The gods of the ancient world tended to be practical and accessible. They were not always predictable, however, and could even be capricious at times. The multiplicity of gods represented the complexity of life and of an uncontrollable world. Their names and characteristics varied from place to place, but it was nearly universally true that gods were appealed to in various ways to perform tasks that humans needed to have done.

A list of such needs, of course, was endless, as seemingly was the number and names of gods to perform them. They could, however, be fairly easily categorized based on the primary needs and predicaments of human life. Thus, people prayed and sacrificed to one god or another for rain for crops, for help in getting pregnant, for healing from disease, for good hunting, for protection from natural disaster, and so on.

As cultures and life got more sophisticated and complicated, so too did the gods and the needs that people brought to them. One could ask for help in getting someone to fall in love with you or for a curse on a personal enemy. And gods became nationalized, granting protection from enemy tribes or countries and giving victory in battle.

The Bible appeared on the scene in this more complicated phase. What sets it apart, however, is its insistence that there is, in fact, only one God. Remnants of the multiple gods view are still present in it, especially where foreign peoples are understood to have different gods. Some more ancient texts accept that this is actually the case. Later, these foreign gods are dismissed as fakes. Wisdom, the Bible teaches, is coming to know that there is only one universal God, the LORD, rendered as YHWH in the manuscripts (more a symbol that a word).

What was unclear, however, was whether the Lord could be appealed to for personal and other needs in the same way the earlier gods could be. Evidence of this uncertainty is in the now common finding of totems and idols of neighboring people’s gods in excavated ancient Israelite settlements. Clearly, practical people took the attitude of keeping all bases covered, though the biblical texts express repeated outrage at such infidelity.

Yet, to be honest, the Lord’s biblical reputation in this department is pretty spotty. Sometimes prayers got answered but often they didn’t. Worse, the Lord often is Israel’s nemesis and causes as much suffering as he resolves. The problem was something called the Lord’s righteousness. This God wasn’t interested so much in the right prayers and offerings as he was in proper behavior, especially from Israel’s rulers.

When we come to Jesus and the New Testament, Israel has become a vassal state and the Lord’s concern with it is less than clear. Is he going to send a messiah to liberate it or has he moved on to more universal, and at the same time, more personal concerns? Jesus, or more accurately his later interpreters, seems to want it both ways. But it’s not long before concern for Israel falls by the wayside (especially after Rome basically obliterates it) and Jesus become a universal savior.

But what kind of savior is Jesus? The numerous healing and other miracle stories depict Jesus as being intensely concerned with people’s individual needs. And writings from Christianity’s first centuries show that this aspect of Jesus remained important and popular. But gradually, Jesus as a divine source meeting personal needs in this life gave way to Jesus as the savior granting something called “eternal life” in a time to come. This is the Jesus we meet in the letters of Paul and the gospel of John. This Jesus as universal Savior and Lord is made the official one in the 4^th century at the council of Nicaea (whose creed makes no mention of his earthly ministry).

While Jesus’ intimacy stands out in the gospels, Jesus the resurrected Lord gradually became ever lofty, distant, and unapproachable. In response, the Christian pantheon began to expand. The Virgin Mary became a sympathetic figure who could be appealed to as an intercessor with her son. Since miracles are attributed to the disciples in Acts, people began praying to them to do such things from their positions in the heavenly community. The company of saints expanded as more recent heroic figures were added and many, like the ancient gods, became associated with various specific needs and causes.

As the centuries went by, the Lord God, supported by his heavenly retinue, continued to be viewed as a source of help with the vicissitudes of life. Eternal life in heaven was all well and good but one’s needs and sufferings right now were what held people’s attention.

All this changed dramatically, of course, with the coming of the modern era. The mysterious and seemingly random sufferings visited upon people were gradually given logical explanations. Diseases became explainable in theory and increasingly treatable in practice. In most cases, natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts) still can’t be prevented but are understood and not seen as random acts of divine or malevolent forces.

