Luther Memorial Church
Des Moines, Iowa
July 27, 2014
Think about what the first game you ever learned was. It wasn't bridge or Scrabble, and it certainly wasn't boring and unending Monopoly or groovy Twister. Your first game wasn't even patty cake. No, the first game every one of us learned was peek-a-boo, the simplest version of hide-and-seek. When we cover our faces, babies believe we've gone away. When our face pops out again, the baby often giggles with delight at having found us again. My nephew Nate posted a video of his infant daughter to Facebook this week, and that's exactly what little Penny Kay did. She giggled to the point of hiccupping.
When we get older we advance to more elaborate games of hide-and-seek. Someone is it and everyone hides, and the person who's it has to find them all. Sometimes it gets more complicated as a game of Kick-the-Can. Or it gets turned inside out as a game of Sardines, where one person hides and everyone else is it. When the find the hider, they get to hide with them in the same tight quarters. Hide-and-seek is our first game because it's our basic mode in life. It's like our brains were built initially for seeking and finding. And all those eureka moments of finding and discovery tie together to form a web of mastery over hidden things that may be simple or difficult to find.
The hide-and-seek game is there in so much of what we do. It plays out all over the place. We strive after success and seek status. We wait for Godot. The movie "Urban Cowboy" told us we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And in the 80s the band Loverboy reminded us that we're working for the weekend. Whatever it is we're seeking, it all has its roots in a deeper longing: out quest for God. That's where Jesus is going in our gospel passage this morning. In all these little parables, he gives you a festival of hiddenness and a challenge to go seeking after God. But be careful! It may not be as easy as you think.
Sure we can imagine God present in the beauty we see all around us. Rainbows. Waterfalls. Fall colors. In the best sounds: The thwack of a perfectly hit golf ball. The sweet-spot smack of a ball hitting the bat for a home run. My infant niece giggling and hiccupping. Or in the smells of the coffee aisle at the grocery story, of fresh oranges and strawberries, and of whiff of vanilla. Or perhaps in the savory tastes of Cajun cooking, or bread from Ethiopia and India, or my wife's red beans and rice.
It's so easy to imagine God in these things. But as soon as we do, along come floods and drought, tornados, and famine. Not to mention hunger and homelessness, cancer and drug-resistant bacteria. And moldy popovers. And red beans and rice spilled on my nice white polo shirt. And potholes. And computer glitches. If we say we can find God in all the wonderful things, then we have to be able to say that God, being the one in charge of it all, has to be present in all the tragic, disastrous, and just plain yucky stuff we see, too. That might not be the most gratifying way to find God. It's sure not going to be the way to find a gracious God. Martin Luther, this congregation's namesake, said that if we go that route we're likely to find a God that doesn't look much different from the Devil with all that seemingly capricious malice.
So we sinners go another route. We like to ascribe God's hand as the thing behind our every success, rewarding us for our well-intentioned efforts. We think we deserve all the good things in our lives, and we can find God in them. That's what a preacher like Joel Osteen gives you in his so-called prosperity gospel. But the implication is that things like hunger and homelessness, cancer and poverty are somehow God's retribution for laziness or a lack of character. That's no God I'm interested in seeking after. And the prosperity gospel isn’t a true gospel. It’s just a way of manipulating the God you thought you’d found.
We ought not be surprised that God is so difficult to find. If we look at the Scriptures, an honest quest for God finds God going AWOL on a regular basis. It turns out God is a little harder to find than we might first suspect. In the Garden, Adam and Eve turned away from God when he wasn't at their beck and call. They saw imagined he was holding back something marvelously divine from them. In their failed search they chose to go it alone.
Yes, Moses did encounter God who called him into his Egyptian-slave-freeing scheme, but Moses didn't actually ever see God. Instead God appeared behind the mask of a burning bush. And later, when Moses begged to see God fully on Mt. Sinai, God said it would destroy him. God told Moses to hide in a cleft of the rock. He hollered, "When!" and Moses only got to see God's fanny...pack. Moses was so changed by the experience that he had to wear a veil over his face to keep from scaring the Israelites.
Worst of all, when those same chosen people were attacked by invading armies, their kingdom was razed and they were carted off into exile in Babylon. They looked for God in it all and came up empty-handed. It seemed for all the world as if God had forgotten them. All that was left was like sand running through their fingers and their echoing cry for God in the barrenness of their lives. “Where are you God…god…god…od…od?”
