Reframing God: Old God and New God

I gave this talk on Sunstone Sunday (Aug 1, 2021) at Salt Lake City Community of Christ’s worship service on Zoom. I don’t imagine that this is a story that resonates with everyone, but if you feel that are losing your faith because God no longer seems good, this one might be for you.

I want to talk this morning about reframing God and the best way that I can do that is by telling you the story of how I reframed God and am continuing to reframe God. For some time, I was sure that God was good and that my church or church culture were the problem. As time went on and I left the LDS Church, I realized that it was hard to build a new faith around the God that I had come to know. I saw that more and more of the spiritual problems that I was working through stemmed from my image of God.   

My first big breakthrough in spiritual direction in the last few years was naming that I had an Old God and a New God. The Old God was the God I had encountered at church. He was an authoritarian father who ruled the world from a distant heaven. Old God demanded perfection and seemed to resent having to forgive people of their sins. Old God was kinda cranky and didn’t understand LGBT folks or affirm the dignity and humanity of women. Old God used to exclude people of color from the best parts of heaven, but then he changed his mind in the late 1970s. Old God was fickle and taciturn, a tough-love kind of guy who embraced a withholding and begrudging kind of love. Old God’s love was available to me, but was always conditioned on my obedience and if I asked Old God if my sacrifices were enough, the answer was always no. 

At the same time, I felt that periodically in my childhood I encountered a God whose love was more abundant and more freely given. This God comforted me in private moments of sadness and despair. Whenever this God showed up, God invited me into ways of moving through the world with more patience and generosity. Later, God opened up questions that stayed with me, like what is my responsibility to my enemy? Or why am I feeling the Spirit in my Hebrew school class? Or why is goodness complicated? This God knew me and knew my family and our challenges and our sins. This God always seemed to respond with love – the kind that always felt loving.

It was hard to reconcile these competing understandings of God. My church leaders insisted on the authoritarian image and talked about other models of God as being too permissive. It seemed like those leaders had the authority to name divine realities in ways that I could never possess as a woman, or at least that is what they taught. At the time, I’m not sure I was even aware of this conflict in my mind. In that subtle battle between Old God and this other God, Old God won with the backing of church authority. 

The work of deconstructing my faith, though, eventually brought struggles with Old God to the surface. I didn’t like many things about him, and I resented him, but to lose Old God entirely also wasn’t something I was ready for. And while atheism did not scare me in the way that it scares many people of faith, I came to realize that I still wanted God, I just didn’t want this Old God. I was starting to realize that when other people in many traditions talked about God, they were not all describing God in the same way. For my own mental health and wellbeing, this God had to go. But my desire for a good God remained. The problem was that I did not know how to get to a place of believing in a better God. That was not a conversation I had seen or participated in before. 

And so I was left with a God problem I did not know how to fix. I wanted God, just not the one I had. I was sure that there were some better models of God out there, but I did not know how to find them on my own. When I explained this problem to my pastor, she suggested a book – Robert Mesle’s Process Theology: An Introduction – that might give me some ideas on how to think about God differently. Within Process theology, God was not an embodied man, but more like a force for good in the world, who sought connection with people and to create loving connection between people. In chapter 1 of his book, Mesle wrote

In Process theology, God is constantly, in every moment and in every place, doing everything within God’s power to bring about the good. Divine power, however, is persuasive rather than coercive. God cannot… force people or the world to obey God’s will. Instead, God works by sharing with us a vision of the better way, of the good and the beautiful. God’s power lies in patience and love, not in force.

I liked this new-to-me idea of God that Mesle presented through Process theology. I recognized that my former faith community would likely view this God as a wishy-washy God whose very being would crumble in the face of a tougher, more masculine Old God. The very last shreds of Old God that I was still holding onto also did not like this new image of God. But I was starting to realize that I had fought this quiet battle before, and that I needed to come to a different conclusion if I wanted to keep believing in God. 

In Mormonism, I had come to rely on the presence of good feelings to confirm truth. My faith transition caused me to let go of that, but I wanted to feel connected to this new-to-me image of God that I encountered in Mesle’s book. But how do you grow feelings for a new God in your life? Do you date for a while and talk late into the night, sharing intimacies? I couldn’t find a book that spoke to that process. 

Eventually, I remembered that in my earlier years, I had encountered a more comforting and compassionate God. I named this God New God, as I was discovering this God for the first time after a long time. This God consistently shows up in my life as loving connection, helping me to connect and integrate the different parts of myself and moving me to make meaningful connections with others. I reflected on past memories of New God and connected with New God when I meditated, listened to the stories of others, and in dancing with my kids. I realized that this God had been with me through my whole life in the shadow of Old God. In these reflections and in new encounters with New God, I started to feel New God in my life and I realized that I liked the way that New God felt, always showing up with abundant kindness and compassion.

For a while, I was worried that I would pick up new ideas about New God that would come back to hurt me again, but scripture offers ways for us to test ideas about God’s love against a kind of love that is lasting. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 13:4-8 reads 

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Paul isn’t my favorite biblical author, but this description of love, of what good love, God’s love, looks like, is a helpful litmus test for my ideas about God. I can see that Old God’s love was envious and arrogant, always demanding. Old God’s conditional love was always threatening to end, instead of enduring. Old God caused a fracturing of my inner self that always felt inadequate and broken. Appeals to Old God to help heal these wounds never resulted in healing, but in a persistence of woundedness.

For me, New God, or really just God these days, loves the people I love and the people I struggle to love. God is continually inviting me into ways of seeing the world that honor the worth of all persons. In feeling that I am loved by God without conditions, I understand what a blessing it is to walk through the world accompanied by this love. It is healing. Instead of creating permissiveness, this solid foundation of love in my life calls me to mirror that love back to others, though I do not always live up to that standard. Regardless of my mistakes or my goodness, God’s patient love is enduring and always feels like kindness.

Pray with me.

God of abundant love,
God of a love that is loving,
Help us to heal the wounds in our lives 
That have been caused by 
Cruelty named as love
Judgment named as kindness
And conditions named as steadfastness.
Guide us to find 
Foundations of divine love
In our lives 
That can serve as a 
Bedrock of healing
For ourselves.
Call us into this healing
And stay with us as we do this hard work.
In the name of Jesus, the peaceful one,
Amen.