If there is a God what are they like and why does it matter?
A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, July 21st 2024
Genesis 2: 4b-9, 15-17; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 1:1-15, 15-17
Watch the whole service on YouTube
So, welcome to a series of five sermons that are about answering big questions. The questions come from a Church meeting where participants were invited to share a question they would want to ask God or Jesus. There were lots of questions! They were the sort of questions that all sorts of people ask, not just church folk.
If we devoted a service and sermon to every one of these questions we would be here a very, very, very long time. Instead, I’ve consolidated the questions down to a mere five. This week it’s ‘If there’s a God what are they like, and why might it matter?’ In succeeding weeks we’ll grapple with,
- Why is there so much trouble and suffering in the world, and what can be done about it?
- Why doesn’t God intervene to make things better?
- Why is Church irrelevant as far as so many people are concerned, and what should we do about that?
- What happens to us (and others) when we die?
You may have noticed that some of these five questions contain more than one question!
That’s true of today’s question, where there are actually three of them lying in wait for us. ‘If there’s a God’ comes with an implied question: ‘Is there a God?’ If there is – question number 2 – ‘what are they like?’ And if there is a God, and we think we know what that God is like ‘why might it matter?’ Tasked with providing answers to three such questions I have to ask, “Did you bring your sandwiches with you when you came to church today?”
Of course, even if we were here all day we would not arrive at complete, shared and satisfactory answers to today’s big question. Apart from the fact that God is bigger than our capacity for understanding there is the fact that we arrive at church today as individuals with different life stories and experiences. These affect the ways we understand the world and our understanding of God; while we might agree on lots of things, including about God, we also always see things differently.
It’s inevitable, then, that what I say now in answer to the question may not be exactly the answer you would give. You might even disagree with what I have to say (even though I’m the minister!), and that might well be perfectly ok. That’s why, after this service has concluded, all who wish to do so can come back into the church with their tea or coffee for a thirty-minute chat. We’ll look at what I’ve said in this sermon, share our reactions to it, and learn from each other in the process.
So, if there is a God what are they like, and why might it matter?
If there is a God: many people have their doubts about that. While there are theists (people who believe there is a God) there are also atheists (who believe there is no God), and agnostics (who don’t think there is enough evidence to be sure either way).
There are various good arguments that can be made to say that God exists:
- something must have caused things to exist (including us)
- the world and universe we see around us works with such complexity that this can’t be by chance
- humankind has a sense of purpose and of right and wrong and that must have come from somewhere
- so many people exist who report that they have experienced God at work in their lives
For me, such arguments make a belief that God exists seem plausible – believable – yet they don’t convince everyone. In fact, I think the most rational position is to be an agnostic, to say that there is not enough evidence to convince one way or the other. Atheists, not just religious believers, need an element of faith in order to reach their position, in my opinion at least.
And yet I do believe that there is a God. That’s tied up with the second part of today’s question: ‘If there’s a God what are they like?’ So, let’s take a leap of faith and assume that God does exist; what’s God like?
- God is immense
- God is the reason for our existence
- God seeks relationship with us
God is immense: ‘Our God is a great big God, our God is a great big God, our God is a great big God and He holds us in his hands’ says the song written by Jo and Nigel Henning that we sang earlier in the service. That tells a truth, though that’s the least of it. Consider the beginning of John’s Gospel, which itself references Genesis 1’s imaginative account of how everything came to be and continues to be sustained: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God … all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’ (1:1, 3)
Think for a moment of the scale of the cosmos, the universe. Just consider the stars. Our sun is one star, which belongs to one galaxy called the Milky Way, which is estimated to contain one hundred thousand million stars! And there are millions upon millions of other galaxies in the universe, each one of which contains hundreds of thousands of millions of stars. And we haven’t even got to all the planets that are orbiting each star.
And God is bigger than all of that.
This God, the immense God who both created and sustains the universe, is responsible for our existence, and for our future. We are individual creatures among billions of others upon this planet, which is only one planet among further billions of planets, each containing billions of creatures, and God seeks a relationship with us.
When I came to plan this service I pencilled in Genesis chapter one as our first reading; God’s creation of the elements of life in the heavens and in this world. Then I changed my mind. Such is the immensity of God that the author or authors of Genesis came up with not one but two stories about creation, and in the second one they emphasise that God not only made us but does so in order to be in relationship with us: ‘The LORD God took the man [the earthling] and put him in the garden to till it and keep it.’ (2:15) God has put us here for a reason – to look after the earth for him – and so we’re in a relationship with God.
So, believing that there is a God, we find that this God is immense, is the reason for our existence, and seeks relationship with us.
But why does that matter?
The Apostle Paul obviously felt it matters. He wanted us to explore the immensity of God: ‘I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of God] and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with the fullness of God.’ (3:18-19) That’s what he wrote to Christians in Ephesus a couple thousand years ago. I think it is what he would be writing to us today.
God is immense, and that’s awesome. We depend upon God for our existence – for our life and flourishing – and that matters. Whatever a god is like when you depend on them for your very existence you would not want to get on the wrong side of them. But what’s good news is that God is a relationship sort of God; a God who wants to work with us in this part of creation called planet earth. That demands that we respond by choosing to live well in the world. God is a God who is not remote but reaches out to us, including and particularly in Jesus Christ, and that demands our thanksgiving; our praise; our worship.
What does it mean that God reaches out to us in Jesus Christ?
That’s a subject for another sermon at another time; maybe for a whole series of them!
But for today, for now, let’s be content with answering one question: there is a God; that God is immense, is life-giving, and relationship seeking. And it matters how we respond to that; in how we live in the world, including how we treat each other; responding to God with lives of thanksgiving and praise. Amen.