Is God absent from the Oklahoma public schools? That's the claim. If so, I want to know what that looks like. Or let's cancel Christmas.

Oklahoma's superintendent for public instruction, Ryan Walters, is on a mission. He is convinced that he has the power to "bring God back to schools." Friends, that is a lot of power.

Apparently, this all-powerful Creator of the Universe decided to leave. Or flunked out. Or maybe got kicked out because of a need to include the "least of these," like maybe gay teens, Muslims and Jews, in the center of all-encompassing Holy Love. Whatever happened, Walters, declaring that God is absent, is convinced he's got what it takes to push God back in.

My take: best of luck to him. I think he may be overestimating his influence over the Holy One. Plus, he completely negates the Christmas story.

Remember the narrative from Matthew Chapter 1:

"She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."

That's the whole premise and the whole promise of this season: Yes, God IS with us, both in the light and in the darkness. In other words, God cannot be absent and there be any truth to the Incarnation.

Nevertheless, this Incarnation-denying Don Quixote-like quest to "bring God back" brings me to wonder what a place where God has left looks like.

I ponder my years of studies on the nature of God, or as much as we puny, limited humans can understand about the nature of God. I contended then and still believe that, even with our limitations, we can certainly take a stab at it.

The Scriptures testify clearly that love centers the nature of God, with justice and mercy being the primary ways of expressing that love.

If God indeed departed the public schools in Oklahoma, then there must not be one loved child, not one caring teacher, zero just and corrective discipline, and nary a moment of gracious forgiveness offered to anyone in any classroom or administrative space anywhere.

And I am having a hard time believing that is the situation.

Think with me for a moment: what does a place empty of the Presence of the Holy One, the Immanuel, look like? Perhaps we can get a glimpse of it from what the news reports are saying about the unreal conditions in the prisons of deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When the rebels opened the doors, they found . . . something approaching hell.

Prisoners were killed in mass hangings or tortured to death, including by being deprived of food, water and medicine.

Syrian authorities would then dump them in mass graves.

And yet, I'm betting even in these horrific conditions, some of those imprisoned, starving, tortured people found tiny moments of compassion for each other. Their non-imprisoned relatives still loved them. Even there, God is not absent. Even in the worst of darkness, the love of God persists. We may have a hard time finding it, but it is there.

Truly, the absolute absence of God is . . . absolute hell. That is the place where love cannot be, where all justice is twisted with the guilty rewarded and the innocent punished, where grudges are held forever and mercy never granted, where kindness makes no appearance, where the oppressed are further trampled and the privileged live without accountability, where music is forever silenced, where hope may no longer poke its head above the ground and breathe freely.

If that describes the God-vacated Oklahoma public schools, they need to close. Right now.

So what does Ryan Walters, whom I'm sure is genuinely sincere in his assertions, really want? With all due respect, he doesn't want the Holy, Merciful, All-Encompassing and Justice-seeking-for-the-oppressed God that is revealed in the Holy Bible, the One who favors feeding the hungry over rewarding the powerful.

Instead, Walters wants the god that has been created by small minds, the god who excludes the desperate foreigners and condemns the ones who don't fit the "I am a girl's girl/I am a boy's boy" absolute divide, today's editions of yesterday's lepers. He wants the "I created the world in seven days" god rather than the One whose creative abilities hold this entire, ever-changing/ever-evolving apparently infinite universe together.

Walters, and so many like him, want the safe god. The god who doesn't demand that we recognize our punyness, our ignorant prejudices and our casual dismissal of the full humanness of those who are radically different from us. This is the god that rewards our smallness and pettiness and does not insist we take a hard look at our dark and disturbed souls.

The problem: the God of the Bible, the one that showed up at the time of the Holy Birth, is not safe. Not safe at all. And most of us would rather not go to these unsafe, holiness-demanding spaces.

But I promise you this: the unsafe Holy God is not absent, however much we seek to replace the Holy One with the god of our own making. God is present. And God is seeking justice and mercy for least of us.

That's our job: do justice and have mercy. God's already here-we are simply making God's presence more visible.