Looking For the Footprints of God
By Boone L. White
Methodist Ministor - Retired

I’d like to begin this morning with a show of hands. I’d like you to raise your hand if you have ever seen God. -------- Not many have. It says in the Bible that “nobody has seen God and lived”. That’s pretty straight forward! And yet we often talk about seeking the guidance of God for our daily lives.

In the Book of Exodus, Moses is depicted as demanding to see God face to face. God had called him via the burning bush to rescue his people from slavery in Egypt. Up to this moment of his request, God had been manifested to Moses only in a bush that appeared to be burning, in a cloud, in the thunder, or perhaps in lighting from the skies. This was not good enough for the one who was called to become the father of the Jewish Nation. If you had been commissioned to lead a forty year migration of a whole nation from Egypt to Palestine you would want to be prepared. You would want to know God’s strategy and what you would have to face. According to this interesting tale in Exodus, God declined Moses presumptuous attempt at intimacy! One shouldn’t be surprised by that, because among the Hebrews, the holiness of God was so intense that no human being could see God and continue to live. But Moses was undaunted and continued to push for a face-to-face meeting.

Then, perhaps in deference to the great stature of Moses, or maybe because it had already taken God an awfully long time to locate a person with the spiritual qualifications needed in His continued evolution of history and creation. God is said to have offered Moses a compromise. If Moses would cover his eyes, God would pass before him, and then as God went around the bend of the mountain, Moses could open his eyes and stare momentarily on God’s “back- side”, or “Derrière”.. What do you think of that?

This story probably is a surprise to most of you. It isn’t in the church’s lectionary, that’s for sure. And while this story is pretty amusing on the level of literalness, what the writer was really asserting was that it is our common human experience, that mortal men and women can never see who God is, but only where God has been. (p. 62-63, John Spong, A New Christianity for a New World.
He reminds me of one of my favorite stories by Garrison Keeler, who tells about Ole, the old Swedish farmer near Lake Wobegon, who was caught in a terrible blizzard while driving home from town one day. The snow was getting alarmingly deep, and the wind was driving the blizzard horizontally and he was unable to see even as far as the end of the hood of his car. He opened the door and started to get out, but when he looked down he discovered that he could see the tracks of his tires in the snow, and with a great sign of relief, he started up again with the door open, and just followed his tire tracks home. Of course he soon ended up in the ditch. He had as much trouble as we do, when trying to discern the footprints of God.

I’d like to share with you a most unusual experience that took place in my life just as I had finished my first year of college, and which led , it seemed almost as though predestined by God, to my becoming a Methodist Minister. It is my own experience of finding the footprints of God in my life.
As background you should know that when I was 17 I withdrew from the Baptist church of my youth, because the church had refused to accept into membership a woman of the streets in my small hometown. She had come forward during an altar call and asked to give her life to Christ . She and the minister talked a long time while the congregation sang about 50 verses of Just as I am, and then he announced that they would not vote on her for membership. When I asked him about it, he said she was not the sort of person the church wanted. I left the church never to bother with it again. They had turned away the one opportunity to do something significant since I was baptized there in 1937,

In 1949 my roommate at Colorado A and M invited me to join other members of his family on a horseback trip from Divide, Colorado, through the high Rocky Mountains as far as we could go toward Canada. The trip was to take all summer. I packed my gear into a pair of saddle bags and a large duffel, and bought a ticket on the bus into Denver, where I was to meet a once a week train that would take me to the rendezvous point near Divide. After a few miles on the bus, I got a strong intuitive feeling that the driver had failed to put my baggage on the bus. I asked him about it, and he said, although he had seen it piled on top of other suit cases, because it looked odd, he had set it aside and had not loaded it, but left it on the curb.

He stopped the bus at the next telephone, and phoned back and the station agent said he would see that it was put on the next bus through in about an hour. So I went on into Denver. When the next bus arrived my baggage was not there. So I phoned again, and was promised faithfully that they would send it on the next bus without fail. This happened two more times, and when the final bus arrived in Denver and they still had failed to bring my baggage, I had to face the fact that I would not be able to go on the trip. The weekly train would leave in a half hour and that was my only way to connect with my party anad the horses. I was really depressed over what had happened.

I couldn’t stay in Denver, so I boarded the bus and returned to Longmont, saw my stuff still lying on the curb, where it had been all day. I loaded it on the bus and traveled on to the end of the line at Ft. Collins and spent the night sleeping on the courthouse lawn. The next morning I tried to enroll in summer school at College. They told me there were no rooms, but if I could find a place to live, I could attend classes. I got a job cooking evenings at Al and Ruth’s Cafeteria, which included a place to stay over a garage behind the restaurant. There I met two strange guys from Chicago, one an artist and the other a philosopher, who were what we called then “Beatniks”.. They had no beds in their room, but caught cat naps wherever they happened to be. They took me in tow, and we traveled all over the region on weekends in an old car they owned, attending all kinds of educational and cultural events. They asked me one day if I was a Christian and I said, “Yes, but that I didn’t belong to a church”. They asked me to critique articles by all kinds of writers from a Christians point of view, and at the end of the summer I no longer wanted to study Forestry Engineering, but transferred to a school strong in the Humanities.

