“Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” says scripture scholar Marcus Borg. The comment asks us to question the analogies we use to describe God. We can speak about God only by drawing on our human experience, yet no comparison is adequate.
Your God may still be a thundering, white-bearded, all-knowing autocrat whom you reject for letting bad things happen to good people and whom you suspect hasn’t kept up with the electronic age. Or, perhaps your God is the faithful, loving father to whom Jesus teaches us to pray.
Or, perhaps your God is the one who occasionally blesses you with a new job or parking place but lets you wallow alone in your shame and failures the rest of the time — an on again, off again God. Or maybe your God is just a texting exclamation — OMG.
What does the unfolding of the cosmos in evolution tell us about God? God unfurls dynamic energy that forms increasingly complex relationships, that ultimately forms the awesome cosmos we know as diverse and yet one. This God is creative and present from beginning to end. The Spirit of God reaches through all that is. We humans are Earth’s conscious cantors.
Advent prepares us to celebrate the incarnation — God becoming one of us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, the one Israel’s prophet Isaiah promised God would send. By loving us as one of us, Jesus shows us that our capacity to love is the image of our life-giving, creative God in us.
As we celebrate Christmas, love evolves in our relationships, in our world. We carol and spread joy. We light up the dark. We gift one another and set tables for family and stranger. We live in the embrace of God. Creation is holy. Our family relationships are holy. Our lives of love and struggle are holy.
- Tell about the God you believe in today.