Message 11-04-07
Series: What I’ve Always Wondered
Scripture: Acts 8:26-38 [Isaiah 56:1-8]
Title: Where Do I Begin?
Over the past several weeks we’ve been looking at questions the congregation asked about God, Jesus faith or the Bible. Today I want to lift up two questions. The first is:
I never know where to start with someone who I can see a glimmer of God in or someone who is searching. What I mean is, I never know where to point them to in the Bible that is sort-of a synopsis of everything. I always seem to get to detailed and tell them to just start from the beginning to understand the foundation and go from there to the end where it all comes together.
And the second ties to it:
Last night at dinner, Jesse (11) was speculating on the following questions:
Who made God and if there are parallel universes, are there Gods in those universes?
These are great questions. Let’s start with – Who made God?
That’s been a question that people have pondered for centuries. Some people suggest that people made God and they made God up out of their imaginations, out of their need to explain things or out of their need to fix things. Some people have come to believe that God exists only for people who want to believe in God. Sometimes Christ followers act like that. They act like God exists in a way that they have to defend, that they have to prove God exists in order for God to be real for others.
The Bible doesn’t take that approach. The Bible doesn’t try to explain God or to prove God. The Bible reveals God. The Bible says to look around and to see God’s work in the world. The Bible calls people to experience God. It doesn’t try to demonstrate that he exists. The Bible just shares the experience of people who spent time with God. The friends of Jesus try to just express what their experience was and what they discovered about God through Jesus, but they don’t try to demonstrate that Jesus existed.
Do you believe that God exists only because you believe in him? Do you believe that God doesn’t exist only because you don’t believe in him? If no one on the planet believed in God would he no longer exist? Our thought or doubt about God doesn’t affect God. God exists whether we believe it or not. The issue is whether you’ve experienced the presence of God. In the movie “Contact” a scientist and a believer discuss life and nature. The scientist says that she only believes in what she can see and touch and know by experimentation and prove. The believer asks, “Did you love your father?” The scientist says, “Yes.” And the believer says, “Prove it.”
There are things that we experience in the world that are not experimental by nature. If scientists only thought about what they can see and hear and prove we would have no theories, we’d have no moments of inspiration or wonder. Saying that I am able to prove something only demonstrates what we can show someone else that they can duplicate.
But we are able to speculate, to wonder and that causes us to explore. It is how we were created. It is what we’re supposed to do. Some people suggest that we need to give up God in order to explore, to discover how things work. What we need to do is to stop using God as an excuse or a reason not to explore or not to think.
When I read the story of Philip I find that God tells him to go to a particular place and to be on hand to be used by the Spirit of God. So I expect that this is the way God works with people who know him. So, when I feel a prompt to go some where and to be prepared to be used, I follow the prompt. I’ll sometimes call people because I feel prompted. I’ll sometimes show up at people’s houses because I feel prompted. I’ve never been disappointed in those moments. When I show up I find that I’m needed.
Philip listens to the man reading his Bible and he asks, “So, are you getting this?” There is an urgency and a directness that we kind of miss in our translation here. Philip is expecting to be used by God. He sees a glimmer of God in someone’s life and he starts with where the person is. That’s where you start when you see a glimmer of God in someone’s life – to go back to our first question. If the person is looking to find where to go in the Bible turn them to the Gospel of John in the New Testament. But only do that if you’re going to sit down with them and talk about the kinds of conversations Jesus has with the people he talks with there. What’s going on with Jesus and people in those times? These are examples of the ways God speaks to different people’s hearts and those are just stepping off places for conversations today. What is God saying to the person you know?
When you see the glimmer of God in someone else God is revealing to you that he’s at work in that person’s life. He’s revealing to you that he expects you to be a servant and to open the door into the kingdom of God for someone else.
