God of the Mundane

The following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son, Nathanael Cameron Hood, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Something I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older is that few things make me sound crazier than trying to explain social media trends and memes to people who don’t have or use social media. Therefore, I usually try to avoid mentioning things I see on those sites, but recently I stumbled across a post that stopped me in my tracks like a sudden thunderclap. The post in question was from a young woman explaining how she lost her faith and stopped going to church. Roughly paraphrasing, she wrote that she believed in God as a child because she felt moved by her megachurch’s worship music. However, one day she went to a pop concert, felt the same emotions, and realized it wasn’t God that moved her but live music. As of my writing this article, the post has been viewed and liked over two million times and received over three thousand comments, many from other young people proclaiming similar experiences and disenchantment with organized religion. There was, however, one exception. One of the many comments asked a simple question: “Well, are you sure it wasn’t God you felt at that pop concert?”

Reading this comment, my mind immediately flashed to many of the stories I’d encountered in my church history classes at seminary. Entire wars were fought between different Christian groups and denominations over the “correct” ways to worship and know God. With music, without music. With strict liturgy, without strict liturgy. With lavish decorative artwork, without lavish decorative artwork. My point is that Christians take these things very, very seriously—in many cases, to a dangerous fault. One need scarcely imagine the horror many fellow believers might feel at the idea that you can experience God not in a church but in a concert venue and not with religious hymns but secular pop music.

But is it really that extraordinary to imagine? Time and again in the Bible, we find God deliberately working with the ordinary and the mundane. In Genesis, God uses dust from the ground, not gold or jewels, to form the first human. Many of the miracles in the Hebrew Bible display God’s power not in wealth and physical might but in simple provisions for the poor, needy, and desperate: water from a rock, manna in the desert, and jars of oil in a widow’s house. Jesus himself chose to teach in parables which used common, everyday images familiar to even the poorest of the poor: a farmer sowing seed, a shepherd keeping their sheep, and an attacked traveler. When he wasn’t healing or exorcising demons, Jesus’ miracles seldom strayed far from the table: jars of wine at a wedding, loaves and fish for hungry crowds, nets of fish that threatened to capsize boats.

And then, of course, there is the Last Supper. When Jesus made his everlasting covenant with all humanity on that fateful Passover night, it wasn’t with choice meats and oils, expensive fruits, and imported spices. It was with bread and wine. And with which bread and which wine? The fine, processed white loaves and opulent wines of a king? Almost certainly not. When Jesus broke bread and said, “this is my body,” it was with the tough, grainy loaves of a peasant. When he poured wine and said, “this is my blood,” it was with the watery swill of the poor. Taken together, the Bible doesn’t seem to just approve the search for God in the mundane, it demands it. After all, a God that can only be felt and known in a church is no God at all. Ours is a God who can be found in all facets of creation from the stars in the sky to smell of fresh bread in an oven. And, yes, ours is a God who can be found even at pop concerts.

Joy,

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To read more meditations by Dr. Doug Hood and Nathanael Cameron Hood, you can purchase Nurture Faith: Five Minute Meditations to Strengthen Your Walk with Christ from your favorite book seller.

Any royalties received support the ministry and mission of First Presbyterian Church of Delray Beach.