People have said that they can’t get down with a God who is homophobic and sexist and all the things they hate about evangelical Christianity’s version of what God is.

And I agree. I can’t get down with that God either.

But those things are not God.

God is not some loser in a button up with a bad sermon with shallow biblical understanding.

God is not a line that can be crossed from in to out.

God is not the painful experiences we have had.

God is, as you may have heard, Love.

It is Love which inspires poetry, not dogma. It is Love which liberates, not doctrine. It is Love which transforms, not discipline.

God is not the thing that hurt you and, if I may posit an idea, you aren’t mad at God.

God doesn’t have a body to direct your anger towards. And that energy must go somewhere. Without knowing it, most of us turn it onwards. And we hold that pain inside like a badge of honor.

God didn’t hurt you. The church likely did. That pastor, those Christians, maybe even white Jesus. But that is not God.

God is the feeling of peace you get when you notice the sky is blue for the first time in weeks.

God is the smell of coffee brewing first thing.

God is the friend who held your hand when they died and you didn’t know what to do.

God is the meal you shared with someone that was so good that you forgot to have a conversation.

God is Love.

God is the thing in the song that makes you cry, that gives you that warm feeling when you hear babies laugh, that brings you back home to your Self even after everything you went thru.

God is big enough for your anger and also is as mad as you are!

I believe God sees, feels, hears, experiences all the pains we do because if our bodies are Temples, God must be here. God must be feeling what I feel, going thru it all, and if I can just get still, I hear, “and I am always with you.”

It is this faith in that power, the breath breathed into creation, the love that raised Jesus from the grave, and raises us all back to life, that! That is the kind of God I can get down with, because it’s not a far off personality, but a close and personal enfleshed Divinity.