Walking around in God.......Preacher: Dona Warren

Did any of you, when you were a kid, wonder where the sky started? I was curious about that, and it bothered me. The sky, after all, is usually blue, so the sky must start where the blue begins. Looking up from the ground, that’s more or less at the top of the trees, so the sky must start where the trees stop. Except it doesn’t. When I looked out the window of a tall building, I was at the same height as the top of a tree, but it wasn’t any bluer there - not even with the windows open to let blue come in. No matter how high up I got, the blue continually retreated. If the sky needed to be blue, it seemed, then the sky was always where I wasn’t. The sky was a place it was impossible to be. And that’s the thing that bothered me - until I decided that maybe the sky wasn’t the blueness. And if the sky wasn’t the blueness, then it didn’t start at the tree tops. It didn’t really start anywhere. The sky went all the way down to the ground. “I’m walking around in the sky,” I thought, and it was fun. I still think that sometimes. And it’s still fun. We’re all walking around in the sky.


“Where does the sky start?” is a good question because its answer is illuminating. “Where does God start?” is another good question, and I suspect it’s inescapable, at least for those of us who believe that God exists at all, because everything else that exists starts in one place and stops in another. That’s what make things locatable. The altar, for example, starts over here and stops over there. That’s where the altar is located. So, if God exists, where does God start and where does God stop? Where, in other words, is God situated? Is that a question a child might ask? Of course it is. Is it a good question? Absolutely. And I think people tend to answer it one way or another, even if the answer they believe and act upon isn’t the answer they’d give.


There are four main contenders for where God is. The first identifies God with a particular object, person, party, or tradition, and so places God wherever that thing happens to be. I suppose that’s idolatry, though, and however tempting idolatry is, it isn’t especially relevant to our question because we know it’s wrong. The best we can do when talking about idolatry is repent of all the times we accidentally fall into it. It can be useful to identify when, and where, and how we end up thinking about something other than God as God-for-all-practical-purposes, because only then can we reject proxy Gods in favor of the real thing. But our question here is “Where is God?” and the insight that idols aren’t really God, when we know full well they aren’t, doesn’t get us any closer to an answer. So, let’s look at the three remaining options.


One way to talk about God that avoids idolatry is called “theism.”  Theism says that God transcends the universe and everything in it. There is the creator on the one hand, and creation on the other, and they are essentially different things. Theism has the benefit of escaping idolatry, and (at least for many people) it enjoys the comfort of familiarity. Unfortunately, by so clearly distinguishing God from creation, it makes it difficult to understand how the two could interact. How can a God who transcends both energy and matter accomplish anything in the world? Even more worrisomely, by exalting God above creation we underestimate both God and creation. Nature is forever cut off from the divine. And God, rather weirdly, is found to have physical boundaries. God stops where the tree starts, where the person starts, where the atom starts. God is riddled through with holes. People who find that hard to swallow sometimes look to pantheism.

Pantheism (which means “all (pan) God (theism)”) says that God is the same as the cosmos itself, identical to the universe and everything in it. There is no distinction between the creator and the creation. Pantheism, like theism, avoids idolatry by refusing to identify God with any particular thing. And pantheism, unlike the theism, doesn’t force us to separate God from the world in troubling ways. Unfortunately, pantheism doesn’t present us with a personal God, a being with whom we can enter into relationship. Prayer, for instance, makes little sense on this model, so some people turn to panentheism.

​Panentheism (which means “all (pan) in (en) God (theism)”) maintains that God transcends the universe while also manifesting as the universe. There is nothing that is not God, but God is also more than everything. God and creation are related to each other in somewhat the same way that the ocean is related to the waves. The ocean is certainly more than the waves, even as the waves are nothing but the ocean. Similarly, according to panentheism, God is more than the things around us, even as the things around us are nothing other than God.

I suspect that panentheism is less familiar than traditional theism in most Chrisitan circles, but it’s not unheard of. The Christian Congregational minister and mentor to Lewis Carrol, George MacDonald, wrote, “I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all.” The Catholic priest and author of The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr, explicitly identifies as a panentheist and writes, “Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be?” Rohr calls panentheism the "incarnational worldview,” and traces it to scriptural sources, the Eastern Fathers, Celtic spirituality, and many mystics, so if you find panentheism attractive, you’ll be in good company.

Now, I’m not here to say that panentheism solves all theological puzzles, but I think it solves some without introducing many new ones. And one of the puzzles that I think it solves, or at least clarifies, is what we do each Sunday when we identify the bread as the body of Christ and the wine or juice as his blood. Because, if panentheism is right, of course it is. To quote Richard Rohr, “What else could it really be?” I don’t deny that something supernatural occurs at the altar. That’s beyond my pay grade. But it seems to me that when Jesus says, “I’m right here, in this bread,” he’s got to be right. Where else could he be? And when Jesus says that we abide in him, and he in us, he’s got to be right. How else could it be?

When Jesus says that believing all this will give us eternal life, I suspect he’s right about that as well. We will, after all, be identifying ourselves and everything else with the eternal and undying substance of God. What that eternal life amounts to after the death of our physical bodies is certainly the topic of a whole other discussion. I suspect it’s pretty good. But what that eternal life amounts to right now is pretty good as well because the implications of panentheism are really quite astounding. It’s not just good news. It’s the best of all possible news. Everything is God. Right now.

Of course, the idea that everything is God right now can be hard to grasp and even harder to practice. It means acknowledging that there's an essential unity among all things, taking Paul seriously when he writes to the Ephesians that “There is one body and one Spirit… one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” It means treating nature as sacred. It means seeing yourself as nothing less than an expression of God. It means refusing to demonize anyone. Not anyone. Ever. It means doing all things as God to God, listening to God when a friend needs to talk, enjoying God in a loving animal, stretching ourselves to love God more unconditionally when we engage God in someone who disagrees with us, or confuses us, or frightens us.

That’s a tall order, and I like to think God knows that. I like to think that God says to us, “If you can’t, right now, see me in the people who support what you oppose - if you can’t, just yet, see me in yourselves – start by seeing me in the bread.”
God’s a good teacher, and that’s easier, isn’t it?

We can taste God in the bread and the wine or juice that we’re offered each Sunday, and we can know that it is really God after all. Because, like the sky, God doesn’t start at the tree tops. God, like the sky, goes all the way down to the ground, but God, unlike the sky, becomes the ground, too, becomes wheat, becomes bread, becomes flesh.

“I am walking around in God,” I sometimes think. It’s fun. And it’s helpful. You can think that too, if you want. We’re all walking around in God.