The Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich described God as the “source and ground of all that is.” Scripture describes God as the One “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Max Lucado said, “People asking, ‘Where is God?’ is like fish asking, ‘Where is water?’.”
As a group of Lutheran seminarians prepared for a mission in the Mexican colonias, a community organizer reminded us: “Wherever we go, God is there before us.” I love the double-entendre: wherever we would go, wherever we arrived, God preceded us there; and, wherever we went, God was right there, before us … in the people, in the environment, in the culture and the nature of the place.
It is this faith – our trust in the ever-presence of God, in us and in the world – that enables us to live boldly. And it is this faith that calls us out, into the world, to live as God’s people, to share with others the grace and truth we have received. From this perspective, we’re invited to see the world, like author/teacher Kelly Fryer said, not as “a problem to be solved,” but as the arena where God is already at work, transforming lives. God simply invites us to join in that work. It is out there, in the world, that God invites us to be co-creators of a new reality that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
Our “mission” is no more and no less than to proclaim that Kingdom through everything we say and do. And to do so, as Luther said, with a living, daring confidence borne out of our faith in God’s presence and grace. So … we go, together; and we go boldly, secure in knowing that wherever we go, God is there before us.