The last week before leaving for Baylor in Waco Texas, my high school buddies asked me to go with them to our Methodist Youth Camp at Castle Rock, Colorado.

I met a girl the first day there. We spent the whole week together, and on Saturday night, after camp ended, I invited her to go to Estes Park to a dance with all my friends one last time before we all went back to college. We had a great time, but on the way home the road was closed because of heavy fog, and we had to sit in a long line of traffic for several hours before they let us go on. During that time we talked of our plans for a life work and finally of marriage and when I left for Waco the following Wednesday, we were engaged. Her name was Flo Rivers, (the same name as Dick Tracy’s girl friend), and she, together with my mom, exerted their influence on me to become a Methodist Minister.. Within a year I had my lisence to preach and was on the way to seminary and my life work.

Now the questions I asked were pretty heavy questions. Why had God or the fates, the force or whatever, caused the bus agents to break their promises repeatedly resulting in my missing the horse back trip. What strange twist of fortune caused me to stumble onto those two non conformist guys who rekindled my interest in religion. What a bunch of strange coincidences, which resulted in my meeting my first wife, who was so influential in my becoming a minister.
As it happened, I was mad as a hornet at God and everybody connected with the bus company. But I made all my choices in freedom. I could have decided to go a totally different direction. When I look back at what happened it seems that Someone or something was guiding and determining my destiny. You can never know what the future will bring, because you have the freedom to choose to go any direction, but when you look backwards, it is frequently easy to find the footprints of God in your life. God never allows you to see his face, or experience him directly, but he does allow you to see his back side as he goes around the bend. And that is the first point that I want to make this morning.
Even though we cannot see God face to face, there are several ways we can experience the presence of God. And this is my second point. For me God has seemed most real in the wilderness. I grew up in the Colorado Rockies. My sister and her husband owned a historic resort, called Hewes Kirkwood Inn, at over 9,000 ft on the slopes of Longs Peak, where I spent my summers. From Jr. High on, part of the time as a climbing guide, part of the time as a cook, I spent my summers working in the mountains.. For me the Rocky Mountains, with 52 peaks over 14,000 feet, many of which I climbed as a young man, as well as the 16 Glacier covered peaks here in the Northwest, I climbed later in life, became the places where the presence of God became most real to me. The grandeur of the Grand Canyon and it‘s vast temples of sandstone, the raging rivers with their awesome rapids and power, the fearsome waves of the oceans; these were the places I experienced the wonder and holiness of God. I felt like John Wesley Powell, the son of a Methodist minister, who called the Grand Canyon the “Library of God”. Powell was the first to float the entire length of the Grand Canyon and his descriptions of the scenery are deeply spiritual. Certainly many people find God’s footprints when they commune with nature and the wonders of this world we live in.

But I also learned that to study the age of rocks, tended to cause you to question the Rock of Ages Anyone with even a basic understanding of science knows that our world is not made up of three layers, hell below, earth in the middle and heaven above us. Our travel to outer space has found no sign of the pearly gates and streets paved with gold. Our modern understanding of an evolving nature, our picture of the age of the earth which goes back billions of years, our understanding of cause and effect, has made the literal belief in the tales of the Bible nearly impossible for the modern person. We all have difficulty finding God in our modern world. And I don’t believe this is just a recent problem.

Most of us were brought up that the Bible was the primary place where we encounter the presence of God, and learn what God wants us to do with our lives. But many are asking these days: How does God show us His way and will through the Bible? “Does God really guide us through prayer and meditation”? Did God send Jesus to show us the way and teach us the life of holiness?

I admit that early on I had trouble using the Bible as a literal textbook for my religious faith. My parents read the Bible though to me a couple of times before I began to read it myself. Then I read it though several more times before I graduated from high school. I knew back then that many of the stories could only be fables or myths pointing to truths, but could not to be taken literally.
The story of Adam and Eve and their fall into sin and depravity always gave me trouble. I grew up with a friend whose grandfather had a huge museum in his basement in Colorado, filled with the bones of dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures. They made a huge impression on me and I knew that the earth was billions of years old, and that God had certainly taken that long to bring it to fruition and not as the Bible said, “that he did it in just seven days”.

