HAVE YOU SEEN GOD LATELY? Sermon Presented to St. Paul's
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HAVE YOU SEEN GOD LATELY? Sermon Presented to St. Paul’s Church 1 Advent, Isaiah 64:1-9, Year B November 27, 2011 Thack Dyson Once upon a time, there were two brothers, eight and ten years old, who were exceedingly mischievous. Whatever went wrong in the neighborhood, it turned out they had a hand in it. Their parents were at their wits’ end trying to control them. Hearing that her priest worked with delinquent boys, the mother turned to him for help. The mother went to the priest and asked if he would talk to the boys. He agreed, but said he wanted to see the younger boy first and alone. So the mother sent him to the priest. The priest sat the boy down in a chair across from his desk. For about five minutes they just sat and stared at each other. Finally, the priest pointed his forefinger at the boy and asked, “Where is God?” The boy looked under the desk, in the corners of the room, all around, but said nothing. Again, louder, the priest pointed at the boy and asked, “Where is God?” Again the boy looked all around but said nothing. A third time, in a louder, firmer voice, the priest leaned far across the desk and put his forefinger almost to the boy’s nose, and asked, “WHERE IS GOD?” The boy panicked and ran all the way home. Finding his older brother, he dragged him to their room and into the closet, where they usually plotted their mischief. He finally said, “We are in BIG trouble.” The older boy asked, “What do you mean, BIG trouble?” His brother replied, “God is missing, and they think we did it!” Though we may laugh at the story, there are many people, including Christians, who from time to time believe that God is missing, especially in their lives. To them, He often seems AWOL because the circumstances in their lives seem to consist of one calamity after another. But this isn’t new. Throughout salvation history going back to our Hebrew predecessors, there were times when God seemed to be perennially out to lunch. In our Old Testament lesson this morning, we can sense Isaiah’s feeling that God had abandoned the people of Israel. By the time our prophet wrote this passage, the Israelites had returned from exile in Babylon to their holy city of Jerusalem. It was in ruins and the temple destroyed. The future looked bleak for the Israelites, and God’s presence was palpably absent. Isaiah’s longing for God is so desperate that he pleads for God to do some visible act, an act that everyone would see and understand. Isaiah is fairly graphic in describing his expectations of God. He wrote, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so the mountains would quake at your presence. [M]ake your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!” (Isaiah 64:1-2). Not only did he want a sign, he wanted to experience God in a form that communicated power and might. Isaiah connects God’s seeming absence with the lack of righteousness practiced in the community. He reminds the people that they have “become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” (Isaiah 64:6). One easily senses in these words a deep yearning for a God whose presence is not felt. In fact, Isaiah goes so far to say that God was intentionally hiding from His people when he writes, “ . for you have hidden your face from us.” (Isaiah 64:7). This notion that God intentionally hides from us is, in no small way, a chicken and egg kind of question. Which came first, the people turning away in denial of God, or God’s apparent abandonment of the people? It brings to mind something I read about a priest who was counseling with some seminarians who were questioning God’s presence. He said, “If you are feeling that God is far away, the chances are that God has not moved.” Yet, when the circumstances in your lives seemed bleak, how many of you have thought that God had abandoned you first? When that loved one suddenly and tragically died, or when you lost your job or your home, or your neighbor’s five-year-old contracted leukemia, how many of you have thought that God had taken off—that He was intentionally hiding from you? As I said, many people, including some devout Christians, have experienced this hiddenness of God. The contemporary Christian author Philip Yancey has felt that way. During a spiritually bleak time in his life, he felt that God had hidden himself from him. In his book, Reaching for the Invisible God , he writes: “I experienced the sense of abandonment just as I was making progress spiritually, advancing beyond childish faith to the point where I felt I could help others. Suddenly, the darkness descended. For an entire year, my prayers seemed to go nowhere; I had no confidence that God was listening.” 0 Yes, we are in good company when life turns downward and we take it as a sign that God has left us. Yet, I wonder, do we really believe, as this scripture suggests, that God hides from people? Does God back off and leave us without help—void of resources and possibilities? Do we think in our disobedient state, that God responds by taking a sabbatical from creation? Or, could it be that we have a propensity—or a predisposition to ignore the reality of God’s presence among us because we are so consumed with our predicament or otherwise distracted? Could it be that in our world of self-pity or busy-ness we ignore the reality of the holy all around us as we go our way into the world? Here, I think, is the true problem. It is not that God abandons us or hides from us. The truth of the matter is that we cannot see Him because we are so involved with the immediacy of our own lives, that we don’t even recognize that He has been with us all along. By not keeping God at the center of our lives during the prosperous times, we cannot recognize Him when things get desperate. Think about it. Last Friday was the biggest shopping day of the year. Also known as “Black Friday”, the Friday after Thanksgiving is the time when many of you begin the process of shopping for Christmas. In your shopping last Friday, how many of you thought about the coming of Christ? As you were going through the malls or stood in line at Target, Best Buy or Wal-Mart to buy an “X-Box 360” game system or flat screen television, how many of you gave thanks to God for sending His only Son? It’s like the story of the inquisitive four-year-old who was in the “Why” and “Tell me” stage of his life. The boy was helping his father set up the Christmas decorations. Imagine the scene with boxes scattered about as the boy asks, “Daddy, why are there so many lights? What do all these colors mean? Why do you cut branches off the tree and hang them on the door? Did you help your daddy when you were big like me? Tell me again the story of the baby Jesus. Why do you bring a tree into the house? Mommy is going to get mad if you make a mess.” After a while the boy asks his father, “Daddy, what does ignore mean?” The father explained, “Ignore means not to pay attention to people when they call you.” Immediately, the boy looked up at his father and said, “I don’t think we should ignore Jesus.” Puzzled, the father knelt closer to his animated son and replied, “I don’t think we should ignore Jesus either. I think we should give him our full attention. Why do you say we ignore him?” “But daddy, that’s what the Christmas carol says, ‘Oh come let us ignore him.’” 0 Maybe the boy in the story has something for us to consider. It isn’t that God is hidden from us. It could be we think He is hidden because we ignore Him so much that we forgot what the presence of the Holy feels like. We have gotten so out of the habit of going to God daily in prayer and studying His word, that we don’t recognize His presence in our lives. We don’t feel God’s presence, especially in the difficult times, because we don’t take the time each day to live life with God in mind. This brings to mind another aspect of God’s character that we tend to overlook. Not only has God not abandoned us, He is very much a part of us. The prophet Isaiah describes God as follows: “Yet, O Lord, you are the Father; we are the clay and you are our potter we are all the work of your hand.” (Isaiah 64:8). We are created by God, just as the potter shapes the clay. When the potter makes a clay object, the potter’s imprint is on the object. It reflects the potter’s involvement with the clay. The image of the potter and clay suggests an intimacy that God has with humanity. The hands of God are involved in our lives, shaping, creating, and yes, sometimes reshaping.