I don’t know if it is just me or if there has been a shift in our culture, but it seems like everywhere you go these days people are using a three-word phrase nearly every time they open their mouths. Whether it’s a television game show contestant learning they have won the jackpot or a person reacting to bad news, it seems that everyone everywhere is uttering this phrase. There is even an accepted acronym for the phrase if you are texting or twittering your thoughts. The three letters are OMG, and the phrase is “O my God.” And our incessant and casual use of it has me worried. I’m worried that we really aren’t talking to God when say it. I’m worried that we are so flippantly addressing someone who deserves only the most intentional kind of conversation. And I’m worried that the more we use it the more we actually end up in the dark about the One to whom we are speaking. What do we mean when we use this simple little word “God?” Who is God?

Last week we considered the option that there is no God, but we dismissed it for two reasons. One reason we believe in God is because of the things that exist in the human experience of creation that point us toward God, things like our sense of justice, our need for relationship, our quest for spirituality, and our appreciation of beauty. The other reason is because of the long and varied history there is of people’s encounters with a presence that is not of this world, encounters like Jacob’s dream at Bethel and John’s vision on Patmos. But we need to go further today. Simply to say there is a God is a necessary beginning, of course, but if that is all we can say then we really haven’t got much to go on, have we?

The ancient world of Bible times had no trouble believing in God, in fact, it understood that there were many Gods. In one of the most sophisticated cities of the time, a traveling evangelist from the backwoods decided to confront the erudite and informed citizens of Athens with the revolutionary idea that there was only one God and that this one God had appeared in a highly unusual way, living a human life and even dying a human death. The Athenians were so intent on making sure that they had all their theological bases covered that they not only had altars to all the gods they knew but also a special altar to whatever god they did not know. We may scoff at their polytheism, but you have to give them credit for at least recognizing that they might not know all there was to know. And you have to give them credit for taking this God-business so seriously. Certainly that’s better than dismissing God altogether or allowing yourself the spiritual pride to think that you have God neatly wrapped up in a box and you need not learn anything more. So the Apostle Paul seizes the opportunity to start a conversation with them about just who this God might be.

The Athenian’s problem was a human problem: how can we come to know God? From the perspective of polytheism you can take an event or experience of nature, including human nature, and assign it to a god. That’s a natural impulse. The sun is explained as a god. The sea has a god assigned to it. Carried to an extreme, there can be a god involved in every single aspect of existence. But you can go no further, not without help. The Athenian’s sensed that, hence, their all-purpose, anonymous altar. It is sort of like the knock-knock joke my daughter was telling everyone this past summer. She would say to someone, “Let’s do a knock-knock joke.” And they would say, “ok.” And then she would say, “You start.” So they would obligingly say, “Ok. Knock-knock.” And she would say, “Who’s there?” But then the other person would stumble, and they would say, “Well…what am I supposed to say now?” You see, you cannot tell a knock-knock joke unless you are in on the joke, unless you know who is supposed to be on the other side of the door. That is our problem when it comes to God: we know someone is there, but how do we know who it is? We need help knowing God and the only one who can give us that help is God himself.

So let’s go back in story of our faith even further, where we find Moses out herding sheep in the wilderness, on a mountain called Horeb. Like what happened with Jacob and John, Moses had an encounter. A bush started burning but it wasn’t burning. That’s often what happens when God shows up: from our side of things, it makes sense but it doesn’t make sense, it is unreal and real at the same time, it is paradoxical, it is profoundly meaningful but it cannot be expressed completely in word or image or song. God comes from some place that is emphatically not our place. And we cannot know God unless God decides to come from his place to our place, and when he does, we get the sense that our place is already his place, but not the other way around.

Moses reacts like people always react in scripture when God shows up. He is afraid. He hides. He is awed beyond belief. He is blown away. But he is not. God is the one who has to do the talking at first. God says, “Moses, you are dealing with big stuff here, so take off your shoes because this is a place unlike any place you have been before, a place where I have chosen to invade your space. I’ll tell you who I am Moses: I am the same God who showed up and invaded the lives of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And now I am interrupting your space, Moses, because I have seen what is happening with you and your kin down in Egypt, and I intend to do something about it. By the way, what I intend to do includes a job for you. You will go to Pharaoh and on my behalf and with my power you will accomplish the liberation of your people.” And then, Moses reacts again, like a person would normally react. “That’s all well and good, whoever you are in this burning but not burning bush. But tell me, what is your name? Just who are you, really?”

