Column for 9/16 Alton Telegraph

Christian Boyd, the gifted pastor at New Creation in O’Fallon, recently put up a quote on his facebook posting. It’s from W. Rees. A shopper asks for “three dollars worth of God, please. Not enough to disturb my soul or my sleep, just enough to be equal a cup of warm milk, or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of God to make me like (someone different than I) or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.”

We have tried to put God into a safe habitation, far away in heaven. We want the Holy One to be kept safely tucked away in a box that only we can open. We’ve tried to domesticate, to tame, the Eternal One.Years ago, J. B. Phillips spoke that your “God is too small.” He did not mean in terms of the attributes we usually assign God, but that our conception of the divine tends to be too pedestrian, too commonplace.

Maybe worse, we try to put God in service of our little schemes for success here on earth. We actually try to put God on the side of our comfortable little bigotries. Sometimes, we act as if the Creator were a cosmic butler who is at our disposal to answer every need by our command. I just spoke with a woman who imperiously declared about my upcoming prostate cancer surgery:”just have me pray (emphasis on me, and you won’t need to go to any old doctor that word spit out with derision). I realize that some folks see statements such as this as a testament of a faith that could move mountains. Really, it is the old temptation to be as a god and it puts God to the test, something the biblical god does not countenance .

God, of course, blasts aside any notion of being subject to our whims and desires. Yes, we have a relational god, a god who goes to great lengths to communicate in ways we can grasp, but as Karl Barth famously said, “God is God.” That sense has pretty much been consigned to our speculation about the consummation of all things, but even there, we have the sheer temerity to try to select dates, maybe even to force God’s hand by our reading of a calendar.

Such a large God, such a large-hearted God, elicits reverence, a sense of awe, of an encounter with the holy, indeed, the wholly Other. That is certainly a missing element in a lot of attempts to grapple with faith traditions at present. So many church songs of late try to make God a buddy at the beck and call of our feelings.We do the faith no service when we try to cram the Transcendent One into familiar rhythms and casual lyrics. Indeed, hymns of adoration have been reversed as the feelings of the singers can sometimes become the focus for the One beyond All to stroke and placate. Surely, the elevated God deserves elevated language.

When the Bible speaks of fearing God, it is much more along the lines of revering God, holding in awe. We sang How Great Thou Art at former mayor Clyde Wiseman’s funeral recently. It sings of ‘awesome wonder.” That human yearning to come into contact with the beyond, “the height and length and depth” of existence that permeates all that is and ever will be is touched with words and music that seek to ascend into thin air and realms indeed. May we be driven to our knees “lost wonder, love and praise,” of the “immortal, invisible, God only wise. “