FINDING GOD IN EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE

Psalm 19; Acts 17:28; I John 4.

Let’s think about God this morning. We are in church, after all. Let’s focus on God.

What do we mean by God? Where is God? Where do we find God?

After all, we can’t see God. So how do we know God’s there at all?

Lots of people ask these questions these days. To many of us, God seems to be absent.

This is a key question for us in the church. After all, what is the church without God? We can socialize somewhere else. We can seek justice, and do charity in other ways, without bothering about God.

So God seems irrelevant to many people. No doubt that’s why, or at least partly why, there are fewer people in church these days.

One woman, who had had a hard life said to me: “What’s God ever done for me? I haven’t seen any miracles lately.”

She told me that when she was a little girl, her mother became very ill. She prayed, repeatedly, persistently, to God to make her better. But her mother just became more ill and finally died, still in her 40’s. So, she said: “Who needs God?”

I get it. I appreciate how she feels. It’s a common experience and a common feeling. People struggle with terrible illnesses, physical and mental. Many are victims of accidents or violent weather.

Sometimes the world just seems to be a chaos, and we don’t normally see supernatural divine interventions.

If we’re going to find God in everyday life, we’re going to have to look for God not in supernatural miracles, but in the ordinary things of life.

First let’s consider the general meaning of the word “God.” The word “God” is not confined to Christians, of course. Jews and Muslims, at least, believe in one Creator God, as Christians do.

In general, I’d say the word “God,” in most religions, means the Ultimate Source of everything, and the Ultimate destiny of everything. And the Ultimate meaning of everything.

To say there is no God is to say there is no Origin, no eternal Source. No final destination either. And no meaning to anything.

If there is no God, then life really has no meaning at all, because we came from nowhere, and we’re going nowhere. It’s all a big stupid accident.

Yet our creed says: “We are not alone. We live in God’s world. We believe in God who has created and is creating.”

To put it in different words: There is Mind and Intelligence, Meaning and Purpose underlying our world, and our lives too have meaning and purpose.

We come from God, and are going to God. And we are here for a purpose.

Now, why would we believe in such a thing, in face of all the nonsense, all the misery and disaster that goes on in this world? Why believe in a God that we cannot see, and who lets bad things happen to us?

Well, to begin with, we might get a clue from our scriptures this morning. First Psalm 19. This is a magnificent poem, written several centuries before Christ, an ancient Hebrew hymn:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the vault of the sky reveals God’s handiwork…. There is no speech or language; their voices are not heard. But their sound goes out to all the lands, and their words to the ends of the earth.”

The poet is saying: The realm of nature speaks. The world around us proclaims God the Creator. He’s talking about the sky, of course, which is a source of so much beauty and wonder.

But not only the sky. Consider also the tumultuous power, the splendid beauty of the world, its forests and seas, its myriad animals and plants, its order and regularity –

All of this too proclaims to us loudly and clearly, an unfathomable Power, a Mind, a Purpose, and a Meaning that undergirds our world.

We have a similar text in the New Testament: The apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, wrote:

“Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen, through the things God has made.”

Maybe you remember a popular song of the 1950’s, which conveys much the same meaning: Remember “I Believe?” “Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf, or see the sky, then I know why, I believe.”

Now this could be an abstract argument for the existence of God, but does it have any impact on somebody who endures terrible suffering, or grief?

Well, yes, the beauty of the world can have a profound affect on someone’s life.

I wonder if any of you saw the movie “The Colour Purple?’ It was popular a few years ago, based on a novel by Alice Walker.

Whoopi Goldberg was the star of this film. She played a young African American girl in her early teens, by the name of Celie. This was in Georgia, the southern states, 1930’s.

(I’ll tell the story in my own words, as I remember the movie.)

Celie’s life was a scene out of hell. She was regularly raped, and abused, beaten and insulted. She had to work hard for long hours every day. She was often hungry.

No divine intervention was to be seen. No miracles protected her from the terrible things that were happening to her.

But Celie believed in God. She went to the local black congregation, where the preacher told her that God loved her, that she was God’s precious daughter, that Jesus loved her, and forgave all her sins; and would always be with her, and would finally take her to be with him in heaven.

Besides that, there was the fellowship of the church. In church there were many people whose lives were just as hard as hers. There she was treated decently, with respect and affection.

The gospel message of the black church gave her dignity and hope.

But one guy said to her: Ah, Celie. Don’t kid yourself. There ain’t no God in heaven. God ain’t gonna to do nothin’ for you. And when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

Celie was shaken by this. She was in a panic. She wondered if this might be true. How could she go on living if there was no God who loved her?

But when she walked down the road that day she saw a field of beautiful flowers. Celie had an eye for beauty. She saw some purple flowers, and purple was her favourite colour. (Maybe like that one depicted in our bulletin this morning. Maybe beautiful purple irises.)

She thought to herself: How could there be a colour purple, if there ain’t no God?

She thought, there must be a good and beautiful God who had made the colour purple! The beauty of the flowers comforted her and assured her.

