I told you that the way we deal with this problem is by having God release control of the universe. God is not manipulating and controlling the things that happen to us. As a result, the outcome of our lives is dictated by chance and choice. Now, I had several people say that this sounds a lot like deism, where God sets the universe into motion and backs away from the universe. But I explained that I feel God is very much a part of the universe and this when we got into God’s plan.

I believe God’s plan for the universe is the redemption of everyone and everything. The way this happens is with God’s spirit of redemption in all of our hearts. God’s spirit of redemption is connected to God’s unconditional love and is what brings redemption into the world. The problem is that God can’t force us to access the spirit of redemption inside of all of our hearts. We must choose to utilize it of our own accord. And one of the best ways to access the spirit of redemption inside of our heart is through prayer.

Our prayers do not cause God to act on our behalf and manipulate the world in our favor. Rather, when we pray, we become more closely connected to God’s spirit of redemption, which changes us and, as a result, brings redemption to the world. All of this leads to what we are talking about today because, if we’ve defined God in this way, then it begs a fundamental question: What exactly is God?

We don’t talk about this very much because it’s hard to imagine and even articulate. I think most of us think of God as a being that is a lot like us only infinitely greater in every way. This is where a lot of the omni’s come from: omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful), omnipresent (all present) and omnibenevolent (all good). Essentially, God is perfect in every way.

But if you’ve taken anything away from this sermon series, you probably understand that based on these various descriptions, God is not a being like us. In fact, based on these various descriptions, the omni’s don’t apply to God at all. And that’s because the omni’s, which in the Western world is how almost everyone defines God, has nothing to do with the God of the Bible.

Those descriptions, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent, all come from Greek philosophy. They were descriptions developed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And although they are commonly used in the Western world to describe God, the fact is these philosophers didn’t write the Bible. The Hebrews wrote the Bible and they didn’t think of God as being perfect. In fact, they didn’t think of God as a being that was separate and apart from the universe. They thought of God as everything.

Now what do I mean by that? Well, in our scripture we read this morning, Moses is being asked by God to confront Pharaoh and get him to release all of the Hebrew slaves. Moses is not too jazzed about this assignment and responds to God by pointing out that he has no authority with the Hebrew people. Moses is like, “What if they ask about you? I don’t even know your name?” This is when God reveals God’s name to Moses. God says, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

Now this is a remarkable moment in the scriptures because this name tells us so much about how the Hebrew people thought about God. So when Moses asks the question, “What is your name?” one would think that God would revert back to the original Hebrew names for God found in Genesis—like Elohim or Yahweh. Instead, the name of God is “I am”. The name of God is the verb to be. The name of God is existence itself. This is an incredible idea. You, me, the grass, the trees, the air you breath, all existence is God. Indeed, God is not just inside of you. God is the very reason why you exist.

This is a very different idea from a God that creates the universe, steps back from creation and then tinkers with it every so often. If God is simply the cause of the universe’s existence, then the universe can exist independent of God. Using this logic, if God were to cease to exist, we could keep on going. Another way to think about this concept is: if God were to all of a sudden cease to exist, then so would the universe. The biblical God is not simply the creator of the universe, but its reason for continuously existing now and in the future.

The Bible is not simply suggesting that God created the fabric of space and time. Rather, God is the fabric of space and time. Proof of this point of view in the Bible is the Aramaic word Jesus uses to describe God—Alaha. The best translation of Alaha is “Sacred Unity” or “the All” or “oneness.” In our modern English, we would say God is everything. You, me, all existence is God because God is what makes existence possible. The Psalm we read this morning is getting at this idea when it says, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”

If God is everything that means God is both everything good and everything bad about the universe. This idea is really hard for Christians to wrap their mind around because they are so used to thinking of God as only being all good or, as I said earlier, omnibenevolent. However, the Hebrew conception of God means God has to be the bad as well. For example, when someone gets cancer, we often pray for God to intervene and stop the cancer. But using this logic, God is already there because God is the cancer cell.

Now, this might be hard to wrap your mind around, but if you assume that this is true, then everything that we’ve talked about in this series makes perfect sense. We began with the premise that the Christian God is a God of unconditional love. If God is the very fabric of the universe, then the force that undergirds everything in our lives is unconditional love.

And how does that unconditional love play out? God love us so much that God gives us the free will to make our own decisions rather than interfering in our lives. God loves us so much that, rather than impose a plan on each of our lives, God gives us a choice to bring redemption to our world through the spirit of redemption inside of our hearts. God loves us so much that God gives us the ability to change the world through that unconditional love so that we become the answer to prayer. We simply have to see that unconditional love is literally infused in the world around us.

I want to tell you a story that illustrates this point in an amazing way. On January 31^st, 1971, the Apollo 14 rocket took off from the Kennedy Center Space Complex in Florida. Apollo 14 would be the 3^rd mission from NASA to land on the moon. Aboard the ship were three astronauts – Alan Shepherd, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell. Their mission was land on the moon, perform a number of experiments, collect around 90 pounds of moon rocks and return home. Unlike the Apollo 13 space mission (which we all know so well because of Tom Hanks), Apollo 14 was successful and completed 100 percent of their objectives.

On their way back to earth, the Apollo spacecraft was in what astronauts call barbeque mode, where the ship rotates very slowly so that no one side gets too roasted by the sun. Since their only job at this point was to wait until they were close enough to enter into the earth’s atmosphere, the three men could just sit and look out the window, enjoying the view. Every hour or so the ship would rotate to a point that revealed the earth, moon, sun and stars as this large panorama. The view was breath taking.

