Have You Seen God Anywhere?
based on Psalm 139:1-18
by Dr. David Rogne

In the earliest days of exploration of America one of the explorers, Verrazano, landed on the Accomack Peninsula of what is now Virginia, walked west for twenty-five miles and discovered what he believed to be the Pacific Ocean. Actually, it was Chesapeake Bay. He was wrong, but he was operating on partial truths: the Pacific Ocean did exist; he was going in the right direction; and Chesapeake Bay has the same kind of water as does the Pacific. The problem was that he didn't have a large enough concept of the Pacific.

Some people, in their search for God, have fallen on partial understandings of what God is like and finding their concepts to be inadequate, have given up the possibility that God exists. I have had opportunity to talk with a number of people who doubt the existence of God. Instead of challenging their lack of faith, I ask them to share with me their understanding of the God in whom they do not believe. As they share with me, I often have to confess that I can't believe in the kind of God they are describing either!
Some of our difficulty regarding belief in God arises from our maintaining childish conceptions of God as we mature in every other aspect of life. A college student said, "I have always pictured God according to the description in "Paradise Lost," as someone seated on a throne while all around are angels playing on harps and singing hymns." Still others, who have grown up in austere religious tradition, may picture God as an aged bookkeeper, with a white flowing beard, standing behind a high desk, writing down everyone's bad deeds. It is no wonder that some people subsequently say that they cannot believe in God. They are not really atheists; they simply cannot accept some of the things they learned in the past. I would like to suggest that many persons’ understanding of God is dissatisfying because it is partial - they are defining the Pacific Ocean in terms of Chesapeake Bay. Rather than giving up the search for God -saying that God does not exist because they can't believe in their inadequate definitions - they would do far better to expand their definitions.

Today I would like to invite all of us to do that. I confess that my own understanding of God is incomplete. This opportunity to think aloud with you is as much for my benefit as for anyone else's.

One of the ways I think of God is as taught by Jesus, when he taught us to address God as father. (Matt. 6:9) When I call God "Father", I am reminded that Jesus used the term "Abba", meaning "Daddy", and I am filled with new understanding of my relationship to God, as was Coventry Patmore, who wrote these words:

My little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,

His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed
But found him slumbering deep
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing, wet.

And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins ranged there
with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart...

As Patmore thought through that experience, he came to appreciate how the Heavenly Father feels toward his children and their accumulated toys. When I call God Father, I believe that God is similarly interested in me.

Along with the Psalmist who wrote the Psalm we read this morning, I too think of God as the Source of Creation. Contemplation of creation gives us some perspective on ourselves. William Beebe, a naturalist, used to visit fellow nature-lover, Theodore Roosevelt, in Roosevelt's home at Sagamore Hill. Often, in the evening, after a good conversation dealing with the problems of the world, the two would walk out on the lawn, look up at the stars, and then, one or the other would go through their customary ritual:
"That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It is 750,000 light-years away. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun." Then there would follow a period of silence. Finally, Teddy Roosevelt would say, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed."
But contemplating creation also gives us some perspective on God. W.B.J. Martin tells about a minister who preached a sermon on astronomy one Sunday every year. After several years his associate asked, "Why do you preach a sermon on astronomy each year? It has nothing to do with the Bible or the Christian faith." "To help us enlarge our concept of God," was the minister's reply. The preacher was trying to say with the Psalmist: "The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handwork." (Psalm 19:1)

But contemplating creation can produce more than awe: it can make us aware of God's presence. Pablo Casals, the cellist, writes: "When I awake in the morning I go immediately to the sea, and everywhere I find God in the smallest and largest things. I see him in colors and designs and forms. I constantly have the idea of God when I am at the sea....The world is a miracle that only God could make. Think of how no two grains of sand are alike....how among billions and billions of living and non-living things in the universe no two are exactly alike. Who but God could do that? God must be present all the time. Nothing can take that from us I"

For me, God is also the Source of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. I do not deny that there are evil circumstances in life which are difficult to explain - many of them coming from the abuse of our freedom - but it is far more difficult to explain goodness if there is not a good God. I think conscience is a device God uses to keep the goal of goodness alive within us. The "National Enquirer" asked a group of children the question, "What is a conscience?" One six year old said he didn't know but he thought it had something to do with feeling bad when you kicked girls or little dogs. Another said it was something that makes you tell your mother what you've done before your sister does. James Metcalf defined conscience as "the walkie-talkie set by which God speaks to us."