We might well ask why God hides behind a divine veil himself. But maybe the real question shouldn't be whether we can find God at all, but whether we're urban cowboys looking in all the wrong places. We want a God who can be found in mighty deeds of power, but he might have set up shop on the other side of town. We look for God to show up like he did in ancient Israel when Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to a God-calling match. When worshipers of Baal couldn't produce a result, Elijah prayed a simple prayer over the water-logged altar of stones and wood they'd built. God lifted a little finger and burned it all to a crisp. Nothing was left of the water, wood, and stone cairn they’d piled high.
The lesson in finding a God who shows his hand in such a powerful and obvious way lies in what happened afterward: The Israelites promptly chased their enemies, with Elijah leading the chase, and they slaughtered them down in the Kishon Valley. You see, we sinners start thinking we have the market cornered on truth and we believe it's right and meet for us to defend that truth and destroy all who challenge it. They’re a threat to our own power and glory, and they must be dealt with promptly and defiantly. It happens on a spectrum from bullying in a middle school to high finance, from social questions like same-sex marriage and abortion to terrorism, the downing of a Malaysian airliner, the festering conflicts in the Middle East, and our own domestic squabbling over borders, immigration, attack ads and power politics. If you had a God you could so easily spot, what would you do with him? Take control? Treat God like a glorified Saint Nick? Go after those who oppose you?
Look, though, at where Jesus tells you God's kingdom can be found. It's not in acorns that become oak trees. It's in tiny mustard seeds. It's not in the loaf of bread, but in the invisible yeast spores who cause the bread to rise. It's not in the glory of a high-rise high-finance Wall Street investment bank, but in an overgrown patch of land too-long neglected. It's not in the splendid Mormon ordered scheduling of a Franklin day planner, but in the messy flotsam and jetsam hauled in by a drag net.
If you want to find God, the places God wants to be found will surprise you, take you aback, and maybe even offend you. God chooses to be found in the midst of what an old translation of Isaiah calls the uncomely: God is present in the ugly, the unprepossessing, the sad and worn-out. God chooses to be found in the unexpected presence of a baby on a manger who quickly soils his swaddling clothes and grows to become a roving Judean preacher with dirty feet who is executed naked on a cross. "If you're looking for me," God says, "that's where I am."
It goes further. God won't be found in power or prestige. Instead God tells you to go looking in the ordinary water of baptism and in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, even when it's a crisp circle of Styrofoam blandness masquerading as bread and a sip of Welche’s instead of a rich, full-bodied cabernet. God says look to his ephemeral presence in the here-one-minute-gone-the-next preached promise of the gospel. Find him in the announcement of forgiveness. Find God in the witness of your neighboring pew sitters whose presence here today says that you, too, can find God afoot in this place.
It's doubtful that you'll ever find God in the moral games of the culture wars with all their one-upmanship. God is too clever to be found in such obvious potential political weaponry. Nor will God well-pleased to put himself on display in the glory of mega-churches, with their fancy technology, sharply-dressed TV evangelists, and programs for inch-deep discipling. Instead God chooses to be found on the smaller scale where people of faith know and love one another and rub up against one another like iron sharpening iron, upholding and strengthening each other's faith.
God is indeed a treasure and a pearl of great price. We can find God even by playing another game of hiddenness from out childhood: In this room I spy God with my own little eye. I spy God in the way so many of you have quietly supported a struggling in her imprisonment and loss of her children. I spy God in someone who makes wine for communion. I spy God in one spouse caring for the other in the face of infirmity and dementia. I spy God in a family moving together through the grief of a brother and son killed, in another family at the loss of a mother and wife, and still others who've lost a daughter and husbands. I spy with my own little eye the treasure of God working in people laboring in their daily lives to be of some earthly good. I spy God in the sound of clanking coins in a noisy offering to send their spare change to battle malaria. I spy God in aebelskiver and hanging ships and the faithful history of unnamed happy Danes making sure this would be a place God could be found. I spy God like some divine Tom Joad present in the lost, the least, the homeless, the wondering and wandering, in you my friends, my neighbors, my fellow pew-sitters week after week.
The irony is that what’s found in the back corner of the field is the stark, unexpected fact that God doesn’t need any search for; we're the ones who need to be found. God's been right here all along just as he's promised to be. But we've run out to kick the can in another childhood game, so we ourselves can remain in hiding to escape God's judgment on our meager myopic vision and paltry love of our neighbor. So God comes once more to you in Jesus the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find a single lost lamb.
Do you not know that God considers you his treasure to cherish in eternity? Do you not spy the fact that you are such a pearl of great price that Christ has died for your sake and forgives all your sins? Do you not know that God's final Judgment Day call of "Ollie, Ollie, oxen free" is echoing already today to bring you in from hiding, never to be called out?
You who are lost are now found. You who have hidden yourselves for so long are now brought into the light of Jesus’ love and mercy. You are treasured. For you, God has paid the ultimate and eternal price. Amen
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