Hi folks, i hope you are doing ok, this week we are meeting at the Crescent Club, upstairs in the front lounge bar, meeting at 7.30. It would be lovely to see new and old faces. This weeks reflection is written by Pauline.
Peter Ennes begins this chapter by telling us ‘The Universe Freaks Me Out ‘.
Had he (and us) been born in another time we might have thought that the earth was flat not round. For the likes of King David who wrote a really good Psalm ( 19) about 3,000 years ago the earth was a flat manageable size, with a dome overhead where the sun, moon and stars hung out, above the dome was water ( hence the blue sky) and above that somewhere in the heavenly realm God was seated on his throne and all of this was probably only a couple of thousand years old.
But… during the last few centuries the vastness of space began to be discovered and we end up today with black holes, light speed, the red shift, and string theory…… the known universe is about 13.8 billion years old. The size of the universe is unsettling, the numbers used to describe it meaningless, it is all almost beyond comprehension for ordinary humans. Hence the freaking out and maybe even wondering if there is a God at all…… at least the God we read about in the Bible who is said to quaintly fashion everything, like a potter at a wheel.
So we need to look at the Bible and the God of the Bible.
If we asked each other what we thought the purpose of the Bible is there would be some different answers but many would possibly say something like, it is to tell us, or reveal what God is like.
The Bible tells us a lot about God that is comforting, encouraging and inspiring and we love these things. He is defender of the poor and oppressed, saves widows and orphans, a champion of the downtrodden, a just and impartial judge of all, shepherd of sheep, rock of security, flowing stream of refreshment, comforter of the sick and above all ( for Christians ) the one who sent Jesus.
We love this God, Peter Ennes says, but he also says if he is honest he has a lot of trouble squaring this attentive, supportive and available God with a God who is responsible for this ridiculously large, impersonal, cold, dark, largely empty, frightening and not at all comforting or inviting universe we live in, and what on earth do we mean when we say that God is ‘up there looking down?’
As if science and the universe wasn’t enough to cope with, believing in the God of the Bible is challenging for another reason. God seems uncomfortably touchy. It doesn’t take much to set him off to kill, plague or otherwise physically punish these frail human beings he has created. We see God so fed up that we only get to the sixth chapter of the Bible and read that he drowns ‘ all flesh in which is the breath of life …. humans together with animals.
Is this what the God of the 546-sextillion mile – in- diameter universe is really like? It seems to him, says Peter Ennes, that this is out of character for a God who set in motion the galaxies with all their mystery, awe and incomprehensibility.
Making sense of this God is a challenge and many people of faith struggle regularly with the God of the Bible because he seems locked in a world that we don’t recognise and is so distant from ours.
We shouldn’t underestimate the force of this dilemma or the stress and pain it creates for people trying to believe.
We live here and now not then and there, yet we have this ancient Bible and a Christian faith bound fast to it.
What then is the way forward?
We could try not to think about it! May work for some but definitely not others and maybe God gave us minds in order to think and find the way through. We are living now, in this time and we are not meant to isolate ourselves from it.
The big question for us is ‘What is God like’ and Peter Ennes reckons it is the ‘wisdom question ‘ around which all others revolve and which has to be answered as each generation seeks to pass on the faith of the past from an ancient time and an ancient book. He confesses that the God he reads about in the Bible is not what God is like…. in some timeless abstraction, and that’s that……but how God was imagined and reimagined by people of faith living in real times and places.
He isn’t saying that the Bible writers made up God out of thin air, he suggests that these ancient people experienced the Divine, but how they did this and therefore how they thought and wrote about God was filtered through their experience of when and where they existed.
He suggests that Christians and Jews have been doing this ever since the beginning and that we are called to follow this Biblical lead by reimagining God in our time and place.
We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us here and now and when we do this deliberately, consciously and as an act of faith we are walking the path of wisdom in the same way as the ancient people did.
Questions:
- Can you remember how you pictured God when you were a child, when did your picture change?
- Do some of the things Peter Ennes says disturb you?
- What does it mean for God to be present now in this moment in which I find myself?
- What does God’s presence look like right now and how is that like and unlike God’s presence in those other moments in generations past.?
- What kind of God do you believe in really…. and do you think that simply by being ancient, ambiguous and diverse the Bible invites us to engage in this question for ourselves and join the journey of the Biblical writers in their quest for wisdom ?
Rob Wylie is the founder of BeachcomberFX and guides its leadership team. He has worked in the North East for over 20 years and has vast experience from various roles he has held. He has a passion for Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry as well as beer, beaches and Miniature Schnauzers.