Certainly, conscience helps me to know when I have offended a person. It prompts me to confess my error and hope for restoration. But sometimes it isn't so much a person I have offended, it is an awareness that I have not lived up to my capacity and I need to confess it. But you can't confess to an empty universe. I think God uses conscience to lift us toward the goodness of which we are capable and to call forth our best. For me, it is God, the Source of Goodness, who holds the possibility of goodness before us.
When I think of God as the Source of Truth, it means to me that all our attempts to uncover truth, no matter how secular, are really attempts to discover God. Knowledge of God is not the exclusive domain of theology. God is discovered through astronomy, botany, physiology and physics. There is a creator at the heart of the universe who cares for truth, and when we seek truth it becomes possible for us to find him. Louis Pasteur, who gave us much of our understanding of germs, said, "The more I study nature, the more I am amazed at the work of the creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory." The Swiss scientist, Louis Agassiz, wrote at the beginning of his career, "I have no need of the hypothesis of God." As a result of his scientific studies he came to be a devout worshiper of God, who subsequently wrote, "If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all religions."

Some people who are hard pressed to find God elsewhere will respond when God is acknowledged as the Source of Beauty. In one of her letters, the novelist, Katherine Mansfield, who was an atheist, described waking up in her house in the south of France one morning and being overwhelmed by the beauty of the sea, the rocks, the trees, and the flowers. Then she added: "How I wish there were Someone to thank!" When I say that, for me, God is the Source of Beauty, I am saying that I have found Someone to thank, and much to give thanks for.

An artist tells that it was his father who taught him to see and love beauty. His father used to take him out in the evening, and the father and son would lie in the long grass beside the woods. They watched the rabbits play, the birds swoop by, and the corn rippling like the waves of the sea beneath the wind. One evening there was a sunset of surpassing majesty and splendor, and at the sight of it his father stood up, removed his cap, looked at the splendor of the dying sun, and said: "My son, God is passing by." Some of us have had similar feelings.

I have also come to see God as the Source of Love. George Matheson was a Scottish Presbyterian preacher whose faith and courage inspired many. Early in his ministry he felt that he had lost his faith. He felt that he could no longer believe in God as he had always conceived of God. He decided to leave the ministry, but his presbytery told him to hang on and try to work through his theological problems. He stayed on in his church, preaching as much vital Christianity as he could believe in, until his ideas of God expanded, and he was able to write those words that we sing yet:

Love that wilt not let me go,
I hide my weary soul in thee,
I give thee back the life I owe
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

In the experience of love he found God. Many theological concepts may be difficult to comprehend, but not that one. "God is love," says the New Testament, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them." (I John 4:16) When we give or receive love we are in touch with God and God becomes real.
For some, God is experienced as a Source of Strength. Some of the profoundest insights into the meaning of God have come from those who have found themselves in difficult circumstances. Soft occasions seldom bring out the deepest things in us. Rather, it is in the formidable hours, in the times of testing, in the personal calamities, that people have found their deepest insights and assurances. When did Moses find God? When he was a fugitive in the desert, cut from his people. When did Job discover the meaning of his life? When he had lost everything and was sitting on his ash heap. When did Jesus

say, "Not my will, but yours be done?" In the agony of Gethsemane. When did Luther write "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God?" When he was risking his life. When did Thomas More say, "I die the king's good servant, but God's first?" On the scaffold. Some of life's most revealing insights come, not from life's loveliness, but from life's difficulties. It is in those times of descending to the depths that brave souls have found the bedrock that sustains them, a bedrock they call God.

While it does not exhaust the characteristics by which I describe God, let me say, finally for today, that God is for me that Someone who is behind the mystery of life. H.G. Wells tried to describe this Presence when he wrote: "At times in the silence of the night and in rare, lonely moments, I experience a sort of communion of myself with something Great that is not myself." It can be felt in the first holding of a new baby; It can be felt as we stand by at the passing of one we love; I have felt it when I have been present at momentous occasions. I have felt it when I have seen a small town parade pass by with the junior high marching band playing with all the earnestness of the Marine Corps Band. A lump welled up in my throat and I felt in the presence of something very basic. When we have such an experience, we become aware, as did Wordsworth, of

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

It is that Presence which the Psalmist described in the passage that was read this morning: "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. For me, God is that Reality, which, for all my words, still remains a mystery.
All of this may sound very subjective and feeling-oriented. I confess that it is. Many people may help us to understand God, but only our own personal appropriation of what others tell us will make God real. It is one thing to subscribe to a whole list of correct words about God. It is another thing to experience God personally in our lives.
Whenever I go to San Francisco, one of the things I like to do is to take a cable car ride. The cable car has no power of its own; and yet it can climb the steepest hill. The power is in a cable which is moving endlessly beneath the surface of the street. The gripman on the car can believe as much as he likes in the power of the cable, but until he actually reaches down below the surface and gets a grip on that power, the car will not move.

God is such power. But it is not enough to believe what others have told us. We've got to become attached so that we can make God a part of our own experience. Then we may say with Job:
"I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you." (Job 42:5)