Seriously! What's up with this God thing?

Our church put a video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF1puQUN6g4) about the ministry we are doing and our vision for the future. When I logged onto our YouTube account there was a comment waiting to be approved. The comment said something like, "You don't do good things because of Christ - You do good things because your good people - God has nothing to do with it!"

As I was deleting the comment, I had to take a deep breath as a surprising emotion overwhelmed me. I was caught between being insulted by such a naive comment and curious if there is truth behind the statement. The words of another pastor quickly came to mind.

I was questioning God's existence one day and Pastor Reed said, "If you died tomorrow and found out that there was no God. Would you wish you would have changed anything about your life, what you did, and what you believed?"

I quickly realized, "no" because what I believe and do gives me so much life now!

I held onto that past memory for a moment and then flashed through all the ways I have seen God work in my life and in the world. Then the words of a fourth century theologian came to mind. Carol Albright summaries the writing of Saint Augustine, fourth century AD, who used a metaphor that brought to life how God is interacting with the world. A metaphor that explains the vastness of God and how God is our source inside and outside of the world we know.

The world as we know it is like a submerged sponge. God is the ever-changing sea, which penetrates the sponge, supports the sponge, nourishes the sponge and gives it life – but is not itself the sponge. As long as the sea flows through the sponge, the sponge may remain alive. God is forever in interaction with the world, yet God is not the world. Like the sea. God is dynamic and mysterious, always the same, yet never the same, whose very being may be experienced as action and interaction (Confessions VII, V, 7).[1]

The ocean provides the source of life for the sponge. The Trinity (our human understanding of God) is doing something to us. This is the fundamental reality of God. God is in action and interaction with us. God is our source!

[1] Carol Rausch Albright. “Religious Experience, Complexification, and the Image of God,” in NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality, Religious Experience ed. R. Joseph (California: University Press, 2002), 200.