Credo...

Not much going in the Strange World today, so I thought I'd share a theological reflection with you...

Quit groaning, it won't be that bad.

Some time ago, I witnessed a United Methodist friend talking to a young man about God.

The young man very proudly claimed that he was an atheist.

(I just happen to know that he grew up going to church every Sunday- the same ultra-conservative denomination I grew up in.)

My friend asked the young man, rather bluntly, "Why don't you believe in God?"

He answered (to the best of my recollection):

I just can't believe in that bull$#!+. An old man who lives up in the sky? He sits around all day on a golden throne while angels sit on the clouds and play harps and all that $#!+? And he does favors for the people he likes and zaps the people who do bad stuff. Then when you die, he...

At this point my friend and I, almost in unison, interrupted him with:

"That's not what we believe either!"

He looked somewhat puzzled while we tried our best to succintly explain our belief in an infinitely loving God who is, despite our best intentions, rather difficult to define.

We explained to him that a lot of metaphors have been used to describe the nature of God for that very reason, but that when all is said and done, we just cannot know everything about God. But there are many ways to understand God and a person does not have to agree with any one of those in particular in order to understand or to have a relationship with God. We do know one very important thing about God, though - God loves us. All of us.

We eventually ended that conversation, agreeing to disagree as they say, but I have often wondered if it had any impact on that young man at all.

Probably not, but I keep going back to it because I feel like my friend and I failed him. It was a ready made opportunity to 'witness' to someone about our faith. He was quite content in his disbelief but he was also open to further discussion and I think we just dropped the ball.

And I should have been more prepared. After all, this is a topic - the nature of God - to which I have given a lot of thought.

I've written about it and preached about it and studied many of the great thinkers' and philosophers' opinions about it and when it mattered most, I was neither eloquent nor convincing in my testimony.

I guess the one good thing that came from the whole experience was that it forced me to sort through all the philosophical and theological opinions that I've filled my head with over the years.

And though I've read everyone from Aquinas to David Hume, no one has, for me, done a better job of defining God than the author of First John who wrote that "God is Love".

In First John, it is not just that God shows love or displays love or even that God is loving. All of which are true of course but John equates God with love.

God is love.

For John, love was not an aspect of God nor a descriptor of God but God's very nature. Love, then, is the definition of God and as John wrote, "Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him." For God to live in you, you don't have to belong to a particular denomination or have been baptized in a certain way, you're not required to say a special prayer or bow down at the altar... but you must 'live in love'.

I know that a lot of people will answer this with, "But a lot of hateful things have been done in God's name." And I would agree, but that's our fault, not God's. It's our fault for doing those things and for allowing them to be done. It's our fault for not acting as God's agents to spread the message of love instead of hate, whether it's done in God's name or not.

And it's my fault for not being able to express my faith more clearly to those who need or want it most...