Transcript
What about God?
First Baptist Richmond, August 9, 2026
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 1:1-5
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
“So, Jim, can you tell us everything you know about God in twenty minutes or less?”
“Yes. Yes, I can.”
Because what I actually know about God could fit inside a thimble. But what I believe about God could fill the universe, and maybe I should start there, with a declaration of faith:
I believe in God.
But the God I believe in is not the same God I used to believe in. I don’t mean that God has changed; I mean that my understanding of God has changed, and that’s as it should be.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). When I was a child I played with Tinkertoys. I’ve told you about them before: those wooden spools and brightly colored dowels that you could fit together to build things. I’ve built something out of them since I’ve been here, and showed it to you when I was talking about how each of us has a “framework of understanding,” a way of making sense of the world.
Typically, we inherit this framework from our parents. You ask them why the sky is blue and they say, “Because God made it that way.” You say, “Oh, OK. That makes sense.” But then you go off to college and your science professor tells you it has nothing to do with God, that it has everything to do with the way the sun’s light is refracted by the earth’s atmosphere. And you get this uncomfortable feeling inside, like someone is messing with your Tinkertoys.
You had it all figured out. God made the sky and he made it blue. Simple. And then someone comes along and tells you something different, so that you either have to reject what that person says or rebuild your framework of understanding, and nobody wants to do that. I’ve seen that look on some of your faces, when I tell you something from the pulpit that’s different from what you heard in Sunday school, the look that says, “There he goes again, messing with my Tinkertoys!”
In a book called Faith After Doubt, Brian McLaren says that we all begin our faith journey in the stage of simplicity. This is the stage of innocence and trust. As children—or as new believers—we experience the world in fairly simple categories: God is good; the Bible has the answers; the people we trust know what they’re talking about; the world makes sense. But as we mature, life gets more complicated: we discover science; history raises questions; different cultures believe different things; Christians disagree; bad things happen to good people. McLaren calls this stage complexity.
But rather than abandon faith, many people respond by trying to build stronger intellectual systems. This stage values doctrine, apologetics, certainty, boundaries, correct belief. Many churches live almost entirely in Stage Two. And McLaren acknowledges that there is real strength here. Theology matters. Careful thinking matters. He isn’t dismissing that. But eventually cracks begin to appear. Questions
emerge that don’t fit the system. And that’s when we get to the stage he calls perplexity.
This is the stage many Christians fear. Certainties collapse. We begin asking: What if I’ve misunderstood? Why does the Bible seem so complicated? Why are Christians hurting each other? Why doesn’t God seem to fit the neat categories? For some people this happens because of suffering. For others because of scholarship. For others because of disappointment with the church. McLaren argues that many churches mistakenly interpret Stage Three as failure or rebellion. Instead, he suggests it often represents genuine spiritual honesty. This stage feels like grief, disorientation, loneliness, ambiguity, wilderness. It is where many people either leave Christianity entirely or are told they no longer belong.
McLaren’s pastoral insight is that doubt can actually become an expression of deeper faith. He calls Stage Four Harmony, and says this is the destination. Not certainty regained—wisdom gained. Faith becomes less about possessing answers and more about trusting God. People in Stage Four tend to become more humble, more compassionate, less defensive, more curious, more loving. They are comfortable saying: “I don’t know.” Not because nothing is true, but because God is infinitely larger than their understanding.
And that’s where I am.
In forty years of pastoral ministry I have moved through all four of these stages, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t have a choice. When you’re trying to comfort a mother who has just lost a child the simple answers don’t work. And doctrine doesn’t offer much comfort. You have to go deep. You have to go through the discomfort of perplexity on the way to something that feels like harmony. It’s not easy, and I can see why many people choose to remain in the stage of simplicity, or build rigid
belief systems that help them deal with complexity. That’s not wrong, but I believe harmony is worth the struggle.
Let me give you an example.
When I came to First Baptist in 2008 there were some people who wanted me to teach creationism. I said, “No. I will teach Creation, because I believe God created the heavens and the earth. But I will not teach creationism, because it’s an ism.” Creationism insists that God created the heavens and the earth in six, literal 24-hour days (a claim the Bible never makes). Science insists that it took much longer than that, and didn’t involve God at all. I could understand why true believers would want to reject a godless creation, but I couldn’t understand why we needed to reject science.
Science is working on different questions. Science wants to know what and how. Religion wants to know who and why. These two disciplines don’t need to be in competition with each other; they can actually complement each other. When I think about it like that I think, “Why couldn’t God create the heavens and earth with a Big Bang in the beginning, and then a slow, evolutionary process that took millions and millions of years? God has all the time in the world! And when it comes to six, literal twenty-four hour days, that’s how long a day takes when you’re standing on the surface of Planet Earth. But what about when you’re standing at the center of the universe? How long does it take the universe to make one complete rotation?
I believe the biblical writers were working with what they knew, and what they knew was what they could see, and they couldn’t see very far. Now we have telescopes that let us see to the edges of the universe. I remember looking at a picture of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion and learning that it was five light years tall. The biblical writers could see the constellation of Orion (it’s actually mentioned in
the Bible), but they couldn’t see that, and they couldn’t know that a light year is the distance a beam of light can travel in a year at a speed of 186,000 miles…per second.
A light year is about six trillion miles long. Which means that the Horsehead Nebula is about 30 trillion miles tall. And the Horsehead Nebula is only one, tiny feature in our galaxy. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across. That’s huge! Someone has said that if you could shrink our solar system—the Sun, the Earth, Jupiter, Neptune, all of it—down to the size of a quarter, our galaxy would be the size of North America. And there are hundreds of billions of these “North Americas” in the observable universe.
