Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 17, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Where is God? This question haunts us. If you’re like me, at least some of the time, and sometimes a lot of the time, the answer seems to be "nowhere." I remember when I was in seminary, in the classes that went together with our internships, when we were describing some encounter or interaction we’d had at our internship site, sooner or later someone-usually the instructor-would ask: Where was God in that event? The question used to drive me nuts, not because it isn’t a legitimate question but because I hadn’t learned to look for God in my interactions with other people; and so the answer that would always spring immediately into my mind was: "Nowhere." Now you can be assured that at a Jesuit seminary like Seattle University we were never going to get away with that answer. So we probed and questioned and prayed until we were able to discern, however dimly, the presence of God in some part of the event we were analyzing.

Where God is was a significant question for the ancient Hebrews too. It was a question, however, that was complicated for them by their understanding of who God is. In the beginnings at least, the Hebrews imagined God as a person in a pretty literal sense. God was, to be sure, holy, powerful, and wise; but he-this God was definitely a he-was a holy, powerful, and wise person, different from us more in degree than in kind. This God could actually be quite limited. Let me give you just one example from the very ancient Hebrew myth of the Garden of Eden. In that story it isn’t so much that the humans don’t know where God is but that God doesn’t know where the humans are! After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, God comes looking for them and can’t find them. The Lord has to call out to Adam: "Where are you?" Genesis 3:9 Having a God who is so limited that he doesn’t know where you are will certainly color your view of where God is. For one thing, such a God can only be in one place at a time. That makes the place where God is very special, indeed holy. When the ancients thought their God had been in a place, they would build a temple there, or at least set up an altar. With an anthropomorphic God, there’s no question of God being everywhere at once.

We see echoes of this primitive, anthropomorphic image of God in this morning’s story from Genesis of Jacob’s dream at Bethel. Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, whose name would later be changed to Israel-see Genesis 32:27-28-is traveling. It gets to be night, so he lies down on the ground, uses a stone for a pillow, and goes to sleep. Then he has his famous dream of a ladder extending between earth and heaven, an image that reflects another primitive understanding, this one of a tiered universe in which a literal heaven rests above us in the sky somehow just out of our reach. In the dream, Yahweh makes the same promise to Jacob that he once made to Abraham-a land and numerous descendants. Then Jacob wakes up and utters what has become perhaps his most famous line: "Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it."

In the past I’ve been tempted to hear this story as meaning that of course God was in that place because God is in every place; but as I was about to make that leap as I was writing this sermon I thought: Wait a minute! That really isn’t what the story says, is it? Rather, I think we see in the story a reminder of that anthropomorphic God of the Garden of Eden who can only be in one place at a time. We see that reminder in what Jacob does after he wakes up from his dream and says "surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it." He next says: "How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." Genesis 28:17 He names the place "Beth-el," which means "House of God," and he builds an alter to Yahweh at the spot where Yahweh had appeared to him in his dream. These statements and actions don’t speak of a God who is everywhere. Rather, they speak of a God who made this place holy by having been here. This place, not every place. Jacob’s God, it seems, was still too small to be everywhere at once.

Which brings us to our other Scripture reading this morning, the first twelve verses of Psalm 139. This is my favorite Psalm. I love it, or at least I love most of it. I could do without verses 19 through 22. Look them up some time. Maybe you’ll agree with me. Still, this is my favorite Psalm. Through most of my time in seminary I carried a copy of it with me as the first sheet in my class notebook.

In this Psalm we finally come to a truly omnipresent God, a non-anthropomorphic God who truly can be and indeed is everywhere at once. The Psalmist says, in some of the most powerful and important lines in all of Scripture:

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If it take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast. Psalm 139:7-10

The point is clear. Wherever we are, God is. This God isn’t like a person. You and I can only be in one place at a time. It may be true as some wag said that wherever I go, there I am; but it’s not true that wherever I go, there you are, or that wherever you go, there I am-a fact for which I imagine you are immensely grateful. It is true that wherever you go and wherever I go, there God is.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I kind of wish there were some place I could go where God is not. I often empathize with Jonah. You remember Jonah, the guy who got swallowed up by a whale. The reason he got swallowed by a whale was that he was trying to run away from God. God had told him to go to Nineveh, "that great city," the capital of Israel’s enemy Assyria in Mesopotamia to preach God’s word there among the heathens. Jonah wanted none of it, and he apparently hadn’t read Psalm 139. Too bad for him. He boarded a ship headed for Tarshish, in Spain, the exact opposite direction from Nineveh. He was trying to run away from God, and he couldn’t do it. When he tried, he ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit; but I get what he was thinking. God makes demands on me that sometimes I sure would like to run away from, but like Jonah I can’t. The Psalmist of Psalm 139 was right. There is nowhere where we can hide from God. That fact has all kinds of consequences, or it would if we truly believed it and lived in that knowledge. It means that we are living in Bethel, in the House of God. Jacob thought one particular place was the House of God, the place he named Bethel, but we know that the entire earth, indeed all of creation, is Bethel, the House of God.

Now, some of us grew up with the idea that the church, I mean the church building, is the house of God. Some of us grew up thinking that we had to behave a certain way, we had to behave better, when we were in church, in God’s house. We had to be nicer. We had to treat people better, more respectfully, with greater kindness. But what if the entire world is Bethel, the House of God? Then we’d have to treat everyone better. We’d have to treat everyone with more respect, with greater kindness.

But that’s just for starters. There’s a lot more to it than that. The reason we thought we had to be nice in church, in God’s house, is, I suppose, that we thought that’s what God wanted of us. We thought God wanted us to be nice. Now, it’s not that God doesn’t want us to be nice; but I think we now know that being nice is hardly all that God wants from us. The God we know in Jesus Christ is infinite and ultimately unknowable; but because we believe that we see that God in Jesus, we believe that our God is characterized most of all by grace. Grace is God’s commitment to act in love. It is God’s commitment to act in love in every case, no matter what, regardless of what we do or don’t do, what we believe or don’t believe. Because our God is a God of grace for all people, God acts in compassion, demands justice for the poor, the weak, and the marginalized, and works always in peace and never through violence. Because this God is our God, we are called to the same ways of being, the ways of compassion, justice, and nonviolence.

Now if you’re like me, you probably find it relatively easy to be compassionate, just, and nonviolent here in church-although, come to think of it, that isn’t exactly true of every Christian in every church, but never mind. I think all of us can pull off being compassionate, just, and nonviolent in church. After all, that’s God’s house.

But with the Psalmist of Psalm 139 we believe that the whole world is God’s house. Wherever we are, we live in Bethel, the House of God. So we should know that God calls us to lives of compassion, justice, and peace not only in the church-not even primarily in the church-but in the world. Church is a place where we can come for respite, comfort, and spiritual renewal; but it isn’t something radically different from the world. It is the house of God, but so is all the rest of the world; and the rest of the world is a whole lot bigger than the church. It’s actually more important, if we want to be true disciples of Christ, that we live as though we were in God’s house when we’re out in the world-which of course we are-than that we do it in the church. Not that I’m suggesting that we be cruel, unjust, and violent here in church of course.

I’m not suggesting that we bring the way the world lives, a way in which we are at least complicit, into the church. Rather, I’m suggesting that we take the way we know we should be in church out into the world. Our God of grace calls us to lives of compassion, justice, and peace when we come to God’s house, when we are in Bethel. The thing is, we’re always in Bethel. We’ve living in Bethel, in the House of God. Let’s get on with living like we know it. Amen.