sermons
Something New
New Beliefs, New Life
Steve Watson
May 03, 2026
I’ve been on a little preaching break since Easter, and it’s been beautiful the past three weeks to listen to three different preachers explore the creativity and artistry of our living, life-giving God. How this God who makes all things new invites us to be God’s co-creative poets and partners – loving with God, gardening with God, exploring new ways of knowing with God.
I’m so grateful for each of the three women we’ve heard from these past three weeks – our own pastors Ivy and Lydia and our guest Keri Ladouceur. It still stuns me that for most of the past two thousand years, churches shut down and blocked the gifts of women teachers and preachers. How much healthier our churches would have been, how much better our faith and our witness if we’d been taught by all God’s children.
I’m grateful for you, Ivy, Lydia, and Keri, and I’m grateful to be alive today.
Today I’m going to talk about the new life that can grow in us and through us when we embrace new beliefs that we’ve been missing. When our beliefs get larger, freer, more loving than they used to be.
My friend Tom asked me last week at a conference we hosted here at Reservoir to say something about a belief theology that was making my life better. What’s a belief about God that is changing my life?
And this is the first one that came to mind. It’s about the everywhereness of God.
Sounds uncontroversial at first, maybe boring. Classically, Christians have taught that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent – all powerful, all knowing, and everywhere.
But it turns out all those “omni” words are complicated, and people don’t all believe the same things about them and also don’t live like they’re aligned with their belief.
Here’s what I used to believe. I used to believe that God lives in the heavens, wherever that is. And that here on earth, there were particular places that God lives. I think I felt like God lives in religious places, like in churches. And that God shows up too, when we’re doing religious things, like reading the Bible or praying. After all, Jesus said:
Wherever 2 or 3 of you gather in my name, there I am.
And when I thought about it more precisely, here’s what I believed: that God lives in the souls of people who believe in Jesus and who, because of that, are in a special relationship with God, saved by God’s grace, adopted as God’s children.
And this is actually a pretty historic belief in the Christian church. That through God’s Holy Spirit, God lives in the souls of baptized believers in Christ, and that God’s presence is magnified when those baptized believers in Christ gather together, like in church.
And I’m not going to do it today, but you can make a case for this with a bunch of Bible verses. It’s a coherent belief – that the earth and its creatures – including all of us humans – are lost, and that those of us who believe in God through faith in Jesus Christ are saved, and it’s with us that God lives.
But then sometimes in the Bible, it pushes against the limitations of this belief.
Like when the poet says this in the Bible’s prayer book of the psalms:
Psalm 139:7-8 (Common English Bible)
7 Where could I go to get away from your spirit?
Where could I go to escape your presence?
8 If I went up to heaven, you would be there.
If I went down to the grave, you would be there too!
God’s in heaven, but when I die, God will be there too, in the underworld.
Or when the Bible says this:
Jeremiah 23:23-24 (Common English Bible)
23 The Lord declares, Am I a God
who is only nearby and not far off?
24 Can people hide themselves in secret places
so I might not see them?
Don’t I fill heaven and earth?
The prophets, like Jeremiah, correct people when their societies are unjust and they need to change their ways. Or when their beliefs are too narrow, and they need to change their mind. And get larger, freer, more loving in their thinking about God.
Like here: people are teaching that God is only found in the words and lives of particular people. And Jeremiah says:
no, no, no. You can’t limit God’s presence or activity or truth. God fills heaven and earth. God is everywhere.
The New Testament – the Christian scriptures – teach the same.
Like here in Acts, when the apostle Paul says:
Acts 17:27-28 (Common English Bible)
27 God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us.
28 In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring.’
God isn’t far away from any of us. We are all God’s children. In fact, we and all creatures live inside of God.
Woah.
Here’s another spot:
Colossians 1:17 (Common English Bible)
17 He existed before all things,
and all things are held together in him.
All things – heaven and earth, people and plants, moons and molecules, gravity and thermodynamics – all things are inside of God, held together by God.
God is everywhere – larger, freer, more loving than we might have imagined.
There are technical ways we can talk about this.
Call it radical omnipresence – this everywhereness of God.
Call it panentheism – the doctrine that teaches all things are in God. Not pantheism – that means everything is God, but panentheism, that everything is inside of God.
Call it divine entanglement – that when we say God didn’t want to be God without us, we mean everything and everyone, not just humans. And we don’t just mean God doesn’t want to be God without us, but that God can’t be. That God is present to, entangled with, this all matters – everyone and everything.
I don’t much care what we call it, though. I want to tell you how it’s changed me to start to live it.
Because what we believe is some of the soil out of which our very lives grow. What we believe about God is the soil of the garden of faith that grows in us. And new beliefs, when they are truer and better than what came before them, can bring forth new life.
Let me tell you some ways I’m feeling this.
The radical everywhereness of God explains a lot about our religion.
The theologian Willie James Jennings says that so much of Western colonialism hinged on a terribly mistaken belief. The land theft, the plundered treasure, the plundered people, genocide, slavery, the invention of race and the idea of white people – the whole diseased social imagination of the Western World – begins with what Jennings calls a “breathtaking hubris,” a critical mistake in a too narrow doctrine of divine geography and providence.
Jennings says that the first Spanish colonizers, and all the ones who followed them,
“discern the guiding hand of God in the way (they) arrived and remained in the New World, while discerning no such divine involvement in the lives of native peoples.”
God is with us, they thought (the baptized Christians) and not with them.
And when you imagine the transcendent God to live and reign only in the spaces where your religion has planted your flag in his name – well, then you more easily misunderstand, diminish, and mistreat the geographical terrain and culture you have assumed is godless.