There is that question again. Who is God? What is God? How do we begin to comprehend this ONE who is beyond the boundaries of our existence? So God answers Moses with the most cryptic, enigmatic, mysterious word there is, but also the most revealing, the most telling, the most enlightening. There are many ways to translate this word and to understand its meaning. “I am who I am. I am who is. I will be who I will be. I am.” Now, we can spend forever figuring out what that means. And I, for one, believe that I will have forever to do that! But in the few minutes we have together right now to begin, what can we say? When God said to Moses, “I AM is who I am,” what can it mean?

For me, the best way to understand God’s name, God’s identity, is to go back to something Paul said in Athens. Paul may have been quoting a poet named Epimenides when he talked about God as the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Our being, our existence itself, totally depends upon this God. Our existence and life is completely enveloped and contained within something larger than the creation that we inhabit and perceive, and that something larger is God. God is the one who is outside of space and outside of time, outside of what you and I perceive to be the limits of existence. God is existence itself. I hope you understand what I’ve just expressed. It makes perfect sense. But in another sense, if you understand it, then you don’t really understand that you don’t understand it at all! For who can understand and comprehend and truly know God?

Let’s look at this another way. The British theologian N. T. Wright says there are three basic options when it comes to thinking about who and where God is. We can say that God exists in and through everything that is in the created order. This is the option of pantheism: God is everything and everything is somehow infused with God. Or we can say that God exists in a sphere that is completely separate and distinct from the sphere of existence that we inhabit and the two spheres never meet or touch each other. This is the option of deism: God exists but God doesn’t interact or intersect with us. There is a third option, which is the option accepted and proclaimed and believed by the great monotheistic faiths. The third option is that God and his realm is not the same as we and our realm, but that God chooses to intersect and overlap with us. Heaven, if you will, and earth, touch. When they do, you get a burning but not burning bush, or angels going up and down a ladder.

How can we know God? In the end, it all depends on God choosing to be known. And so there stands Paul, in the great tradition of Moses, saying to the people of Athens, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” God had come to Moses and revealed himself to Moses. And God had come to Paul and revealed himself to Paul. There is the great Christian belief: that the unknowable, unfathomable, incomprehensible God who is completely outside us has come to be one of us. And we’ll talk more about God-With-Us much more in the weeks to come. For today, we need to linger with this amazing idea, that God is “I am,” and that you and I “am,” we “are,” we “exist” because God is. God said to Moses, “I will be with you.” God was born into our world in Jesus and God told us to name him, “Immanuel,” which means God-with-us. To put it another way, “in him we live and move and have our being.”

Heaven and earth meet each other in that place where God chooses, and that place is, for us, supremely expressed and experienced not so much in a place but in a person, in Jesus of Nazareth, in Jesus the Christ. We Christian folks associate a particular symbol with him, the symbol of the cross. Today we are going to get to see for the very first time a brand-new cross that sits as the highest point of our new church campus. The cross sits on top of a dome. The dome sits at the top of the center of our new sanctuary. For me, the dome represents the entire creation, and it can also represent the world. The cross is on top because the world and all that is in it is under the ONE whom the cross represents. “In him we live and move and have our being.”

In the case of the new sanctuary we are building, architecture expresses theology. Bricks and mortar says something about what we believe. We have put a cross on the dome because we believe that God’s realm and our realms touch each other. We believe that we live out the moments and days and years of our lives under the cross. You and I live our lives in the context of the good news that has come to us in the life—the life of Jesus. The bricks and mortar part is in fact the least important part. The most important part is what it means for how you and I live our lives. And so when you are looking at your bank statement and the numbers are far less than they used to be and you are wondering how you are going to make it, you remember that the one who made you still loves you and is with you. And when the kids have been crazy all day and the pets have been crazy all day and when life has conspired against you all day and you fall exhausted into bed and wonder if you can get up again to do it tomorrow, you remember that the one who made you still loves you and is with you. And when you are tempted to do something in your business or your life that you know will get you ahead or will get you something you want but that will also contradict all the morals and principles you know to be true and right and good, you remember that the one who made you still loves you and is with you. And when you are riding high and life is good and all is well with your world, you remember that the one who made you still loves you and is with you. And when the doctor comes out to the waiting room and says to you, “We could do nothing more,” you remember that the one who made you still loves you and is with you. And when…well, you fill in the blank, you remember that there is Someone named “I Am.” “I Am” came to Moses and Moses hid his face. “I Am” came to us and he had a face like ours. And some of us looked into his face, the face of Jesus, and there we saw the ONE who is “I Am.” The Unknown God is known, to us, and we are known to him. And when we meet, there is heaven on earth, God with us. And he is with us all the way every day. “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Amen.