Where's God?

 

Where’s God?

October 3, 2020

 

Life is complicated. Faith is complicated. Yes, I’ve heard people say of me that I can make anything complicated and do make everything complicated. OK, but I don’t think I make complications up. In the dedication to my first book I wrote that my father “taught me never to be satisfied with superficial answers.” I tend to see complications that most others don’t see, but I don’t make them up. They really are there. In my years to preaching, teaching, and writing theology I have learned that every answer to any question in the Christian faith raises as many questions as it answers. All those questions popping up all the time can drive you nuts, but that doesn’t mean the questions aren’t there or that it’s OK to ignore them. Ignoring them leaves understanding less complete than it needs to be. God doesn’t want us to live with incomplete understandings, or at least God wants us to pursue our questions and to wrestle with the answers we find and all the new questions we ask.

Here’s a question that occurred to me today that perhaps few people ask and fewer people answer. It’s more complicated that it at first appears to be. We know it’s complicated because we know of several different answers people have given to it. The question is, “Where’s God?” As I thought about that question I came up with three traditional answers Christians have given to it. I want here to consider each of them to see if they are true, partially true, or false and to consider what meaning they might have for us, if any.

One traditional answer to the question of God’s location is “up in heaven.” The poet Robert Browning famously said “God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world.” How Browning could believe that all’s right with the world escapes me, but never mind. He locates God right where a lot of people believe God is. We traditionally think of heaven as being “up there somewhere.” So we often look up when we pray. Perhaps like me you’ve seen kitschy art picturing a young child kneeling by a bed, palms together before her in a traditional position for prayer, looking up. It’s terrible art, but it reflects a common belief that God is located up there somewhere in a place we call heaven. I heard about a colleague of mine who said that as I child he was afraid to lie on his bed looking up because he knew that’s where God was, up there, and he didn’t want God to see how bad he’d been. We express our belief that God is up in heaven somewhere in many different ways.

It’s not that God isn’t in heaven, assuming for the moment that there is such a place. There is nonetheless a big problem with thinking about God’s location in this way. It says, or at least it suggests, that God is only in heaven and not anywhere else. Taken by itself the belief that God is in heaven can lead to a concept of God as separate from us, isolated from us, and distant from us. God being only up in heaven is where eighteenth century Deists thought God was, and Deism didn’t much outlive the eighteenth century because it made God so remote, inactive, and ineffective in the world. Surely we want to avoid those negative consequences of thinking of God as being primarily in heaven.

Another traditional answer to the question “Where’s God?” is that God is in a temple, church, or some other place of worship. Ancient Israel believed that God lived in the temple in Jerusalem. Thus Psalm 84 begins, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.” NRSV. Hebrew scripture is full of references to the temple as “the house of the Lord,” and the authors of those texts always meant “house” literally. The temple was where God lived. In our own day people still sometimes call their church a house of God as if God actually lived specifically there. When I was a child First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, which my family attended, always began its worship services by having us sing “The Lord is in his holy temple,” as though First Congregational Church of Eugene were somehow a place where God was particularly present, at least on Sunday morning. This way of understanding has the same negative side to it as does thinking of God as being primarily up in heaven. It isolates God. It puts God in a particular place and thereby suggests that God is not present anywhere else, at least not on Sunday morning.

I believe that these two answers to the question of where God is tell the truth but not the whole truth, to use a bit of legal terminology. If there is a heaven, which I believe is something for which we can hope but the reality of which we cannot know, then God is surely present there. Surely God is with God’s people of different faith traditions when they gather in their places of worship for prayer and other acts of communal worship. God was present in the Jerusalem temple. God was present with us at First Congregational of Eugene. We weren’t wrong when we sang “the Lord is in his holy temple.”

Those traditional answers to our question however, while true, miss the complete answer to the question that we need. The complete answer to the question “Where’s God?” is—everywhere. The traditional Christian characterization of God as “ubiquitous” is correct. Ubiquitous means present everywhere. There is no place where God is not. Psalm 139 knows that truth well. It asks rhetorically, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” Psalm 139:7 NRSV. It knows God is in heaven, but it even insists that God is in the opposite of heaven, the place where we all end up after death that the ancient Hebrews called Sheol. Psalm 139:8. This ancient prayer powerfully proclaims the reality of a ubiquitous God. St. Paul knew that reality too. In the book of Acts he quotes with approval some ancient Greek poet as having said that God is that in which we “live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28. Everything is in God, and God is in everything.

So where is God? Here. There. Everywhere, and that is very good news indeed. We can discover God right where we are wherever we are. Yes, some places can be what Celtic spirituality calls thin places where we can more readily perceive God’s presence than we can in other places, but God is everywhere. Any place can be a thin place. If you have felt the presence of God in nature, great. God is there. If you feel God’s presence more strongly in your church or other place of worship, great. God is there. If you feel yourself wrapped in the presence of God in the silence and privacy of your own room, great. God is there. The Jerusalem temple was I suppose God’s dwelling place in a sense, but it was that not so much because God actually lived there but because the temple was part of God’s creation, and God is present everywhere in God’s creation. So don’t think that you need to go to some special place to find God. God is everywhere. God is right there where you are as you read these words, and for God’s ubiquitous presence with us, let all the people say, Thanks be to God!