Wait For It

What a way to end the month of January! As I wrote my notes this morning, we had about six inches of snow and it was still snowing. The sheep, interestingly, slept out in it, and had veritable snowbanks on top of them but still seemed to just want a nibble of corn from your mama’s hand.I loved having everyone home, however briefly on Wednesday night. When I was driving Tomi back to St. John’s, we talked a little bit about two things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The first is a question I’ve been pondering, how can I think of God without imagining a dude in the sky? And having imagined God as something other than a dude in the sky, I then wondered what it would do for my own theology.Now, on that first question, I’m hardly the first person to rethink how we think about God. I mean, the Old Testament is completely built around this revolutionary idea that God is invisible, and that we shouldn’t worship, for example, a golden calf. Not making graven images is really about this same question, in my mind. How should we imagine God? Or even should we?There are some more very old hints about not imagining God as a dude. When the burning bush talks to Moses and Moses asks, who should I say you are, the voice says, “I AM THAT I AM.” It’s enigmatic, but also just kind of sensible, right? “I AM BEING ITSELF.” I’m not proposing an alternate translation here, I’m just saying I think there’s room here for a lot space to maneuver, and our way of thinking of God, which is very rooted in Greek and Roman mythology, and which is also very rooted in Jesus, a very human seeming son of God, it’s easy to fall into a rut.There’s another verse in the book of Numbers that I’ve always liked, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”That’s my old standby King James Version, but I’ve always liked that. God is not a man. So the obvious question is, “so is god a woman?” Messing around with God’s pronouns is something I am definitely not bothered by, in the sense that “he” already doesn’t work, so why not try “she” or “they,” and even “it” maybe has a place, but none of those options especially land with me either. In fact more modern translations of the Bible translate that same verse as “God is not a human” which makes more sense, although we should look further than just that place for translations that improperly embed our or some previous culture’s gender assumptions in the text, but I digress.God speaks with many voices in the Bible. A still small voice. A whirlwind, a burning shrub, prophets, donkeys, apostles, floods, winds, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork. Another verse I love is God speaking in first person, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And wildly, the first person pronouns for God are sometimes I/me and sometimes we/us! Just like a weird old timey king, I guess? We’re hardly the first generation to wonder how pronouns should interact with names.I’ve told you all as recently as a few weeks ago that my own idea of God as the eternal, immortal, invisible, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent creator of all seems to be completely compatible with the notion of God-as-Being, and that this in turn seems to avoid the nasty problem described by the Apostle Paul in Romans, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”When I encounter something in creation, whatever it may be, to worship that thing as if it were the whole thing, that’s a mistake. I’m not saying we can’t marvel at a tree, just that we can’t forget the forest, to borrow a completely different metaphor.Okay with this all in mind, now I get to the second part of the thought experiment, which is that having de-dude-ified God, what does that do to my theology. I have all these Bible verses knocking around in my head that I’ve been misinterpreting through the lens of God-as-dude-in-the-sky, and when I revisit them without that considerably broken, and arguably theologically problematic theology, they’re all different.The two verses that have been knocking around in my head are both about waiting, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.” What can, what does it mean, to wait on a God who isn’t a dude in the sky, who isn’t separated from us, who is infused in every fiber of my own and of your being and of all the stuff between us? How can I understand those words differently without those scales on my eyes?Incidentally, that’s a quote about the Apostle Paul, “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.” I feel like that’s been happening to me for the past forty or so years that I’ve been thinking about this, admittedly I’m a little slower on the uptake than Paul was.There’s another song about waiting, this is the beginning of Psalm 40 in the KJV again, I love my old poetic translation for some things:I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.I find myself asking the same question again, what does that even mean, to wait? Why do I wait for anything that is definitively, and definitionally, already present?I mean, there’s lots of obvious answers. All of language is a metaphor, so the idea that somehow we can’t just understand God through the metaphor of a dude who wasn’t paying attention to us but now is, well, we’re pretty creative with that kind of thinking, so that’s a fine interpretation to me.But it just doesn’t hit for me personally.Understanding that waiting differently helps me, although it’s also frustrating. To quote your mama quoting Glinda the Good in the Wizard of Oz, “You’ve always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” Dorothy had the ruby slippers all along.In my revised and revisited understanding of waiting, I come to understand that I have always been suffused with God’s presence, and that this waiting is a calming of myself and a stilling of other noise in my head and in my heart. The George Fox Quaker idea, that of God in everyone, is present in me, and must only be heeded.I love you all so very much, and I hope you’re enjoying this snow and taking lots of pictures. Send all the cute ones for the family photo album. Now let’s light our candles and still those other noises for a moment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com