admitted it.

And today, 11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God.

I want to share with you my favourite quote of the week. This is a ten year old boy. The ten year old boy said this; "My brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and a bunch of worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth that most of us go to hell and burn for eternity but I didn’t want to upset him." Isn’t that great!

"God as we understand God." "God as we understand God." What is it that we speak about when we speak about God? Another thing that I did this week was that I went to the net and I looked up arguments for God’s existence. They’re good quotes but not quite as good as that ten year old boy’s.

You’ll be interested to know that there’s one called the Kalam Cosmological argument. It states that the universe had a beginning and it therefore requires a cause. These are scientific arguments for the existence of God. The Anthropic Principle states that the fine tuned nature of the universe shows that it was designed for intelligent life.

Then we could go back to the 16^th century and we could start to look at what some of the theologians had done. There’s Anselm’s Ontological argument. God is by definition that which nothing greater can be conceived. It’s greater to exist in reality than in the mind therefore God must exist in reality. If God did not

exist, God would not be the greatest. That takes a degree in theology?! Or some very strong LSD.

Here’s another one, the Thomas Aquinas argument; from motion to an unmoved mover, from a second to a first cause, from a contingent being to a necessary being, from degrees of being to the most perfect being, from design in nature to a designer of nature. Again many, many years of study went in to that?!

My favourite theological argument is Pascal’s Wager. If you believe in God heh you believe in life after death and that’s better right? If you don’t believe in God then you have every reason to fear death and that’s bad, right? Things are better believing in God than not and you have nothing to lose so why not believe? Right about now the ten year old boy is looking pretty smart, isn’t he.

Another quote. This is from George Bernard Shaw, " Beware of the man whose God is in the skies." I love that quote.

I’m an Italian so I get to tell this story. The picture of God that we all learned about in Sunday School is the picture that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel, the old, white guy with the long white beard and what struck me in all these arguments for the existence of God is that that’s really who we’re talking about in them, an omnipotent master of the universe, a big, old white guy with a long white beard. That’s who they’re proving or disproving exists.

It’s bizarre to me. I mean I’m this 21^st century chick and I’m just a chick but it’s bizarre to me that all these great and intelligent men never questioned the word, ‘God’ in the first place. What is it that we speak about when we speak about God?

You know there’s always the Bible. Yesterday I got to marry a couple in this sanctuary and I always kick things off by saying this quote from 1 John 4:16, "God is love and whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in them" That is the Bible’s answer to "What is God?" It’s very, very, very simple. Logos equals Agape. God ‘is’ love.

So one has to ask oneself, where did the old white guy come from and why is everybody arguing about him?

Another quote that I read that I liked is from someone unknown, "Religion is acceptance without proof of God’s existence and science is rejection without proof." What is that we speak about when we speak about God?

What if the Bible is right? What if God is love? Now of course, it still needs some further discussion because when we think of love we think of that imperfect love that is the human variety that we’ve all sampled now and then. And of course there’s some blissful moments. Another quote I pulled out this week from a woman who said that she and her husband divorced over religious reasons. He thought he was God and she didn’t. What is it that we speak about when we speak about God?

You know sometimes metaphors are useful and sometimes they become stumbling blocks to faith and spirituality and the metaphor of parent is just such a metaphor. I use it, like the idea of God as a loving mother or father because for most of us that was as close to real, unconditional, always forgiving, always

accepting love as we have ever experienced but it’s just a metaphor. It’s not the real thing.

Last week we heard one of our multi faith members get up here and speak of the 99 names of God and there’s probably 999 versions of God in the Old and New Testament. I like some days, especially when it’s not going well, the angry, judgmental vindictive God but that’s just a metaphor, that’s just a description. That’s not God.

Sometimes I like in the Bible, the jealous, possessive God. I like to think there’s something special set aside for us just because we go to Church and do all this hard work and to think that we’re the elect, we’re the privileged. I like to think that and there is a face of God that looks like that in the Bible. But that’s just a metaphor. That’s not what we speak about when we speak about God.

What is it that we speak about when we speak about God? Logos is Agape. God is love. Now what does this love look like? This love looks like the creation of universes. This love looks like heaven. This love looks like what’s going to happen on earth because we want it to happen on earth, because love wants it to happen. This love looks like peace. It looks like human to human love. It looks like the end of war. It looks like people forgiving people even for the unforgivable. It also looks like someone called Jesus, a first century Jewish Rabbi, who walked around and healed and talked and was embodied love. That’s what love that is God looks like.

I remember when I first went to Church with my husband, the father of my children. It was Richmond Hill United Church and it had a fabulous minister, a man named Ken Gallinger. Ken had what we have, introduction to Christianity classes. Now neither Don nor I believed in God. We were there with our kids because we wanted our kids to go to Sunday School and we just had to sit through the sermon and the rest of it just to make that happen. And we wanted our kids to go to Sunday School because we wanted our kids to know the stories so that they could read Shakespeare so they knew what the origins of the stories were.

So we were the ultimate skeptics. Don was raised a Roman Catholic and I had had a thoroughly secular social justice upbringing and I hadn’t been to Church much at all and so we agreed. Do said to Ken that he didn’t believe in God but did believe that Mary was God’s mother and I said I didn’t believe in God (but since I loved the stories of Jesus) but did believe that Jesus was God’s son.

I find it very hard as a Christian to conceive of a God without Christ. I’m not good at fantasy projections and imaginary friends. I like a face to my God. I like to know that God came as a human and that God comes as a human still and that Christ is here, that one of you is Christ this morning and that one of you is going to tell me something, or teach me something or change my life in some way today and the one that does that, is Christ to me. And the one that is that, is Christ, is God, is the logos, is God equals love.

One child when I was teaching Sunday School said that God is the space between us that is filled with love. The space between us that is filled with love

but it’s also not only between us but it’s inside us as well. Not only inside us but inside everyone made manifest, we Christians say, in Jesus Christ.

Here’s another quote, Dante Rosetti said it, "The worst moment for an atheist is when he is so thankful and has nobody to thank." So God of the Bible is love and those who live in God live in love and God lives in them. You see despite what you hear on televison from the televangelists the Bible is the word of God in this way, that the word that God is love is greater than all human words. When you hear people trying to reason their way to God it’s a little like getting in your car and trying to drive to England. Eventually it’s not going to work. The car will sink. What is demanded of us is simply this humility. That our reason will never get us there. That our reason will never describe God. That our reason will never give us a metaphor that really, really works. Our reason will give us metaphors but that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about God.

That our reason is so limited. We are after all just human and we are speaking about something so far beyond our understanding such an astounding mystery that the best we can say is what’s been said by our ancestors for thousands of year, "God is love and whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in them."

One other quote that you have to hear, "The world is proof that God is a committee." But this is the one I’ll leave you with, "No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the Godless man." Harriet Beecher Stowe said that.

Amen