For a time all three men watched the view come and go, but eventually Alan Shepherd and Stuart Roosa retreated into other activities. But not Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell was transfixed by the scene outside the window of the spacecraft. Every time he saw the earth, his mind would float towards the fact that his brother was flying missions in Vietnam. Mitchell himself had flown bombing missions during the Korean War. From where he was sitting, the earth looked so peaceful and serene, but on the surface life was extraordinarily violent.

His mind was struggling to comprehend the dissonance between the violence of humanity and the peaceful beauty of the planet, and then, all of a sudden, something happened—Mitchell realized that everything he assumed was true about the world was totally and completely wrong. Mitchell had been an avowed atheist for quite some time. He had adopted a wholly scientific view of the world, dismissing all religion as totally archaic. Science made the world seem predictable and understandable. It was science that had shot him into space and taken him safely to the moon. But looking out that window, he realized that his perspective was extremely deficient.

Mitchell felt something happening to him that he had never felt before. As he looked at the sun, moon earth and stars, they no longer felt like these distinct separate bodies floating out in space. Mitchell was no longer simply an observer of these bodies, he felt like he was connected to them. Almost as if they were part of Mitchell. He said it felt like his flesh and bone just disappeared and there was no boundaries between his body and the celestial bodies. The divisions that had defined his life for so long (male/female, white/black, American/Russian) just evaporated and, for the first time ever, he experienced life with no distinctions at all – everything was one.

Mitchell described this event as an “ecstasy of unity” and in that moment he abandoned his atheism and realized that the universe was the result of an intelligent design overseen by a force that was more powerful than any religion or scientific principle had ever described. Although this might sound unusual, what Edgar Mitchell experienced in space is not uncommon among astronauts. In fact, it happens so often that it has been given its own term. It is known as the Overview Effect. By being in space, above the earth, you gain a perspective that was impossible to even conceive of when you were on the ground. Every astronaut who describes the Overview Effect talks about how the experience fundamentally changed their understanding of life.

This feeling of being connected to everyone and everything, the “ecstasy of unity” as Mitchell called it, he was experiencing the fabric of space and time. He was experiencing that unconditional love that is everywhere and in everything. I would argue that Mitchell caught a pure glimpse of God that ignited the spirit of redemption inside of his heart that is connected to that unconditional love.

Indeed, what Mitchell’s story proves is that, the more we are connected with the unconditional love of God, the more we discover the meaning of life. God’s unconditional love is what truly illuminates our purpose and brings fulfillment to our lives. And our goal in this church is to help you get in touch with and experience God’s unconditional love.

And that’s how I want to end this series. I want to talk about how we can get in touch with God’s unconditional love. Now there’s lots of different ways we can do this. You can do it through Jesus and his teachings. You can do it through rituals like worship and prayer. But for me, perhaps the most effective way of getting in touch with God’s unconditional love is through experiencing God in nature. So I want to end by telling you a story where I experienced God in everything.

This past summer, my family had the opportunity to go to the beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My father provides this for everyone so that once a year we can all get together for a few days since we all live in different parts of the country. Generally, the house my father rents is pretty large so that it can fit all of our various family members. Well, my dad rented a house and my sisters had been raving about it saying, “It’s the best house. You’re going to love it!” I was like, “Okay, if you say so.”

So we get there and it is a huge house. It has like eight bedrooms, a movie theater, a rec room with a pool table, etc. Of course, I don’t care so much about the house, I’m there to swim in the ocean. So we immediately go out to the beach to swim and when we come back in, I realize that the outdoor shower, where you usually get all sand and salt off of your body, is protruding out from the side of the house.

If you’ve ever been to a house in the Outer Banks, normally these showers are underneath the house so you can have some privacy. This shower is exposed with no top, so anyone from your house or the surrounding houses, if they’re on the upper decks can see you in this shower, which means you’re not going to take off your suit to get fully clean. Since there’s no privacy, your immediate thought is, I’ll just shower inside. Unfortunately, this is the thought that everyone has had because when I got in the shower in my room it was clogged with sand and shells.

Literally, dirty water and sand was bubbling out of the shower, so I felt dirtier after I got out of the shower than when I got in. I was so grossed out by this, I was like, “I’m just not going to shower.” But after a few days, I was smelly and sticky and I just couldn’t take it anymore. So one night, at like midnight, I decide I’m going to shower in this outdoor shower because it’s dark and nobody can see me.

Now it’s about 65 degrees because it had been cloudy and raining all week, which means it’s a little cool. I get in the shower and turn it on and the warm water starts flowing over my body and, after a minute, I look up. Now what you have to understand is that shower is facing towards the Atlantic ocean, which means there is no light pollution. And I assumed that when I looked up, I wouldn’t see anything because the clouds were blocking the sky. But the clouds had just parted for the first time all week, so when I looked to the sky, I saw the entire Milky Way galaxy with my naked eye.

It was incredible, I had never seen anything like it before. It was like I was right there. And something happened in that moment with the water and stars. It was like I disappeared. I didn’t have skin and bones. There was no division between myself and the universe. It’s as if, for a brief moment, we were one and I was part of everything. And I felt this amazing sense of wholeness wash over me. I felt God’s unconditional love in a way that I had never felt it before. I was overcome by a sense of peace and joy. Tears were streaming down my face and I was changed in that moment because, for the first time in my life, I truly understood why the Hebrews say God is everything. Amen.