I also experienced life as good rather than evil. And even read where when God had finished creating the world he stepped back and said, “It is very, good.” So, how come the church taught that because of Adam’s Fall, every child born was depraved, and lost in sin, until it was baptized. How come sex was considered evil instead of holy? How come every woman was considered unclean when she became pregnant and gave birth to a baby, and was prohibited from taking communion in church afterward until she had gone through a ritual of cleansing and re-consecration. Some of those laws are still on the books in the Roman and Episcopal churches.
The Church of my youth, taught that we are all lost in sin, that our nature was depraved and corrupt. The worship services featured every Sunday a prayer of confession, which emphasized our failures, and corruptness. It trafficked in heavy guilt trips, and tended to destroy self esteem, which was just the opposite from what psychology and mental health classes were teaching me at school. I don’t know if anyone noticed but when I first became pastor here 21 years ago, you were used to having a prayer of confession every Sunday, I gradually weaned the church away from that, and my last few years we replaced them entirely with more life affirming ones. Not that our lives are perfect , but those guilt trips did nothing to help us become all that we could be in response to the grace and presence of God.

It is not easy to find the way to the being and reality of God, or to discern God’s will for our lives. Even so great a spiritual leader as John Wesley the founder of our denomination used to practice a very dubious method of seeking God’s guidance. When faced with some perplexity or other, he would take his bible and let it fall open however it wanted to open, and then he would magically find his answer on that page. Several times he was guided into gross errors, especially when it came to women and marriage, if you have read anything about his life.

What I would say in summing up this point is that for most of us in our modern culture today, while the Bible certainly tells us much about how God works in history, reading the Bible literally usually causes more stumbling blocks than assistance. We need to read it with careful interpretation, which you find only in small study and discussion groups, rarely in the formal worship of the church. Many of us will find tremendous inspiration, and indeed will come in contact with the Holy presence of God, through the contemplation of the wonders of the natural world God has created slowly over millions of years, through contemplation of the wonders of the human being, and our capacity for love, our moral awareness, our ever expanding consciousness, ever growing community, our intellectual complexity, and the ever unfolding fullness of our being.

In the last generation theologians like Paul Tillich, have written about the nature of God as the “Ground of Being” meaning that what ever exists, is part of the being of God. And that this Being is constantly emerging, creating, evolving seeking the completion of the universe. We are part of that.. To the extent we are living, we are part of the Being of God. Our task is to fulfill all the richness found in the presence and being of God within ourselves. The uniqueness of Jesus lies in the fact that in him people intuitively experience the fullness and presence of God. The early church called this the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit—that is-- God within us. So, while today we may not understand the uniqueness of Jesus in the same way , we still find in Jesus the fullness of the Being of God, and we are called if we would be his followers, to become all that we can become.

Tom Whitehead and I for more than 25 years have been students of Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit Priest, who was the discoverer of Peltdown Man in China. And who wrote many books on his own understanding of God. He saw in God’s continuing creation a pattern moving from very simple to complex, from unconscious matter to highly conscious human intelligence , from small isolated communities, to communities of greater numbers and complexity, and finally at the end a transition from the physical to a completely spiritual reality he called the Omega Point.
He taught even a rock or a crystal had the same structure as the most complex living things, but they were just moving at a slower, simpler, more rudimentary level. But even a crystal has within it the unique pattern that directs it to form a certain number of facets, with distinctive, beautiful colors. It assimilates nourishment, and eliminates what it can’t use, it is always the same hardness etc. just as the DNA of humans guides their reproductive patterns. He taught that there is a rudimentary consciousness even in a stone. After all we are taught today that all creation is made up of electrical energy, with the density of particles determining the appearance of a chair, or a furry kitten. He wrote a book called the Divine Milieu, in which he describes how the emptiness of the Universe with its scattered planets and stars, is the same emptiness of the atom with its neutrons and protons circling in a vast field of electrical energy. God according to Chardin is the Totality of this evolving, creative mass of energy. A creation that has moved from primitive atoms, to molecules, to rocks, to plants and later to animals, and then to man, with ever evolving consciousness and spiritualization. As a follower of Jesus, who has become for us the pattern, we are called to become all that we can be. That is what it means to be a Child of God. That is what Wesley was striving for with his “doctrine of perfection” Within the heart of science you can find the footsteps of God.

With this kind of understanding of ourselves as potentially the best that God has created, we are called to realize all our spiritual potential Looking unto Jesus who the early Christians called” the author and finisher of our faith.” I believe what this means for us today is to become doers, rather than arguing about traditional interpretations of beliefs. The need today is for the world to see what it means to live a spiritual life guided and nurtured by the Ground of our Being inspired by the life of Jesus. The early church said you will know the Christians by their love, by their works, by their feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and in prison, by comforting the sorrowing and grieving, and lifting up the downtrodden .

No one can begin to comprehend fully the mystery and wonder of God, but we can observe God’s footprints when he has passed by. We can learn much by studying the experience of God recorded in the Bible. We see his footprints in the wonders of our natural world, in the wonders of a human birth , in the works of love and compassion given freely to those in need, in the growing unity and community of the human family across the earth. We are called to become all that we can be by the God, who has made us “very very good”—a little less than the angels-- but who is still striving with us toward that Omega Point when his Purpose will be fulfilled.