How Does The World See God?

            Last month in this space, I asked the question, “What is your picture of God?” I proposed that we all have a unique picture of God and that it is formed by various influences in our lives; parents, the church, scriptures, etc. I also said that these pictures of God that we hold affect the way in which we each live our lives and understand our relationship to God.

            This month I want to approach the topic of God’s picture or God’s face from a different angle. How does the world see God? Or to ask the same question differently, what picture of God are we portraying? You see, whether we like it or not, or whether we asked for the job or not, we have the privileged job, as God’s followers, of representing God to a watching world. And watching they are. Just ask anyone who has been drawn into faith in God by a church, or anyone who has been driven away from faith by a church, and you will draw the same conclusion: How we as the church portray the God we serve is critically important. The picture of God that we paint by the way we interact with the world is the God that the watching world comes to know.

            Too often, I fear, the church in America and the Christians that inhabit them are felt by the surrounding society to be a barking, watch-dog presence. They se us watching out for our own good though, rather than being the safe place of healing for broken, oppressed people that God desires his followers to form. Is this a fair assessment of the church? Perhaps not always, but I can certainly understand why misperceptions of the church’s purpose could exist. For too much of history, those who were oppressed in society have found the church to be silent, or worse yet a participant, in the face of the oppression they were experiencing. Think of the issue of slavery in America, or the atrocities of the holocaust in Germany. Or ponder apartheid in S. Africa, and genocide in Rwanda. For far too long, the church has been silent in the face of rampant evil or found itself actually participating in continuing the evil.

            While these are some of the more extreme cases that I have mentioned, we need to be aware that we are always in danger of falling into such situations if we are not always asking ourselves if we are faithfully portraying the face of God in smaller ways and as individuals. If my neighbor knows I am a Christian, what is their picture of God, based on my life? If our communities come to know God through our church’s presence, what do they know of God? Are we as a church being a picture of another, more true reality (that is, the kingdom of God), or are we tied into the fortunes of our nation in a way that keeps us from being the faithful portrait of God we are called to be?

            To push this further, what voice does America hear from the church? Do we only get “riled up” when our own rights are trampled on, or do we cry out the loudest when we see others being oppressed? Think about the God we follow. What did Jesus, (our clearest picture of God) get upset about? Whose side was he on? The oppressed, or the oppressor? Who was his anger, when it showed up, expressed towards? To who, and in what way, was his love and compassion most often expressed?

            These are some of the questions we need to ponder to assess how faithfully we are mirroring God’s image to the world. I pray that we can wrestle honestly with what picture of God we carry, and work at getting that picture as closely aligned with Jesus as we can, so that we can in turn portray an accurate picture to the world. Let’s continue to grow together in our understanding of God, so that we can glow together, shining God’s gracious love into our broken world. May God’s love grow in us.

Pastor Carl