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When God Seems Hard to Find Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, September 10, 2006 Years ago someone gave me a picture to hang on my wall. On the surface it seems like a colorful design, but if you look at it carefully – not studiously, but almost as if you were looking through the picture not at it – to can begin to make out an actual image. It is of Jesus on the cross. It isn’t something I can see all the time; I have to have the patience to gaze into the picture. Even then sometimes I can’t make out the figure of Jesus on the cross very well – sometimes not at all. It is a fascinating thing: Jesus hidden from the naked eye, yet visible to the inner eye. This picture serves as something of a parable for our lives. Sometimes we can see Jesus in almost everything. Sometimes we can’t see him at all, no matter how hard we are looking. In contrast to us, Noah and his family had seen the hand of God at work in the world and especially for them. You see, God had chosen Noah to build a huge boat. He, his wife, their sons and their wives along with animals two by two were supposed to get on the boat while God flooded the world killing everyone and everything – except for creatures that lived in the water, I presume. It rained for forty days and forty nights so that water covered the entire earth. The big boat drifted around on the seas for weeks. Finally the water evaporated and the boat came to rest on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. Noah and his family eventually disembarked to resume their lives. As they stood on the dry land the Lord made a covenant with Noah, his family and all the creatures of the earth. The covenant was essentially a promise God made not to destroy the world with water ever again. As a sign of the covenant God placed a rainbow in the sky. When Noah and his family saw the rainbow they could remember what God had promised. You have to admit: this was a pretty big deal. After all the rain and the destruction they had endured, to see this rainbow was a wonderful thing. They could be sure that God had been behind all that had happened to them. More than that, they could be sure that God would never ever do it again. If this wasn’t a mountain top experience of God then I don’t know what would be. Not long after that, Noah got drunk and one of his sons, Ham, saw him lying in his tent bare naked. When he told his brothers about it, he laughed, but they didn’t. Then went in and covered their father up. Once Noah heard what had happened, he pronounced a curse on one of Ham’s sons – that he would serve the others all of his days. The mountain top experience of God gave way to the valley; the extraordinary gave way to the very ordinary. The God who had been so evidently involved in their lives had become hidden. Where was God now? Have you ever wondered about that – where God was? Most people have. We wonder where God is in the midst of great tragedies: like hurricane Katrina or 9/11 or the Indonesian tsunami. Why does God let this sort of thing happen? Or where was God in the midst of the recent war in Lebanon or in the repeated bombings in Iraq. How can God just stand and look on? Why doesn’t God do something to stop it? But we wonder where God is in our own lives as well. When we suffer tragedies or when things aren’t tragic but they don’t quite go like we had expected. Or sometimes we wonder where God is not because anything bad has happened, but just because our lives seem spiritually dry. God seems far away and we don’t know why. Have you ever wondered where God was? Why do we have those times when it’s hard to see Jesus at work? Why do we sometimes feel that God is far away? John Ortberg in his book God is Closer than You Think suggests that one reason God doesn’t seem close is because we may not want God to be close. You see, we’re doing something we’re pretty sure God doesn’t want us to do, and we would rather God stayed away. Ortberg tells about a two and one half year old girl who discovered the pleasure of making mud pies in her back yard. She called it “warm chocolate.” Her grandmother was reading in the back yard. When she saw her, she told her to stop playing in the mud. The little girl persisted, and when her grandmother looked up from her reading again, the little girl said, “Don’t look at me, Nana.” Sometimes we’re like the two-year-old: we don’t want God to look at us. Maybe it’s when were filling out our expense accounts or doing our taxes or searching for pornographic websites or wishing that something bad would happen to someone else. It’s not as though we consciously tell God to stay away; it’s more like acting as if God didn’t even exist. Sometimes we don’t want God to be close. Ortberg also says that God seems far away in order to get our attention. Years ago I knew a Kindergarten teacher who spoke in such a soft voice – especially with children. I asked her why she spoke so softly when talking to children, and she said that it was her experience that when she spoke softly the children paid better attention, they listened more carefully. Ortberg notes that when he and his wife want to have a private conversation, their children have an almost uncanny ability to hear what they are saying. If they can’t hear, then they desperately want to know. Sometimes God is like that. Sometimes God doesn’t say anything. Sometimes God speaks softly through the ordinary things of everyday life inviting us to welcome both grace and mercy. The silence of God is not always a sign of God’s displeasure. Often God is trying to get us to pay attention. Sometimes God’s absence becomes a test of our faithfulness – if we will obey whether or not we feel God’s presence. The Lord tested Job in this way. God allowed Job to be stripped of all he had. God permitted Job to be afflicted with a painful, ugly illness. God allowed Job’s friends to counsel him, asking what he had done to deserve such treatment from God. They urged him to remember what it was and then repent of it. Job’s wife – who apparently had had about as much as she could stand - told him, “Curse God and die.” Do you know what Job did? To his wife he said, “Though God slay me, I will still praise him.” To his friends he said that he hadn’t done anything wrong. And to God he complained long and hard, but when all was said and done he had obeyed God in spite of what had happened to him. Old Job walked by faith and not by sight or by feeling. Life is filled with more uncertainty than we’d like to admit. We often sense that God seems far away, but we don’t know why. We wish we could have an extraordinary experience of God like someone else has had, but God never seems to get around to letting us have one like it. Like Noah who awoke from a drunken sleep to discover that things weren’t really that much different from before the flood, we discover that our days are pretty ordinary. What can we do? Noah had some wonderful memories. He could remember the flood and how God saved him and his family and all those animals. He could recall the water receding and the dove returning with an olive branch in its mouth. He could visualize walking down the ramp to dry land. He could remember planting those first grapes from which came the wine that made him drunk. But most of all he could remember the rainbow and God’s promise never to destroy the earth again by water. We can do that, too. Remember. We can remember the rainbow – sometimes we can even see them. We can remember the covenant God made with Abraham to make of him a great nation who would bless the world. We can recall God’s covenant made with the people of Israel through Moses. Mostly, we can remember the cross. It is the new rainbow. But it isn’t a promise not to destroy the world; it is a promise to save the world through Jesus dying on the cross for us. But the cross isn’t just about Jesus’ death. He had to live before he died. The cross reminds us of God coming in human form in a little baby. It speaks to us of Jesus living among us, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, raising the dead and forgiving sinners. But since it is a cross and people were crucified on crosses, it is about Jesus dying for the sins of the world – how he took our sins as his own so we could be free to become God’s children. And of course, it speaks of Jesus rising from the dead. Death could not contain him. Jesus rose in victory over everything that makes life threatening and painful. We recall those events – especially Jesus’ death and resurrection - every Sunday. They are essential to our faith. We recall them in Scripture and in preaching, in our prayers and affirmations of faith. We recall them in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are the rainbow events in our lives as Christians. They are events we can remember together. They remind us that the God who sent Jesus to live and die and rise again is not about to leave us. In Jesus Christ God is committed to us forever. Remember those rainbow events. We can remember the rainbow events of our own lives, too. The spiritual high points. The mountain top experiences. Like the time when we were confirmed. Or the time when we consciously decided to trust in and follow Jesus. The times when God has answered our prayers or the times God has guided us through particularly difficult periods. Or the times God has helped us make good choices. And any other time when God has seemed especially close. Often these things are hard to remember. That’s why some people keep spiritual journals chronicling their relationship with God through Jesus. They write about the low points and the high points. Often they write out their prayers to God. They keep a record of their prayers – the ones God answers and the ones God has yet to answer. You might say, “This is silly. Who has time for this?” Some people keep a visual record of the growing up years of their children. We used to put them in picture albums. Now you can find them on CD’s, videotapes and computers. We do that because we love our children and want to remember how they were when they were little. To look back on those pictures sometimes moves us to tears, but, more often than not, looking back makes us smile. So it is with keeping a record of our life with God. It helps us remember the rainbow days when God seemed close. But what if you haven’t kept a record and even if you had, you don’t think you would have very many things you would like to recall anyway? What if your life with God has seemed more like a dry duty than a joyful journey? Or what if you wonder sometimes whether you really believe what the church believes? That’s when we recall that it doesn’t depend on us; that it depends on God and what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. This is when we hold on ever so tightly to Jesus who lived for us, died for us and rose for us. Even though our personal experience may seem a little parched, God’s gift in Jesus Christ is still good, still there for the receiving, still there for the believing – even if all we can say is, “I believe, heal my unbelief.” Remember my picture? Even if Jesus isn’t always visible to the naked eye, he is nearby anyway. And he is on the cross – the rainbow for Christians. God is closer than we think. | |||||
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