Christianity was knocked on its heals by all this and still struggles to know how to respond. After its initial attempts to oppose scientific understanding fell flat, it has essentially adopted a have your cake and eat it too posture. Scientific explanations of natural phenomena are mostly accepted yet there are still attempts to give God some kind of role in them. Even the most ardent fundamentalist will go to a doctor but also ask their congregation to pray for them if they are ill. They will check their weather app before going on a picnic and pray for God to give them sunshine.

In the days after the July 4 Texas flood disaster, a few stories appeared about how area churches responded. A minister of a (typically conservative) Church of Christ congregation prayed (with the odd directiveness of some evangelicals), “Lord, turn off the floodgates of heaven right now.” Mostly, however, he simply acknowledged the pain and confusion his congregants were experiencing.

At a neighboring mainline Presbyterian church, people were urged to comfort each other and the many instances of people coming forward to help those in need was highlighted. To those who had experienced personal loss, a minister said, “Your pain is seen, your grief is honored, and your questions are valid. We don’t know why this tragedy happened, but we do know this: God is with us.”

Another story focused on a prayer service at an Episcopal church further away in Dallas but which had many connections to the devastated girls’ camp. Here, too, God’s presence was emphasized.

“This service is meant to be that safe, calm space where we come together to be reminded of God’s presence,” said the Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Girata in his opening remarks. Together, the congregation read Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”

In an interview after the service, Father Girata shared his view of the Christian response to such tragedies.

There’s a saying people like to attribute to Christian theology, which is “God will never give you more than you can handle.” It’s terrible theology. Actually, the entire point of Christ is that we cannot handle the pain of this world. Jesus carries the pain that is too much for us to bear.

I don’t know how representative these examples are, but I suspect they are evidence for a pretty dramatic shift away from belief in what I sometimes call the “cavalry God” who will rush to the rescue of those in distress. Even the minster who asked God to turn off the celestial spigots would have been stunned if, in fact, the rain had ended and the sun came out. His prayer was a remnant of a more credulous past but mostly was an expression of the sincere frustrations of his grieving congregation: Enough already.

Grief is clearly what these services were about. When disaster strikes, people naturally turn to each other for support. Shared grief is much easier to bear and such occasions are where religious communities shine. The millions who attended or watched Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, followed a few years later by the surge in church attendance after the 9/11 attacks, are two of the most dramatic recent expressions of this human need.

The breakdown of the cavalry God belief system is not simply because of science. Even more it is the gradual abandonment of what some have called the “mythic God.” That is, God as essentially an inflated and overwhelming human being, existing in some far-off realm, watching over the events of humanity and the universe. The man behind the curtain, in other words. While at times we may all wish for a special invisible magical friend, today it seems that few of us anymore can take such a notion seriously.

Who or what is God then? Or is it a notion that just needs to be abandoned finally, like Santa or the tooth fairy? In its early centuries, the church decided to make Jesus the bridge (pontes, Latin for bridge, hence pontiff, pope) between the human realm and the heavenly one. Yet there is no evidence Jesus of Nazareth ever held such a view.

Instead, Jesus seemed to believe there was no gap needing to be bridged. For him, what he called the kingdom of God was all around us and within us. We just need to wake up to see it. Which is why, in saner moments, later theologians would say things like “God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves” (Augustine) and “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me” (Meister Eckhart). And later, echoing Eckhart, Paul Tillich would say that God is not a being but rather the ground of Being itself.

Personal tragedy and community disaster throw us into a tailspin, causing us to doubt our self-worth and life’s meaning and value. When we come together, hearing things like “God is with you” may sound trite. But gathering in grief is a way of reassuring ourselves of the eternal Being we all share and which transcends whatever pain and loss we have experienced.

Science has helped explain many of the fundamental principles and laws by which the universe operates. At the same time, however, it has also shown that the universe which we actually experience is the result of a seeming anti-principle: randomness and chance. That randomness produces amazing wonder and beauty but also equally incredible destruction and disaster. We ourselves are the result of the unending interplay of order and disorder, as is everything around us.

And holding it all together is what historically people have called God. You many prefer another word. But whatever it’s called, this primal Reality is the assurance and the deep knowing that, whatever the circumstances, everything is and will always be held together. Trusting in that is what Jesus called “faith” and it yields the experience which Paul described as “the peace which transcends all understanding.”

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