The less we believe in God, the more freely we use God’s name. That’s the irony that prompted David Balzer to make an audio documentary about the phrase “Oh my God.”
Often used thoughtlessly, the words carry a vestige of religious heft — and therefore make some people uneasy. To invoke God so casually seems like a Commandment-breaker.
Balzer, who teaches at Canadian Mennonite University, gleaned a range of opinions about whether or not God frowns on the phrase. But he’s less interested in what constitutes taking the Lord’s name in vain than in redeeming the words for a good purpose.
“Now, whenever I hear the phrase, I’m going to ask myself: Does it make sense for God to be here right now?” he says in the new documentary, which you can find here. “Yes, it does. And I’ll smile, because I’m happy about that.”
The point being: All of us would do well to call upon the name of the Lord more often — intentionally, not thoughtlessly.
The difference depends on a grammatical nuance: Are you saying, “Oh my God” or “O my God”?
The former is an exclamation, the latter a vocative — a form of address or invocation.
What if, Balzer asks, every time you said OMG you had to decide if you were saying “Oh” or “O”?
Were you calling on God or just exclaiming?
If you weren’t calling on God, maybe you should have.
Balzer’s reminder to sharpen our awareness of God’s sustaining presence augments the lead article in our May issue. In “Tender Words for Fearful Skeptics,” Brenda Hostetler Meyer confronts the doubts that even a lifetime of churchgoing can’t dismiss: “Can I, or do I, believe in a God who saves, given the turmoil on the nightly news?”
In scripture she finds “some of God’s words that I need to hear in these challenging times.”
Who hears the divine words? Those who invoke God’s name.
Hostetler Meyer offers the example of Gideon, who encounters a messenger from God after “the Israelites cried to the Lord” (Judges 6:7).
“Don’t be afraid,” the heavenly visitor says. “The Lord is with you.”
And also with us. A note alongside this passage in the new Anabaptist Community Bible says: “God is aware of our struggles, is present in all circumstances and hears our cries.”
Like Gideon, we cry to God because we know we are small.
“How can I deliver Israel?” Gideon asks. “My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”
“I will be with you,” God’s messenger assures him again.
Today, the world’s turmoil might make us feel small — powerless against a surge of troubles. This is a time to band together and cry out to God alongside the faithful, as the Israelites did in Gideon’s day.
When life’s trials threaten to crush our spirit, how might God answer our plea? Perhaps by granting a sense of peace amid the mystery of divine presence and the awareness of our small place in God’s infinite creation.
Or — dare we hope? — by empowering those who appear weak to do great things, like Gideon’s trumpet-blowing, jar-smashing defeat of Midian. “And they cried, ‘A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!’ ” (Judges 7:20).
Whether in shouts of triumph or whispered prayers, our cries to God rise from our quest to know the God who sees and saves.
The late Mennonite astronomer and Harvard professor Owen Gingerich, who attended the Mennonite Congregation of Boston (see an article by its current pastor here), described the search for God in a 1995 sermon at the Washington National Cathedral.
Being created in God’s image, Gingerich said, endows us with creativity, conscience and consciousness.
“One consequence of this self-consciousness,” he said, as quoted by Peter J. Gomes in The Good Book, “is that we ponder our place in the universe, and we seek to find meaning and to find God.
“The search for God is subtle, but perhaps it is this long journey — this search, more than anything else — that makes us human. We are the thinking part of this vast and sometimes very intimidating universe, and our quest could well be the purpose of it all.”
The quest begins with the vocative OMG: “Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you” (Psalm 102:1).
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