A terrible belief that gives us a lot of the pain and dysfunction and war of the past few centuries of human history.
- Bad soil, bad garden.
- Bad beliefs, bad life.
And I explore this a lot more in the first chapter of my new book.
But this morning, I’d love to share with you what starting to believe in the radical everywhereness of God is doing for me not just intellectually but in my everyday life.
Faith in divine entanglement is probably the only thing that gives me a chance at being a decent pastor, in the times when I am a decent pastor. Because I’m not all the time.
I don’t know that it comes naturally to me. When I was a kid, I loved to talk, and I loved words and books, and I became an English teacher, where I got to talk a lot and tell people about words and books. Awesome, that worked.
But being a good pastor is really more about listening than speaking, and it’s more about lives and relationships than it is about words or books. And that stuff didn’t come naturally to me as a kid at least.
But when I’m tuned in to the radical everywhereness of God, I start to get really curious about everyone and everything, because God’s there, and so it’s all sacred.
And that means God lives with each and everyone of you friends, and with every other person I will ever see, who I will ever meet, who I will ever talk to. And that makes me curious. It makes me want to ask questions, makes me want to listen. Because I wonder more often, what’s going on with you that’s sacred. And I want us to see that together.
Let me put this a little more bluntly.
Belief in the radical everywhereness of God is often what makes me not be a jerk, when I’m not a jerk. Because sometimes I am.
For example, this winter, my daughter asked me if I’d go to a writing group with her. I think this was partly because we both like to write. And she was writing poetry and she knew I was about to launch a book, and so she was like – Dad, come with me to this writing group. Let’s try it together.
Now the cynical part of me thought maybe my daughter wants me to come because this way she can get a ride. She doesn’t have a car or a license, and this thing would have taken a long way to get to on the T or on her bicycle, and I have both a driver’s license and a car, so when my daughter was like – Dad, I really want to do this together. – she probably knew that was the most foolproof way she could have found to get a ride, and she was right. So off we went.
But when we got there, I didn’t want to write at all, partly because I was tired, but partly because I was too busy being judgy and eye-rolly about the whole scene. It wasn’t just a writing group, but it was a Buddhist writing group, and it was led by a white zenmaster.
And the room was full of tokens of Asian culture and Buddhist practice, and the walls were full of art I judged as kind of cheezy, and the room was full of people that when they first introduced themselves, didn’t seem much like serious writers to me.
And so during the writing time, I was thinking about cultural appropriation and kind of looking down on the space I was in and everything that was happening there.
But then when it came time near the end for those who wanted to read what they’d been writing, something shifted. First, my daughter read a bit of the poem she was working on, and I loved it. And I thought that the language she’s using is so interesting, and that experience she’s alluding to is so deep, and I just love that my own child has such an interesting way to say something so interesting to say about this life that is also so interesting. So beautiful.
And that shifted something in me, made me more open about what was going on in the room. What if God is here? And what if that can make me more curious, not judgmental. Thank you, Walt Whitman and Ted Lasso.
And so as people shared, I tried to hear the sacred in it all, and sometimes I did, so much so that as I left, I looked that white zenmaster in the eye and I didn’t say: I’m sorry I judged you so much because that would have been inappropriate and probably unhelpful, but I did say:
thank you for having us in your space, I’m grateful to be here.
Because that was true.
Because whatever I thought, God was there. And that changed me.
New soil, new garden. New belief, new life.
I feel this everywhere.
In my relationship to my own past and future – since there’s no trauma I lived where God was not there, no past I’ve had, no future ahead where God is not.
I feel this in my politics, so that I can walk into a space of community organizing and social justice work, like I did last week at the shareholders’ meeting of a bank to try to interrupt something terrible, but I can think: no enemy of mine is just an enemy. Because God is with them too.
And so instead of treating the people you might have called our opponents, or the target of our action, like jerks, we could treat them like, you know, people. And make our point, and make it forcefully, but also make it respectfully and humanely – child of God to child of God, like God is with us all, because I think that’s really true.
- New soil, new garden.
- New belief, new life.
All this makes me wonder if I’m entering into my Aunt Ethel phase of life.
When I was a kid, I had a great Aunt named Ethel who had suffered terribly. She had some serious mental breakdowns in the 40s and 50s, and I gather there was immense challenge and some violence or at least risk of violence in it, and she had spent at least a couple of decades institutionalized.
And if you know anything about the residential mental institutions of the mid-twentieth century in America, you know there were some terrible things that happened in many of those places, and I only know the smallest amount of all that my Aunt Ethel went through before she ended up in one of those places, and all that she endured while she was there.
But I know that when I was a child, she was stable, and she was living in a group home, and she spent Christmas with us most every year. And the one thing I remember about her is that to her, everything was beautiful.
No matter what gift you gave her, no matter what you said, it was beautiful.
And I’d never known anyone who talked that way.
- Oh, that’s beautiful.
- Oh, Steven, that’s so beautiful.
- Oh, Steven, you’re so beautiful.
And I didn’t have words for it then, but I loved that because it was beautiful. My Aunt Ethel was beautiful.
And the more curious I get about the radical omnipresence of God, the more I feel just like she did.
There’s no place I can go and God is not already there. How beautiful.
God fills heaven and earth, and inside of God, we live and move and have our being. How beautiful.
There is nowhere that God is not. You and me, and earth and sky, and fields of flowers, and sewage treatment plants, and friend and foe and joy and heartbreak – it’s all somewhere God lives, and all somewhere God hopes and breathes and loves.
So beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful.