This autumn, our worship follows our Church School curriculum, Seeking Peace Together. We are learning in worship alongside the youngest members of our community.
How do you perceive God?
Is God a hard-driving, task-master who always gives you the impression you come up short?
Or a kind, loving, benevolent, generalized feeling, like the air on a warm summer day or a comforting morning mist?
Is God in the feeling you get from music that moves you down to your core?
Is God like Santa Claus, keeping a list of when you’re naughty and nice, and rewarding you accordingly?
Our perceptions of God have as much to do with what we read in scripture and learn through the tradition as what we experience in the relationships in our lifetimes.
Psalm 139 is a classic for many of us. The first half of it describes a God who knows us intimately, even better than we know ourselves. God knows when we get up and sit down, knows our thoughts even before we speak them, knew us as we were gestating in the womb, knows us wherever we go. There’s no place to hide from God.
For some of us, this is an existential comfort, a bedrock of trust and sense of connectedness to a universal entity much bigger than ourselves. For some of us, it might be threatening, stalking, a little too close for comfort.
It matters how we think about God, because it shapes how we think about the world. In Sunday worship, we’ll join our Church School in delving into these questions. I welcome you coming and digging in together.
In faith,
Kent
