In his March 19th sermon, Pastor Greg Meyer from Bethlehem Lutheran Church offered some useful observations on how people like to come up with their own version of God. Here are excerpts:
We think we would like a buffet line God. We all have our own spiritual journeys. Our journeys all start in different places and pass through different experiences, and that can make your journey look pretty different from mine and mine from someone else’s. But our Gods aren’t the product of our various journeys. We do not start out with an empty plate and fill it up with what we like, leaving what we don’t like, and then when we get to the end, call that God. Doing that deifies our choices and preferences as if they were holy. They aren’t.
Have an enemy? God calls them neighbors. Think you know how to be successful? God calls you to serve. Do you believe that you are of no special value? God deems you worthy. Think you are great? God speaks of humility.
The god of our own creation doesn’t do much but perpetuate our problems. We use this compromised god to bless our unwillingness to grow and change, to excuse our wrong-doings and to validate our misunderstandings.
I love the way the writer, Anne Lamott, says it, "You can tell you created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do."
And be careful how you apply the absoluteness of God’s character to other people. That’s God’s job, not yours. We like to wield our certainty of God like a sword to cut down those with a different view. Isn’t that what was at work in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials? But we don’t have to go that far back in history or look for such extreme examples. This is at work when we look down our noses at other denominations, or people who believe differently than us. When this is happening we need to ask ourselves whether it is our job to be God’s doctrinal police, or whether our intolerance for one another has just exceeded our understanding of God. What we forget is that the word of God, the truth of God is a two-edged sword, like the book of Hebrews says; it cuts both ways (Hebrews 4.12). When we use it to strike another it reveals at least as much about us. |
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