Do you believe in God? If you do, you’re in good company. Whenever polls are taken more than 90% of Americans say they do believe in God. Ah, but what kind of God?

Do you believe in a God who about 4,000 years ago created the world in six literal days? Do you believe in a God who wiped out all the people of earth except Noah and his family? Do you believe in a God who rolled back the Red Sea so that Moses and the Israelites could pass safely through and then drowned the Egyptian army that was pursuing them? Do you believe in a God who stopped the sun from going around the earth so that Joshua and the Hebrew army could have enough daylight to destroy their enemies? Do you believe in a God that told the Hebrews to destroy every man, woman and child in several of the cities they conquered, not to mention all the animals? Do you believe in a God who supports slavery and the second-class citizenship of women, who hates witches and homosexuals and approves of killing them so they can be sent to Hell forever? Do you believe in a God who approves of child abuse to discipline children, who approves of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years war and every other war fought in the name of God, a God who plans to send to Hell all those on earth who do not properly confess the Christian faith, who grants miracles and other special favors to a chosen few who pray in the right way and, perhaps, make a suitable financial offering to some church, a God who sends sickness, death and other natural calamities such as hurricanes, tidal waves, and earthquakes to punish both the guilty and the innocent for sins that some have committed? Do you believe in such a God? Well, do you? Plenty of people do. Some people don’t.

This summer during my sabbatical I read books by contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling, and Christopher Hitchens who most definitely do not believe in the God I just described. They deplore the retreat into infantile superstition and magic which they believe marks most believers in God. They can’t understand how rational adults can believe in the irrational nonsense that passes for religion and faith. They are astonished that modern men and women can so easily abandon the truths of science for the lies of religion. Following David Hume and a host of other philosophers they demolish all the classical proofs for the existence of God. They hope (I almost said pray!) that we all come to believe that there is such a better and truer way: the way of scientific humanism which invites all people to treat others with truth, justice and love. They paint a magnificent picture of what the world would be like if we abandoned faith in a cruel, despotic God and embraced one another in human love.

Frankly, friends, a world of universal human love is just as naïve as the traditional notion of a God who rewards virtue and punishes sin, either here or hereafter. As far as I am concerned, the world view of contemporary atheism is just as narrow and bigoted as the world view of conservative evangelical Christians. Both worship their own view of ultimate meaning.

This is illustrated in a marvelous way in the story that is our scripture lesson this morning. The unknown prophet of the Jewish exile, the man whom we call the Second Isaiah, imagines a carpenter going into a forest. He cuts down a cedar tree. Part of it he uses to build a fire and warm himself. He also uses the fire to bake bread. Then he carves what is left of the cedar tree into a god, his idol, bows down to it, and worships it. He prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god.” As the prophet says: “This man feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?” (Isaiah 44: 9-20 Selected) Christopher Hitchens could not have said it that well.

Contrary to what contemporary atheists and traditional religionists would have us believe, our choice is not between no God at all or the false God of contemporary evangelical Christianity. Personally I don’t believe in either of them. If that marks me as a skeptic, an agnostic, so be it. I prefer to see myself as a searcher after God, not a narrow-minded finder. I accept the challenge in our United Church of Christ ordination ceremony which calls on clergy and laity alike to make the Christian faith our own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God. The church is the place where we gather together to search for the reality of God and to support and encourage one another as we go on that lifelong search.

I want to share with you again the words I wrote in last week’s bulletin. Some of you read my Ponderings and some did not or were not here. While I doubt that many of us will encounter many atheists here in Chattanooga, I do believe we are surrounded these days by those who say the Bible is the source of their belief in the most absurd and sometimes terribly cruel things. These folks claim that those who disagree with them are, in fact, disagreeing with God’s truth which they believe they can prove by quoting selected biblical verses. For them, the Word of God, capital “W,” is the Bible and the words of the Bible are the words of God, eternally true and unchanging. They pride themselves on being biblical literalists; in fact, they are biblical selectivists. No one takes all the Bible as literally true.

Sadly, those of us who disagree with them, particularly lay people, may feel so beaten down by their harsh rhetoric that we wonder if we have any answer to what they say. In fact, we who take the Bible seriously but not literally are much closer to the true meaning of the Bible.

The Bible was written by men attempting to understand who God is and what God wants for human beings. Sometimes they were wonderfully right; sometimes terribly wrong. The problem is that they – like we – were people of their own time. They shared much of the cultural norms and values of their time. Most of them accepted slavery, the secondary status of women, polygamy, yes, and the “evil” of homosexuality. As far as that last one is concerned, scholars now believe that neither the writers of the Old Testament or the New Testament understood the “normal” nature of homosexuality for those born with this sexual orientation.

One other thought: the two parts of our English Bible are called “Testaments.” You can see the same root there as our word “testimony.” Just as witnesses in a court case can misunderstand what they have seen and heard even though they are sincerely trying to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” so the biblical writers were sometimes “sincerely” mistaken in their understanding of eternal truth.

I believe that for us as Liberal Christians, the true “Word of God” is Jesus the Christ. Believe me, I know all the problems about discovering the historical Jesus. I have been studying that for fifty years. But I believe with all my heart that the way, the truth and the life that is found in Jesus of Nazareth whom we call the Messiah, God’s messenger, is our window into eternity. As someone wiser than myself said, “Jesus gives God a human face.” I invite you to join our search party as week by week we seek to understand that reality. You won’t be asked to do what the White Queen asked of Alice in Wonderland. The White Queen says some ridiculous thing and Alice responds, “O, I can’t believe that,” to which the White Queen replies, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. I try to believe seven impossible things before breakfast every morning.”

No, Pilgrim Church is a place that cherishes honest faith and honest doubt, where all questions and beliefs are welcome. Whoever you are, wherever you are on your life’s journey, you are welcome here. God is still speaking here and we hope you will join us in listening for that voice.