I am a pastor in the United Church of Christ.

The United Church of Christ claims that “God is Still Speaking.” It is hard to believe that God actually talks to folks and hands out explicit instructions. The bible is full of stories about such divine directives and, well, for many it is a pretty hard to swallow as literal truth. But for me it is not hard to conceive of God being Love, or even an interconnected force, that pulls us to good and pulls us from bad. And so I feel comfortable claiming God calls us and still speaks to us. I see God as this ocean or force of love that permeates all of creation calling, speaking to us from within and through others and creation.

That loving God calls us away from hate and wrongful acts—while at the same time other humans might claim that a god calls them to hate and wrongful acts. To make it more modern: Hitler and his followers somehow heard a call, which the God of love calls us away from. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, heard a call that the God of love calls us toward. In this respect, metaphorically, I think we hear God giving us instruction, speaking to us. King was able to put a part of God’s call into words. This is what the Bible’s author’s did too, and so the Bible can be said to contain the Word of God –timeless truth–through which God is still speaking.

And like it or not, much of our culture claims the bible has specific divine instructions, God’s laws, or calls, if you will. As a pastor one of the things I feel “called” to do is take that framework and show how we can hear God’s calls alright,  and it is always away from hate and always toward love. I believe that many pastors do this as well, and that God can indeed speak through them.

To put one more modern spin on it: it’s sort of akin to modern day religious elites calling for discrimination and hate through religion and finding yourself feeling that “That ain’t Love” and wanting to distance yourself from it and  oppose it. We hear a call (God still speaking!), we act on it by moving away from the hate and toward the love.

Christianity allows us to do this every day, to say “Hey where is love directing us to and away from?” and when folks listen to those calls and act on them, I see that change is possible through the still-speaking-God, and that lives are “saved” from a lesser life by Jesus’s Way. And it works because, Jesus was so very much all about love that it is easy to find God speaking through Jesus’s words and actions, pulling us toward Love and away from hate.

I am not a member of another faith so I would not presume to say what others do or believe, but it seems to me that there is common thread of love and goodness and striving for it in other paths too–which makes me think it’s all about that Love God in the end, the one that soaks us through and through and moves us toward good/love and away from bad/hate, i.e., the God that is still speaking!

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