She would continue to believe in Jesus, and that God loved her. She was sustained to live another day.

She had found God not in some supernatural miracle, but in something ordinary, a purple flower.

Well, it’s not a very logical argument. It may seem rather sentimental. But for this simple girl it was powerful. Perhaps there was more depth and wisdom to be found in that simple girl than in the most sophisticated philosopher.

On a daily basis she was sustained against the power of evil, through her simple faith.

Many years ago I read a similar story about a Jewish man in a Nazi concentration camp. A young man, a husband and father. He was a devout Jew. Let’s call him Simon. (Again, I tell the story in my own words, as I remember it.)

Simon had always gone regularly to synagogue, and believed in the God of his people Israel. He had always tried to live by the commandments.

But one day he and his wife and little children had been dragged from their home and loaded onto a crowded cattle car. After a long dreadful trip without food or water, he and his young wife and small children were unloaded at Auschwitz.

They were separated from each other. Simon had no idea where they had taken his family.

As for himself, he had become a slave, working hard every day for the Nazis, beaten, abused, humiliated, hungry. He had no idea how long this would go on. He lived in the desperate hope that he might see his wife and children again.

One day he saw smoke rising out of a crematorium, and realized it was from the burning flesh of his fellow Jews, and that maybe his own wife and children, not so useful as slaves, were now dead.

Now his faith in God went up in smoke as well.

Simon decided that God did not exist. No divine intervention was in sight. God would not come down and miraculously open the gates of the prison. No, he said to himself: the world is stupid and senseless, and there is no God.

That night he couldn’t sleep, and decided that he would put an end to his life.

At the first opportunity he would run to the barbed wire fence, and if he wasn’t shot down by the guards, he would throw himself upon that electrified wire and kill himself.

But the next morning he had no opportunity to run to the fence. When he awoke, he was marched immediately to the house of the camp commander. The Nazi boss of the whole camp lived in a fine, comfortable house just outside the camp grounds.

Simon was to scrub the floors and clean the toilets, guarded by a soldier with a gun, all the while being verbally abused and insulted.

But something happened in that house. The commander’s wife loved music. She was playing a record of a Mozart piano concerto.

Simon was enthralled. He had not seen or heard anything beautiful for months. His soul had been starved of beauty. Now the music spoke to him, and he was comforted and assured.

Yes, he thought, there is a God. If such beautiful music can exist, this world is not so stupid and meaningless after all. God had spoken to him through the beauty of the music.

Now he knew that he must survive. He would defy the Nazis by staying alive. He would hold on, in whatever way he could, till deliverance came.

If I let them defeat me, Simon thought, I will let them defeat God also. I will not give them that victory. Simon developed a defiant faith. In faithfulness to his God, he would do everything he could to stay alive.

And now he remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah. When his people went into exile in Babylon, God went, weeping, into exile with them. “In all our afflictions, God is afflicted,” said Isaiah.

On a daily basis, then, Simon was sustained in his struggle with evil, through his simple faith.

The story of Simon is a true story, and similar stories were told by many holocaust survivors.

Someone has said: If your theology wouldn’t make sense in a concentration camp, it doesn’t make sense anywhere. In other words, if your faith doesn’t sustain you at the worst of times, then it’s not worth having.

I’ve spoken of the beauty of the world as something through which God speaks, and in which God is present.

And music is part of that beauty. Music, of course, is a human product.

We humans, and all the amazing things we do, including our music, are part of that natural world, since we, after all, have evolved on this planet along with all the other animals, plants, fish, and birds.

In the words of the famous Desiderata: “Just like the trees and the stars, we have a right to be here.”

Like the trees and the stars, we have evolved here on this planet, and our music and our art are part of the evolutionary process on this planet.

I’ve mentioned evolution, a concept which we have learned from the physical sciences.

The physical sciences can actually help us to think about God. With telescopes and microscopes, with carbon dating and DNA testing, they show us marvels that otherwise we wouldn’t know about.

We do know from the sciences that everything in the universe evolved and developed gradually, over a very long period of time.

Apparently the universe of space and time did indeed have a beginning. It had a starting point, which is commonly called “the Big Bang.”

Astronomers, using the Hubble telescope, observed, as far back as the 1920’s, an expanding universe, in which the galaxies are still moving away from each other.

Out of these observations, with very precise measurements, the physicists and mathematicians have calculated a beginning of our universe about 14 billion years ago. They calculate that it must have been an unimaginable explosion, known as the Big Bang, and it’s still going on!

Archeologists, geologists and biologists all agree that human creatures appeared about 2 million years ago, and ‘homo sapiens’, i.e., human beings just like us, appeared about 200,000 years ago.

So you could wonder: if God intended to create us, what took him so long?

And isn’t evolution a random process, that operates by natural selection, in other words, the fittest species survive, and the rest go extinct?

How does that fit with a notion of a Creator God?

Well, it tells us, first, that God is mysterious indeed. As we say in the Song of Faith: “God is holy mystery, beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description.” No one can claim to understand God.

It also tells us that, where time is concerned, our human perspective is very limited. As one of our hymns puts it:

“A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone/ Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”

For the eternal God, a thousand years are nothing. A billion years are nothing.

The amazing thing about the Big Bang is that it was pregnant with all of us:

Contained in that Big Bang were all of the laws of nature, and all the physical and chemical components necessary for the evolution of life. We’re told that, if the proportions of nitrogen and carbon, and other elements, were even slightly different than they were, organic life could not exist.

We have to say that, at its origin, the physical universe was fine-tuned for life.

The whole universe, our Milky Way galaxy, including all the glories of the planet Earth, the purple flowers, the music of Mozart, you and I, were all there, potentially, in that so-called Big Bang.

If we look closely, with the eyes of faith, we discern the operation of an incomprehensible Mind, Intelligence, and Purpose.

Now the telescopes show us the vastness of the universe, but the microscopes show us an unbelievable, infinitesimal world of atoms, cells, molecules, chromosomes. All finely tuned to function harmoniously together.

As one scientific author put it, “even a single bacterium, the simplest form of organic matter, is a vast assemblage of intricately crafted molecules, elaborately customized.”

The arrangement of molecules has to be in exactly the right order, and the cell has to be fed with very particular, complex proteins, which are themselves, intricately crafted.

Consider the complexity of atoms, molecules and chromosomes, that goes into one purple flower.

For all of this to have happened by pure chance would be rather like “a tornado hitting a junkyard and somehow manufacturing a Boeing 747.”

In other words, a single bacterium, and even more, a single purple flower, is even more complex, more intricately designed, than a large functioning airplane!

It appears that there is something more than chance going on in the evolutionary process.

As believers, we say there is an infinite Intelligence at work, beyond, and within, the structures of the created order.

Even without a microscope, the things familiar to us are a source of wonder.

Contemplate, for example, the eye. Eyes have evolved, of course, over millions of years, in many creatures, including ourselves.

But consider the mystery of tiny, finely tuned nerves and muscles, connected expertly to our complicated, highly organized brains, in such a way as to produce the miracle of everyday sight.

And then, consider the whole amazing fact of our consciousness, arising out of that brain – our rationality, our science and technology, our spirituality, our music.

Every single animal, and every single human being, is a stunning miracle of God’s creation.

So, we find God in something as ordinary as a purple flower, a Mozart concerto, or an eye, or a brain.

I’m saying, in tune with Psalm 19, that these wonders of our world, and of our own humanity, speak to us of the glory of God.

Those who have eyes to see, let them see. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Our United Church “Song of Faith” speaks of God the Creator in this way: (It’s printed there in the bulletin insert this morning): “Each part of creation reveals unique aspects of God the Creator, who is both in creation and beyond it. We sing of the Creator, who made humans to live and move and have their being in God.”

These latter words, of course, are a quotation from Acts 17, which was read for us this morning. “In God, we live and move and have our being.”

The text speaks, you see, of God’s intimate connectedness to creation. God is beyond the world, as its Creator - “Our Father in heaven,” as our Lord’s prayer says; but God is also within the world, as Spirit, as its “breath,” its energy, its inner intelligence, and its beauty. So we are in God, and God is in us.

The world around us can seem very ordinary. But if we open our eyes and ears, it is not ordinary at all. The whole world is a mind-boggling miracle!

I have one further point to make, briefly.

Our text from I John this morning helps us to see that God can be found also in persons.

John says “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”

Now, as you know, love takes many forms. It can be sweet and sentimental, or passionate and erotic; it can be affectionate and cuddly. Love can also be ferocious.

Think of a mother cat with her kittens. If a dog enters the room, the cat will attack ferociously. That too is love.

Love can be gentle and kind; it can be angry, indignant, and fierce. It can be personal, and it can be organized and political.

Sometimes love can be a simple kind word to someone who is lonely or depressed. It can make all the difference. Sometimes love is a major act of unselfishness and self-sacrifice, even to the point of laying down one’s life for others.

But in a sense, love is ordinary. It’s all over the place. It can be found in all of us, when we exercise kindness, compassion, caring.

John is telling us that this ordinary thing, this self-giving love, is the fruit of God living within us.

When we say ‘God is Love’ we mean that Love is the ultimate Source, the ultimate destiny, and the ultimate meaning of everything.

Looking at the natural world, like the beauty of the sky, or a purple flower, or even Mozart concerto, won’t in itself tell us that God is love, or that God loves the world.

John learned that from Jesus.

John says the love of God is embodied and revealed in Jesus. Through him, by faith, we learn that Love is the very heart and essence of God.

When we love, we find God, in the neighbor, and in ourselves; and in love we find the very meaning of our lives.

What could be more ordinary than that? What could be more wonderful than that?

To God our Creator, be all thanks and praise! Amen.

[Silence]

Hymn 229 “God of the Sparrow”