Where do we find God?

In heaven (wherever that is…)? In holy scriptures? In places of worship?

If you were to ask ancient Hebrews where one went to encounter the presence of God, the answer would be simple and obvious: the Temple — the Most Holy Place, specifically. Access to God’s presence was quite regulated and controlled — the holier you were, the closer you could get. There was a court for the gentiles, a slightly closer one for women. Hebrew men could get even closer, entering the courtyard. Only priests could enter the temple itself. Only the high priest, and only on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), could enter the Most Holy Place.

After the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, the Jewish rabbis shifted their emphasis from seeing the center of God’s presence as the Temple to seeing the center of God’s presence in the study of Torah. Wherever two or three are gathered together studying Torah, there is the glory of God.

If you were to ask modern practitioners of religion the same question, there would likely be some similarities. Most religious traditions point toward experiencing God in scriptures, prayer, pilgrimage, places of worship, or perhaps even places of great beauty.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a story about where to find God, and he doesn’t mention any of these things. To say it is surprising is an understatement:

He presents God at the final judgment saying only one thing: “Come, you who are blessed, and inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.” He then says the inverse: “I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me in. I was naked, and you didn’t clothe me. I was sick, and you didn’t care for me. I was in prison, and you didn’t visit me.”

Both those who did and did not care for the people around them have the same response: “When did we ever see you (God) and help you?”

God replies: “As much as you did (or didn’t do) for the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!”

At its core, this is a story about where we are willing to look for and see the divine.

This is an astounding reversal of most traditional religious worldviews which usually draw strong distinctions about where God is and where God is not, between the clean and the unclean, seeing some places as sacred and others profane, some people as worthy and others as less so, some groups as good and others as bad; God being present with some people and less with others.

It is a common perspective within Christianity to believe that what matters most is a personal relationship with Jesus. This usually implies that this is an internal experience cultivated by reading your Bible and praying, that it is solitary, individual, and private. And yet, in this bold story, Jesus himself clearly describes what a “relationship with God” actually looks like. It isn’t internal, it is external. It is much more about how we care for the people around us.

Finding God in church, scriptures, and individual religion can unintentionally free us to ignore or mistreat others and still feel like we are connected to God. But Jesus insists that God isn’t cloistered in the churches and temples. That instead, God is in the gutters, the slums, the homeless shelters, the refugee camps and the prisons.

Jesus does not present God asking any questions about what beliefs, religious traditions, prayers, or scriptures anyone practiced. According to Jesus, our compassion, care, and work for a just world for each person is the only way our religion matters to God. Cultivating a relationship with God looks like feeding those without enough resources to eat, visiting those who are lonely, being present with those who are incarcerated.

Jesus claims that God is most present to us in the people we are most tempted to categorize as other, dirty, dangerous, worthless, or even bad. Only as much as we are willing to open our eyes and see God’s presence in them are we able to experience God’s presence at all.

So what if we did this? What if we started viewing our most important human work as seeing the presence of God in each and every human being we have the privilege of sharing our earth with?

I think seeing God in each person would change what (and who) we value. I think seeing God in each person would change how we pay employees and share profits. I think seeing God in each person would change how available we make education and healthcare. It would change how we operate our prisons. It would move us to tolerate much less inequality, injustice, and violence. It would cause us to respect and honor each person in their uniqueness.

I deeply believe that if we saw God in each person, we would create a world that felt a lot like heaven.

And perhaps we would find God everywhere.