'Sky fairy' jibes need addressed with gentleness and respect as challenge of sharing 'Unknown God' endure
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It used to be that everyone in Scotland had heard of a couple of Jesus’s most famous stories – ‘The Good Samaritan’ and ‘The Prodigal Son’ – but this is simply no longer the case.
Duncan our minister at Hilton Church mentioned this recently. And in the light of it, he quoted words from the Bible about Christians being ready to ‘give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have,’ and about the need to do this ‘with gentleness and respect’.
Duncan demonstrated how St Paul did just this when visiting Athens.
The Bible summarises Paul’s lecture to Athenian intellectuals: he built links with his audience by mentioning poetry and philosophy they’d recognise, and referred, in a city of many altars, to one inscribed ‘To the Unknown God’.
In Scotland today, few people understand why Christians are people of hope. For many Scots, God is an ‘unknown God’, often caricatured as ‘invisible friend’, ‘sky fairy’.
I often avoid the much-misunderstood ‘G’ word, and use terms like ‘Mystery’, ‘Wonder’, ‘Great Love’, ‘Author of all things’ to describe the immensity of the divine. Christians want to share the amazing good news we’ve glimpsed: this Love cherishes us unconditionally.
All we’re asked to do is to honestly tell our stories, sharing both the reasons for our faith and our struggles to believe. We are to do it with gentleness and respect, not preaching at people but open to their reality as they share with us, remembering that those we talk to are God’s beloved ones.
And we may find that, since the Mystery is always speaking, they too will have been drawn by Love. In every poem, novel, movie, video game which expresses a yearning for something more, God is glimpsed. In every account of self-sacrificial love, every story of those who sank low being lifted and rehabilitated, God is heard.
A recent Inverness convert to Christian faith suspects there are thousands of Scots seeking for fulfilment, a yearning in their hearts, a sense of being on the edge of something amazing. And all the time the Unknown God patiently waits to encounter us.
This God made themselves known in Jesus. The Creator stepped into the creation, the Author into the novel, the Director onto the stage. The poet embodied his words.
And what do we see of God in Jesus’s wonderful stories?
The love, patience and self-sacrifice of the divine parent; the God who rescues us, comes running towards us, flings arms around our neck, throws a party for us.
We need those old stories, and how blessed we are when there we encounter the unchanging divine Love which summons us home.
