Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 27, 2008

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.

Have you ever noticed how when we’re getting to know someone new, and they’re getting to know us, one of the questions that’s always asked is where do you live or where are you from? It’s not that we think we’re likely ever to go to that person’s home, or that they’re likely ever to come to ours. It’s just that where we live, where we’re from, is a bit part of our identity, of who we are.

I had an interesting experience around that question once. In the summer of 1968 I was with a group of American students in Tbilisi, the capital of what was then the Soviet Republic of Georgia. We got into a discussion with some student age Russians, and they asked us where we were from. We said we’re Americans. They said No you’re not. We kept insisting that we were indeed Americans, and they kept insisting that we weren’t. We asked them why they were so sure we weren’t Americans. They said: “Your Russian is too good. No one can learn to speak Russian like that in America.” To honest I don’t know why anyone traveling in the Soviet Union in 1968, the height of the universally condemned Vietnam War, universally condemned outside this country in any event, would claim to be American who wasn’t. Those were days, like today, when we are engaged in another universally condemned war, when you could often tell an American tourist in Europe by the Canadian flag on his luggage.

The point of this story for us this morning is that when we want to know who a person is, one of the primary things we want to know about them is where they are from. We think that knowing that will tell us something important about them, as those Russian students thought that being from America meant you can’t speak Russian. Where we live shapes us. We all take on at least some of the characteristics of the place where we live. Where we live is a big part of who we are.

In our reading from Acts Paul is talking to a group of people who, on one level, live in Athens, Greece, in the middle of the first century CE. He knows that, of course; yet Paul has something else to say about where they—and we—actually live. He says to his Athenian audience that we “live and move and have our being” in God. Acts 17:28 NRSV We may on one level live in Athens, or Monroe; but on a deeper, more fundamental level, where we really live is in God, or so Paul tells his Greek listeners.

It’s an intriguing claim. But how are we to understand Paul’s assertion that it is in God that we live and move and have our being? How is that possible? Isn’t God a “Supreme Being” who lives “out there somewhere,” in heaven, remote and removed from the earth? O sure, sometimes God intervenes in the world, although he—God seen this way is always he—sure seems to have done so more dramatically and decisively in Biblical times than in our times. If that’s who God is—and that is who God is, isn’t it?—what sense does it make to say that we live and move and have our being in God?

Well, if that is who God is, it doesn’t make any sense to say that we live and move and have our being in God. Yet in Acts, Luke (the author of Acts) has St. Paul agree with an ancient Greek idea that it is precisely in God that we live and move and have our being. Maybe we could dismiss that line if it were merely some ancient Greek saying, but Paul agrees with it! So I guess we have to take a closer look to see what it says not just about us, but about God.

The line says we live not with God but “in” God. So it seems pretty clear that this saying assumes some different conception of God than a “Supreme Being” out there somewhere. We can’t be “in” a God like that, so we must be talking about some other understanding of God here. What sort of understanding might that be?

If is, first of all, an understanding that says that God is not “out there.” If we are “in” God, then God must be here not there. This God is what the theologians call “immanent,” which means that God is a reality in this world, not out of, this world. The world exists within God, which means that God is present in the world.

But doesn’t that raise a serious problem for our understanding of God? Doesn’t it make God and the world the same? Surely that notion doesn’t work. We don’t need a God who is just the same as the world. Well, I don’t think this conception of God has to do that. The world can be in God, and God can still be bigger than and other than the world. This God is immanent, is present in creation. But this God is also bigger than the world. This God is immanent, but this God is also what the theologians call transcendent. This idea of God doesn’t force us to choose between an immanent God and a transcendent one. It lets God be both, and indeed the nearly universal human experience of God is that God truly is both in the world and beyond the world at the same time. We can’t reduce God to the world, but we don’t have to remove God from the world either. With this idea that we live and move and have our being in God, God can be, and indeed is, both greater than the world and always present within it.

So it turns out that we live in two planes of reality at the same time. We live and move and have our being in this physical world. There’s no doubt about that. We Christians don’t consider the physical world in which we live to be an illusion, as Buddhism does. The physical world is real enough, and we really live in it—or at least perceive that we do, but I won’t go there this morning, something that I’m sure will be a great relief to those of you who know what I really think on that subject. The important point this morning is that we also live and move and have our being in the spiritual reality of God. God is real too, and we really live in God. We are complex creatures, aware at some level that we live in two planes of existence, the secular and the divine, at the same time.

And that awareness creates a problem for us. It creates a tension within us and presents us with a fundamental choice. It does that because the two planes on which we exist are very different. They have radically different values. God’s values are not the world’s values, and God’s ways are not the world’s ways, as Scripture teaches. Isaiah 55:8 The world values success, wealth, and power. God values service, compassion, and mercy. The world’s ways are self interest, deceit, and violence. God’s ways are selflessness, honesty, and nonviolence. The world seeks always to trap us in its values and its ways. God seeks always to free us into God’s values and God’s ways.

The choice we face is a real one, but it is not an easy one. It’s not an easy one because God calls us to live God’s values and God’s ways in the world, not out of it. Our call is not to retreat into cloisters and hermitages cut off from the world. Our call is to the difficult task of living God’s values and God’s ways precisely in the world, in the midst of the world’s other and lesser values and ways. If any of you heard Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers last Friday evening as I did, you heard him powerfully denouncing the world’s ways violence and deceit, especially our self-deceit about the facts of our history and our responsibility for those facts. And you heard him prophetically proclaiming God’s ways of honesty and nonviolence. And we all know how much trouble his doing that has gotten him into. The world can’t stand God’s truth, and it always fights back. It always tries to destroy the messenger, as the national media and Senator Obama’s political opponents have tried to destroy Rev. Wright, someone I consider it a great honor to call a colleague in ministry in the United Church of Christ.

Yet for all its difficulty and all its danger, God’s call to us to live God’s values and God’s ways in the world is actually very good news. It is very good news because God’s ways lead to wholeness of life that the world’s ways can never give us. The world’s values and ways are empty and lead to despair. God’s values give life and give it abundantly. God’s way leads to lives with meaning, hope, peace, and joy, things the world more often destroys than builds up. And God’s call to us is good news because we know that when we seek to live God’s values and ways in the world God will always be there with us, supporting us, encouraging us, and giving us strength in the struggle for justice and peace.

So this morning I ask you, and I ask myself: Where do you live? We live in the world, of course. That’s unavoidable and is part of God’s will for us. But do we live only in the world? Are we aware that we also live and move and have our being in God? Do we strive to make our living in God a reality in our lives, in our world? Do we make the fact that we also live in God, the ultimate reality, the fundamental part our own identity? That is God’s call to us. So I close by asking again: Where do you live? Where do I? Amen.