This is what happened to one of the women in our congregation here. She shared with me how she heard a call from God after just asking a man who was doing some work for her how he was doing. She realized from his answer that something was going on, so she asked him again, “how are you doing, really?” And he told her. He told her how things were falling apart in his life. He told her how he had had an affair and that he was separated from his wife and how ashamed and guilty he felt. She realized in that moment that she had something she knew about God that she could share with him. So she told him how God loved him. She showed him that in the Bible that some of God’s best friends were adulterers and liars and murderers and how he still loved them and worked in their lives. Our friend here in our congregation opened the door of the kingdom of God for this man and then he asked if she could help him a little more. He asked if she would be willing to call his wife and to ask, on his behalf, for her to give him another chance. So she did. She called his wife and explained the conversation she’d had with the woman’s husband. She lifted up the idea of his getting a second chance. The woman said that she was so impressed that he had shared all this with a total stranger and that this stranger had then been willing to help that she’d do it.
You know you and I could get real cynical and come up with a list of hypothetical cases – how things could go wrong, but what if they don’t. What if God was at work through one of his servants here and she was used to created reconciliation. That’s what God says he’s going to do through us.
Where do you start to “sum up God?” You start by being truthful. You don’t start by doing things that are silly just because you’ve heard that God does amazing “magical” things sometimes. You start by paying attention to the person in front of you and hearing God’s call in your life and doing only what you are able to do. If there’s more to do then God will reveal it to you. So a boy asks first – who made God and the answer is no one. God exists and always has. Then he speculates, he reveals that God is speaking to his heart and mind. What if there were parallel universes? Would God show up in those universes? How would that work?
A man named CS Lewis wondered about this; he speculated this same way. His response was to write a story called “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” At one point he wrote:
In reality, however, [Aslan, the Lion in the story] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all”
The Chronicles of Narnia are the stories of a parallel universe – one that exists in a different dimension from our own, but sort of alongside our own. Scientists who speculate on the possibility of parallel universes can give you reasons to suggest that they might exist. What’s fascinating to me is that when Jesus showed up he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand”. Not “at hand” like “soon”, but “at hand” like here – at the end of your fingertips.
God is speaking to the people of our planet and saying, I’m right here, right next to you, like you can just step into the dimension where you can see and experience me and what I’m doing in the world. The Ethiopian in our story hears that and responds. He recognizes that these words he’s read in the prophet Isaiah are not just ideas. They are connected with reality and they need to be responded to. And so he responds. First he needs to understand it better and then after he understands he feels he needs to respond. He decides to be baptized and to follow Jesus. I’ve heard that at this time people from Ethiopia were considered to be some of the most beautiful people in the world. What that suggests to me is that this man, with beauty, riches and power, heard God speaking into his life and God used one of his servants to help this man step into God’s kingdom. Both men in our story responded to God’s touch.
This gives us an example of how God works. This shows how God will work in our life. We can look for these kinds of things to happen, we can see the hand of God at work simply by paying attention to the world around us.
Do you see that we have nothing to fear from science? Science is just a way of observing the world, reality and how it works. When science tries to tell me that there is no God, then the scientist has stopped being a scientist. They are not telling me what they observe or what they can demonstrate. They are speculating from their feelings.
The issue is – what is the experience of God? The Bible tells us how other people experienced God. We can use that as a guide to explore how we experience God. The Bible is not a bunch of ancient stories used to explain life. That’s not the purpose of the Bible. The Bible describes how human beings have encountered God. We use the Bible to see God’s work in the world today.
There’s another man named Philip I want to bring to your attention today as we close our time. Philip Pullman is an atheist who wants to change the way people think about God. He thinks of God as a dangerous idea. As the movie “The Golden Compass” arrives there will be a storm of response. I want to suggest that we don’t become part of the storm. Atheists are people who are trying to prove that the world is flat. They don’t like the idea of God and they want to argue about it. I have to tell you I don’t like the idea of God either – so I have nothing to argue about. I don’t worship an idea. I worship my best friend, the one I know and who has loved me more deeply than I can imagine or hope.
So, don’t let yourself get caught up in the storm against Philip Pullman. Follow the example of this other Philip, this Philip who was a friend and follower of Jesus. Pay attention to the world. Pay attention to God’s work in the world. And when you see or hear the glimmer of God’s work in the life of another person – open the door for them to enter the kingdom of God. You have your hand on the doorknob. All you have to do sometimes is say, “Welcome.” That’s where we begin. We begin with where they are.
