Reflections: Tell us about the God you do and don’t believe in

The late Biblical scholar and theologian Marcus Borg said that when someone told him they didn’t believe in God, he would ask, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Often, it was a God Borg didn’t believe in himself! That quote inspires this Sunday’s service. We invited two folks from our church, Conrad Liiechty and Matt O’Brien, to reflect on the topic: “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in, and the God you do believe in.”

Conrad’s Reflection:

When Ana first asked if I might do this sharing, I told her I would be pretty nervous to share because I’d have to do some serious reflection in order to figure out exactly what I’d like to say. But there I was, on Thursday morning, with nothing written down or even actively reflected upon, in a bit of a rut.

My first thought was to take the easy way out and talk about the god I don’t believe in for five minutes. I’ve been shown a lot of examples of this god, through Christian nationalism, imperialism, colonialization, and homophobia. I’m pretty sure I could fill five minutes in a pretty cohesive manner if I just ranted about all of that and how it’s connected to capitalism, my least favorite “god” of them all.

But then, all you’d get to learn about me is that I’m anti-capitalist, which I’m pretty sure is old news at this point. So back to the challenge: What god do I believe in?

The earliest religious teaching that I can remember is “God is Love.” I don’t think I understood any of the theology attached to that as a kindergartener, but that phrase has stuck with me. My personal beliefs have grown around that as a central tenet, and it’s grown and reshaped itself as I’ve developed my understanding of love.

My understanding today is that god is literally love – like an invisible web, or hug, holding us all together. The hug glows brighter and draws us in when we care for each other and dims when we choose not to. I believe we all feel the gentle pull of god calling us to be in community – not just the human communities we form, but with our more than human siblings and our mother Earth. The god I believe in ties all of us together to take care of, love, and protect each other. Not everyone follows this call, but I believe we all hear it, at least on some level.

I experience god in times of connection – making and experiencing music, the joy of relationships, the beauty and magic of the natural world. I see god’s joy in acts of love, in restoration, acceptance, and community. In an old-growth sequoia that’s lived a life incomprehensible to human terms. In Lizzy McAlpine singing “[I’ll] love you like I mean it just because I can.” In wild strawberries appearing at just the right time to remind me of Midwestern summer. In sharing a recipe that’s been passed down through the generations.

I don’t think I was “raised on the Bible” quite like people used to be, and I’ve never held it as deeply connected to my faith or my understanding of god. To me, the Bible is a collection of works by a multitude of authors across roughly 1,500 years, finished roughly 2,000 years ago – an interesting and influential historical document, to be sure, but The Source of Truth and Salvation for the World? Christians can’t even agree on the Biblical canon, and the Bible contradicts itself on important issues like slavery and the morality of existing as LGBTQIA+. That’s not something that I feel like I can base my life upon.

My understanding of god has also been influenced by Indigenous thinkers, like Robin Wall Kimmerer – opening my eyes to the need for relationship with the more than human world. One of my favorite chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass speaks to reciprocity in the garden: a relationship in which the gardener shows love and care by weeding, watering, and working the soil, and the land gives back by feeding the gardener. Sure, we’ve found lots of shortcuts that can speed up the relationship, but I’ve never experienced buying food at a grocery store as anything more than transactional, much less loving.

One of my favorite hymns is Voices Together 120: “For the Beauty of the Earth.” My parents would often sing it as a bedtime song when I was young, although I didn’t hear it in church very often. The fifth verse is revised in Voices Together, and I’ve found that it aligns best with my personal theology: “For each perfect gift and sign / to this world so freely given; / graces human and divine, / love uniting earth and heaven: / lord of all, to thee we raise / this our hymn of grateful praise.” In this stanza, I hear the reciprocity that Kimmerer puts so eloquently – the idea that love is what ties us all together. 

Despite my, shall we say, “non-traditional” take on Christianity, I still claim my identity as Mennonite: It’s my heritage; it’s the culture and expectations I’ve grown up with, all of which influences how I understand and interpret the world. I (usually) like being Mennonite, and I’ve found that my interpretation of god fits alongside the general Christian Mennonite interpretation. I don’t know if I’ll ever choose to be baptized, but in my experience, that hasn’t come in the way of ‘being’ a Mennonite. That, or, it’s a good thing that I’m sharing all of this at the end of my MVS term!

Matt’s reflection:

I want to couch this by saying it’s not that I don’t believe in God, (atheism and antigod rhetoric, while alluring and sometimes hilarious, makes me think of what Ram Das said, “people who quit smoking don’t die from smoking, they die from not smoking”). So at this point, and through a lot of my work as a chaplain, I’ve found a resting place in the center of tension between belief and non-belief. It’s just that there are so many notional Gods that I realize look like what I have believed, what has helped me make meaning and others make meaning, but lacks any sense of coherence to my actual lived experience.

I don’t believe in God Almighty. The God who’s got the whole world in his hand. God, the hand that can scoop us up and deliver us. God is the unmoved mover, presiding over human history, and terrible things stay the same, or repeat, or rhyme. A God that generally can but does not do much about each iteration of suffering.

This also leads to the notion of the God that I don’t believe in: the God of convenience or unspoken purpose. When I’m confronted with something unthinkable in life, usually involving prolonged suffering and futility, and someone mentions those mysterious ways you hear so much about, I think, “isn’t that convenient?” that a God of revelation is oddly neglectful and not transparent. That a God with a voice is so deathly silent.

I believe that what people think about when we think about God is either our demonstrated will toward learning, encountering the unknown, OR our sense of self-importance, maintaining harmony in the known. The God I don’t believe in is the God of self-importance, who cares about being God. The idea that a person would be made by God and experience a life of suffering, and God would sulk in the corner for not being praised enough or believed in correctly. It is a deeply unimaginative God who makes human beings at the apex of creation and then makes them suffer. The God who needs to exist is like a vague dream of some internal cry from the heart of our sense of insignificance: the human need to think one must matter because “God sees me.” It’s that God who offers thoughts and prayers after a tragic death and impotently comforts those who grieve tragedy with allusions to a higher purpose. 

I recently read “The Hardest Part” by Chaplain Geoffrey Kennedy, an Anglican priest and World War I chaplain, which describes how trench warfare completely disillusioned him of his sense of religious piety. He writes how a soldier said to him, “What’s God like, Padre? That’s your business, you ought to know…” and he was speechless, and pointed to a crucifix hung on the wall. 

God is suffering love. The most irresistible and subtle force in the world is between the air and the sea. God is down in the dirt, bleeding out with the sufferers – consciousness that witnesses the unfathomable things that each of us at times, and more specifically that I cannot bear to look at. God is the one who does not turn away, the fact and value of existence itself, that we can learn and grow, and this reality is actually truly enough. Maybe this is all a collective dream or a hallucination and God is just what we call the rules our conjoined mind has made up for the unfolding of the dream, trying to make it not a nightmare. But it is all enough.

I sometimes think God is like in The Prince of Egypt movie; anyone here seen that? It’s like 30 years old and it’s the story of Exodus animated. Great cast — Sir Patrick Stewart Danny Glover, Martin Short and Steve Martin as the sorcerers. Jeff Goldblum as Aaron. Sandra Bullock is Miriam.

But the best part is Moses. Vintage 90s Val Kilmer as Moses. And the voice of god, the burning bush? Also Val Kilmer. What else would God sound like but the voice inside our head?

The Kingdom of God is in our midst, God speaks in the gathering, so…God, or No God, I know that we need one another.