I don’t actually have to drink this, do I? It’s too pretty to drink.
Goin’ to church right now, taking you all with me…
Lift God up!
Lift him!
Heft him up there! Heave!
THINK about where he is!
It makes you feel funny, doesn’t it? Makes you feel tingly in your legs?
You lift God up! YOU THINK ABOUT WHERE HE IS! I’m going to show you something different. Settle down. Think about your job. Think about the news. And hold on to that job-news feeling.
Not Job, job! Settle down, and hold on to that feeling.
Not the bad news, not what you worry about in the newspaper! Nothing depressing. Just normal news. The weather report. Think about it.
How does that feel? It doesn’t feel weird, right? Should feel normal.
Now with your eyes open lift God up! I don’t want to see anybody closing their eyes to swoon. We’re not talking about any great mystery at this moment. I’m not sharing with you any complicated parable this sounds like a fairy tale. I’m getting ready to talk to you about a fact. And I want you to think it like a fact. Put your feet down into the ground of what you really are, what you really do, but you really need, and lift God up. I skipped a step there on purpose; I don’t have time for every word! This is important!
There is no more question then, about where god is, or about where you are. Is there?
Here, I’ll give you the answer: Where is God not? I doesn’t matter how you feel.
Do you want to play games and hide under the covers? Don’t put me under those covers! Are you going to whine I just don’t know? Are you going to tell me there’s no way to know? Quit confusing me!
Here little mind, look at this from my back pocket. Look at his 4-inch square-ish thing made mostly of plastic; if I ask, it will show me a picture of any part of the world.
Does it confuse you?
You want to go ahead and tell me how this thing works? How about if I just tell you, because I know what you’re going to say? There’s something in the sky, you might say. Oh, there’s something in the sky, is there? How childish! There’s some kind of system, you might say. What kind of system? You don’t really know, do you. Is that an inexplicable mystery? Or do you feel that you are quite capable of understanding every link in that chain that provides that service to your back pocket, if someone who knew bothered to tell you? You understand how it works, right?
Do you know how many different people, how many different machines, how many different events, how many different patterns, how many different equations, how many different technologies, how many different substances, how many different financial agreements, how many different laws, are involved in what you just told me you understand? You are so smart, you can probably guess.
But God is an inexplicable mystery, outside investigation.
How many systems are involved in God? How many different kinds of laws? How many different substances? How many different technologies? How many different people does it take to connect to God?
I don’t know, I’m swooning. I just closed my eyes. I might sway. Oh, oh, what big ideas. So big. Spirituality, religion, all of it. I feel tingly. What were we talking about?
HEY I NEED TO PRACTICE. I NEED TO SWOON A LOT. On purpose. Until I can think and swoon at the same time. Without giving up. Without going deep within myself and scouring the corners of my heart.
Without looking for extra trouble, is what I’m trying to say.
Here, let’s practice.
Practice question: Is God different from a cellphone?
I’ll let you answer that one.
Let the answers that occurreth unto you be also a lesson unto you. Was one of them, “yes and no”? Or “kind of, because in a way everything is God”?
Those are bad answers. And let me say that in no way is the answer not Yes. No matter what, the answer is No. God is Not a Cellphone.
You want to disagree, don’t you? It is not your fault if you came up with bad answers. You have been trained to think poorly about God. You were taught to use a special kind of very weak thinking in the God-area. And worse, God is hard to logick about, being infinite. That weak thinking is not going to cut it.
Try this similar question and see what I mean: Is orange juice different from North Africa? Why yes. Yes, I would say that it is.
Is it a sin to think about God the way we think about a cellphone? Are we morally obligated instead only to think cheesy things, like: Yes, I carry him everywhere I go.
How do you know someone won’t condemn you to hell for claiming that you can carry God?
If you really like swooning, go to a black church, once, twice, or forever? You don’t really know how to swoon until you’ve done that. Plus the music is good. PS: It’s ok to be late, but it’s not ok to leave early.