See God. Respond to God.

The Second Sunday After the Epiphany

John 1:43-51

See God.  Respond to God.

The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.  The lamp of God had not yet gone out.  Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.  You know I wonder, if you ever feel like that?  Do you ever feel like experiencing God is a rare occurrence these days?  Like the light of God in your life or in the world is dimming and is almost indistinguishable from the darkness?  Like you no longer are able to hear the word of God, God’s guidance, a hint of your purpose or at least an indication of direction.  Or perhaps you sometimes feel as though you’ve never known it?

A few years ago, in the greeting line following a sermon I had delivered (most likely about God being right here within us and around us or some variant of that…….you know, the typical message from me haha!) a church member came up to me, and after thanking me for the sermon, she pushed back just a little bit.  She said, you know I appreciate your message and I too want to hear and experience God, but do you think sometime you could include a little bit about how to actually do that?  Because I honestly can’t say that I know how to.  You know, I was thankful for this little interaction, because it was honest, but it also really gave me pause.  It made me realize that in a very real way, I take my relationship with God for granted.  I take for granted the immense blessing that it is to experience a general closeness to God.  I take for granted that, for whatever reason, throughout my life, even from the time of a child, I have just simply known that relationship, felt it in the nature around me, seen it in the folks who have crossed my path, witnessed the risen Christ walking before me, felt it in the blessing of Love given to me.  I can talk or preach or teach about God living right here until I am blue in the face, but what if that’s just not the case for everyone?  Or maybe it is the case, but just not their experience?  How is that even possible?

You know sometimes folks will ask me and Carla about whether we’d prefer to go back and live in Bolivia or stay here.  My answer for some time has been to compare our experience to living with one foot in each place.  We love them both so deeply, desire to be in whichever place that we currently are not, and hold both closely in our hearts.  So, there just really isn’t a clear answer.  To put it simply, we live in a balance.  In a way, I think that is not unlike where we find ourselves in our relationship with God and perhaps why it is possible to experience a sort of perceived absence of God at times as well. 

Perhaps it is because in our spiritual/theological lives, we also live in a balance, with a foot in two different times or places.  We do currently exist in an in between time.  In seminary they call this Kingdom theology or Inaugurated Eschatology for you theology dorks out there, and they’ll draw these two real big ovals on the board and let them intersect which creates this smaller sort of oval in the center, and they say that as Christians we live in both a now but also a not yet time.  In other words, we currently find ourselves in a kind of existence where the Kingdom of God has begun, it has arrived and is indeed near or right here, but it also has not been fully completed yet.  The Kingdom has not fully come just yet. 

            This is why, in a way, we continually live together, retelling and retelling the story of God and what has already been done.  Yet, at the same time, we continually point to and recognize that the work is not totally complete, and that you are the next chapter.  We proclaim salvation and complete forgiveness, total absolute freedom, and yet we still confess and repent.  We speak Epiphany, the revealing of the Christ, and yet we live Post-Pentecost with the Spirit.  We speak of experiences or ceremonies like Baptism and Confirmation, even Ordination, where we give ourselves over and are marked as Christ’s own, where we are committed once and for all, and yet we also continually work on discerning God in our lives and how to respond here and now.  We have each been called and have responded, and Christ is constantly calling, and we are continually responding as well.  It is a perpetual, almost an infinite call and response dance.  So, God is never absent from you, never, and yet you must always seek God, or hold God as the intention of your heart. 

            I suppose that what I am trying to say, in a long drawn out and I guess teachy way, is that you each have been given the gift of God’s presence.  The creator and source of all is in and with you, which you can never lose, but that does not mean that you don’t have to reach out to that presence, or reach within.  It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to listen, don’t have to work on that relationship, for it is a relationship after all, and that takes real work.  Barring the intense and often unexpected gifts of those in breaking moments where God just hits you over the head, if you want to access, if you want to experience the God that is right here, right here, then you have to put in some of your own work.  You have to put forth some of your own effort.  How?  Back to my friends question of how one does that.  The answer, is Prayer.  It is Prayer, that thing we sometimes neglect or forget about or just don’t really engage in wholeheartedly, and maybe on a deeper level, it is intention.  Serious intention, to connect, to God, in your service of others or your ministry, to connect to God in your everyday life, holding serious intention to connect to God, even and especially in and through your prayers.  Making sure they aren’t just words. 

            So, I ask what may seem like a kind of odd question to pose to a whole bunch of people who are literally sitting in church pews right now: Do you feel like you know how to pray?  Do you feel like you know how to enter into a conversation with God, not just bringing your requests and anxieties and worries, but how to actually listen as well?  Do you know how to sense and discern God’s presence and will in your lives?  If your honest answer to this question is no,  (which I have had many tell me over the years) then I do not want you to worry.  Because to feel as though you do not know how now is certainly not to say that you are somehow stuck in the days of Samuel.  That God’s lamp has somehow gone out, that visions are not widespread and that the word of God is rare these days.  It is certainly not to say that, in a way, like Samuel, the voice of God hasn’t found you yet, for indeed it Lives within you.  In a way, if your answer is no, this simply means that the greater Church and leadership, all of us, have not been doing our job very well.

I assure you though, that there are so many ways to help with this, just come and talk.  Come and talk to us, or even talk to one of the many wonderful spiritual leaders that are sitting right here among you in this community, and you will see.  You will learn to experience God in new and very real ways.  Through intentional spiritual direction, through the service of others, and through engaging in a discipline of some of our traditions’ most beautiful and ancient prayer practices, through this you will see, hear, and experience God more clearly.  Soon, daily, upon hearing God’s voice clearly in your life, the words written on your heart will be those very same words which were uttered by Samuel: “Speak, for your servant is listening.”  Speak!  Your servant is Listening.                                                                                  

Amen.