How do you find God
in the middle of the pagan marketplace?
How do you find God
in things like, oh, cable news? a profoundly secular workplace?
among a thicket of
family, friends, or neighbors who can’t understand what you get out of going to church and
haven’t the faintest interest in learning – because golf or youth athletics or
the beauty of nature or therapy or yoga meets their needs for community and
meaning. (And besides, they’ll tell you, in those places, no one critiques your
moral choices about birth control or gets excited about which kinds of families
are legal.)
It’s easier to be an
atheist – or at least agnostic – in the world outside our church doors, for
most people, including many of us who come here every Sunday.
Some of us are
blessed with the ability to see God in everything from a child’s laughter to
the bee trapped in your office; from cancer to the grocery store checkout line,
every day.
But not all of us.
Not me, actually.
I do spot God in
those sorts of things occasionally, but a good 75% of my life, I realize I’m not
even looking, and so the presence of God in traffic or the mall or Facebook
goes past unnoticed.
Many of us – possibly
even most of us – aren’t actually looking for God in our secular worlds. We know
we can find God when we look in church, in the Bible, in a few trusted people. So
why worry in the rest of the world?
But the witness of
scripture – and of generations of God’s faithful – is that if we aren’t looking, or aren’t
noticing, we are seriously missing out. Missing out on grace for ourselves, and
the opportunity to change the world without trying too hard.
Take Paul, today, for
instance.
He’s been wandering
around Athens, seeing the sights while he waits for his fellow missionaries to
catch up to him, and he’s “deeply distressed” that the city is full of idols.
He’s awash in the evidence that nobody seems to need the God he knows, the Lord
who changed his life.
But finally in his
frustrated tourist wanderings, he comes across one empty altar labeled: “To an
unknown God.”
Now, he could see in
that just more evidence of indifference and idolatry, but Paul sees God. Our God; the God made known to us in Jesus. And now he has the grace of God’s presence right there in the midst of ungodliness,
and evidence of God’s presence that he can share, that will affect the world around
him.
But most of the time,
the presence of God in our
pagan marketplace, in your and my day-to-day life, isn’t labeled at all, much less with any reference to God, named or unknown. So we
have to train our eyes and hearts to look beyond the obvious.
That starts with believing
it matters to find God outside the walls of the church and the words of the
Bible. We have to believe it matters
with our whole hearts and minds and souls – enough to risk disappointment and foolishness
and failure as we go looking – not just believe it as a good idea.
If you are content to
find God only here, an hour or two a week, or in the Bible, take the rest of
the sermon off, and go get coffee.
If you’re still here,
if you believe that it truly matters to encounter and respond to God wherever we
go, well, just as your mother or your coach or your teacher told you, practice
makes perfect.
This Lent, some of us
made a point of looking for moments of God in each day, and telling one another
about them. It’s a habit that gets easy once you get it formed, but it can also
be a habit that limits where we look, if we are not careful.
Most of my
God-moments this Lent, and most of the ones I heard about from you, were
moments where joy or generosity or peace was suddenly and unexpectedly evident.
This is the way we have been taught (when we’ve been taught at all) to recognize God at work in the world Two thousand
years ago, Paul told the church in Galatia that the fruits of the Spirit are
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and
self-control. And to this day, those things provide joyful and solid evidence
of God and God’s work bubbling away in all sorts of secular places.
But how many of you
live lives where most of what you see and interact with – in the “marketplace” of
commuting, sports, work, neighbors…on TV and the internet – is peaceful, kind,
gentle, generous, loving, and joyful?
Where even half of
what you encounter is that way?
The good news is that
good news isn’t the only way to see where God is and what God is doing in the
world. Coach and missionary Greg Finke writes that we can spot God at work even
more certainly when things are going wrong. When we see a fellow human being in
despair, or in need of
healing, or struggling with the well-disguised forces of sin and evil that drag
our hearts and attention away from God, “wherever hope and redemption are needed,” he says, “you can be sure
of this: Jesus is present and working nearby.”*
We know this, Finke
assures us, because redemption is the work that Jesus never, ever stops doing,
whether we notice or not, whether we help or not, whether we care or not.
Have you seen that?
Have you seen that
great need for healing, for hope, for redemption? In the life of a neighbor, a
stranger? yourself, someone you love?
If you have seen the
need, then you have seen the evidence that Jesus is near, at work, working
healing and salvation.
And now I remember
that even though I am used to looking for joy and peace to see God, I have found
more powerful evidence of what God is up to in people’s lives when I am face to
face with their needs for hope and redemption - an encounter as simple as
asking how I can be praying for them.
The deep yearning of
the human heart, the crying need for God in a human life, are like the
blankness of that empty altar in Athens to an unknown God.
That emptiness, the
gaping space itself is evidence of God already there, already at work, redeeming
and making whole, inviting us to join in.
This truth echoes the
promise Jesus makes to his disciples today, that after Jesus dies and ascends – when the one person to
whom they can always turn to find the presence of God is suddenly and
permanently absent from their lives – in that blank space, they can be sure,
God is at work. The Holy Spirit: Advocate, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, is
active and present, abiding with us forever.
The work of the Holy
Spirit abiding with us now is to fill us with the truth that in those hungry,
hurting times and places where the need
for healing and hope are greatest, God
is there, already at work, inviting us to join in, just as God is
working in those radiant moments of joy, generosity, and peace.
And the Holy Spirit
abiding in us prompts us to respond to this evidence of God’s work with all our
hearts, by listening, by generosity, by praying, by loving.
Because when we look
with heart and soul and eyes, for both the radiant joy and the deep yearning
needs; when we see God at work and respond, others who are not even looking
will find more than they knew how to seek, and God will be vividly revealed,
healing and inspiring the world with and among and around us, everywhere, and
every single day.
*Finke, Greg. Joining Jesus on His Mission, Tenth Power Publishing, 2014
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