“O Lord, my God!” as the old hymn puts it. “When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made,” it boggles my mind. It makes me gasp and say, “How great thou art!” Or, as David writes in Psalm 8: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained…what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” It’s another way of saying that God is big, so much bigger than I used to imagine when I was a kid in Sunday school.
I used to imagine God as an old man with a long, white beard, sitting on a throne in heaven. And I was fairly sure that he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake. That is, I think I had God confused with Santa Claus, and I don’t think I was the only one. I think a lot of people still believe that if they are good God will give them whatever they have on their wish list or their prayer list but if they are bad, well…you better watch out.
That is not the way Jesus talked about God. I’ll have more to say about this next week, when I focus on Jesus, but Jesus should know. When he was talking to the woman at the well of Samaria he said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” I’m still trying to grasp the full implications of that statement but
I’m pretty sure that saying “God is Spirit” means that God is not an old man with a long, white beard sitting on a throne. A spirit is immortal, and invisible, as we sang in our opening hymn this morning. A spirit is not confined to a particular time or place. A spirit can be everywhere, all at once. And that begins to sound more like the God revealed by Scripture and proclaimed by Jesus.
I know I’ve shared it with you before, but years ago I wrote a poem after looking at images from the Hubble Space Telescope. I was thinking about a friend who was having trouble believing in God, so I wrote:
Look at these:
Aren’t they amazing?
These are pictures of deep space,
The far reaches of the universe
And what can be seen in every dark corner
Is light.
Towering nebulae,
Whirling galaxies,
Clusters of stars so dense
They dazzle the eyes.
There is an ancient text that claims:
“God is light.”
Work with me for a minute:
Imagine that it’s true,
That all the brilliant beauty in those images—
Is God.
That He, or She, or It, is a luminous, swirling,
Benevolent Presence
That fills the universe,
And touches every dark corner
With light.
And then imagine that here—
On this tiny, blue-green planet—
Among humans who have evolved slowly
Over millions of years
Some humans
Have been especially sensitive to that
Presence,
In love with the light,
Listening for its low vibrations,
And that they have tried to put into words
What they have heard and seen,
Tasted and touched.
Imagine that other humans—
Not so sensitive—
Have found meaning in those words,
Some sense of connection
To something they cannot name
So that they have gathered up those words
And written them down
On tablets, scrolls, and in books.
Suppose that’s what the Bible is,
The Quran, the Bhagavad Gita:
Books full of words that bear witness
To some greater presence
By those who have heard the low hum
Of the heavens singing,
By those who have seen the light
And called it by name?
It doesn’t mean that they got it all right—
This is testimony, not Truth—
But suppose there is a kind of truth there
For those who can hear it
And Good News (if you want to call it that):
The news that we are not alone:
That there is a luminous, swirling, benevolent
Presence
Watching over us,
Nurturing our slow growth
And stuttering evolution
Over eons,
Believing in us
Even when we cannot believe in ourselves
And touching every dark corner
With light.
You can see how that might be a good poem for atheists, a way to open the door just a crack and let some light in. True believers would go much further than that. They would tell you everything they believe about God, about Jesus, about the Bible. They would insist that the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita are not sacred scripture in the way the Bible is. I’ll get to some of that as we continue this series, but for now can we leave it here, with a sense of awe, and wonder, and mystery? Can we not pretend to know more than we do? Can we look toward the heavens and say, along with the hymn writer, “O Lord, my God!”?
I love that verse I quoted in the poem: “God is light.” It’s 1 John 1:5. I’ve read a book by Huston Smith, an expert on world religions, who said that light is a universal metaphor for God, and then, borrowing the language of quantum physics, he talked about the way light transcends time and space, the way it shares the properties of energy and matter, the way it can make something out of nothing through the process of photosynthesis. He doesn’t say that light is God, but affirms that whoever said God is light was in touch with something profound.
I was reading that book shortly after 9/11, when I was in Washington, DC, and I remember coming up the escalator from the Dupont Circle Metro station and seeing the
morning sunlight on the buildings as if someone had taken a huge bucket of gold paint and splashed it against those gray walls. I can’t tell you how comforting it was to think, “God is light,” and to think that God was right there, right then, watching over a city that had been so recently terrified. It brought tears to my eyes.
There’s another verse in the Bible, also from 1 John, that says, “God is love,” and I like to think that those who have been listening to the low hum of the universe have heard that and come to believe that it’s true. I have come to believe that it’s true, and it’s made it easy to judge whether a religious movement comes from God or from somewhere else. If it’s full of hate, if it puts people down, then it’s not from God. That same section of 1 John says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Sometimes it really is that simple.
And then the last thing I’ll say about God this morning (knowing that there will be plenty more to say over the next eleven weeks) is this: God is life. And in the same way I can judge religious movements by how loving they are I can judge religious beliefs and practices by how life-giving they are. The story of Creation (whether you read Genesis 1 or 2) is the story of a God who bends over the emptiness of the universe and brings life out of it. Oceans and rivers, mountains and trees, bobcats and zebras, guppies and bees, and then somewhere in all that beautiful, bountiful diversity—you and me. And when God looked at all that he had made, God said it was very good.
That’s the God I have come to believe in: one who is bigger than I can ever fully comprehend, and yet not too big to know us, love us, and want us for his own. I’ll have more to say about that in the weeks ahead but for now, for today…
Let this be enough.
Jim Somerville © 2026
