God as love, judge, distant parent, creative force, caterer of endless macaroni and cheese… But until we know who God is, we will never fully know who we are.
In recent years, as I’ve navigated divorce and cancer, I must confess I’ve come to know God as something other than liberator and love. There were many dark nights of the soul where God was absent. But as I walked this road with you, dear St. Michael’s, I also came to know God as something more profound: community. There were days when I knew God was near because you made it so. There were days I was able to put the idol of certainty on the shelf because I knew this community was holding me.
So as we ask who God is, may we stop worshiping lesser things.
May we stop searching for life in lifeless idols.
May we know who we are in the One who is nearer than we imagined.
Because the God we seek is not unknown.
The God we search for is the God whose offspring we are.
The God who dwells in us and is revealed among us – the body of Christ.
Amen.
