God hidden in plain sight

Have you ever lost something and couldn’t find it? I put things down all the time and then can’t remember where I have put them. Car keys missing? Coat pocket / in the kitchen / even left in the car! Glasses not where they should be? Try the bathroom, the lounge or in my handbag! However, sometimes they are right close, in plain sight – I just can’t see them!

Treasure hunts can be good fun – and the clues given tend to be simple for those that have set them. Easter egg hunts are also fun, but the eggs are not hidden at all! Sometimes things we look for are right in front of us.

How many times we look for God and God is right there, but we cannot see. The faith to know that God is present even when God seems to be far away eludes us. But God does not fail us. God is there – it is just that we expect God to be different and so we don’t look properly. Obsessed with finding God in places of worship, we forget to look in our kitchens! Only if we in our blindness look in all the right and wrong places will we find God in our lives. We cannot put God in a box of any shape – because God is beyond time and space, beyond our imagining. Hidden in plain sight, God is where God is. If we, who belong to Churches and acknowledge our affinity with Jesus Christ have become so bound up in all sorts of traditions that we cannot envision a future. We are in a rut of our own making and cannot see beyond our nose. I want to suggest here that if we spend the next three years planning to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of this church for example and do not, as part of that, work to discern a vision of what our legacy will be to those who come after us there may be no-one left to celebrate 300 years!!

In the Old Testament God was presented in many different ways. God walked in the Garden of Eden; appeared in Pillars of cloud and fire; was within Moses’ burning bush; Isaiah’s angels hot coals; Jeremiah’s call. Throughout the history of the Jews God was present. Before them, behind them, part of their lives. But things happened and God seemed to be no longer there. People in exile longed for God. Some of them got distracted and followed different paths. It was time for a new way. In God’s time God came – a human being, born in poverty, growing up in the Jewish faith, began his ministry as a man and spoke with such passion and compassion that many turned out to hear him. Did they recognise who or what he was? Many did not; a few did, and they became the story tellers, the people who brought God back into the lives of God’s people in a whole new way trough Jesus’ teaching and preaching.

I have often wondered why Jesus continually told his disciples to “tell no-one?” Maybe it was because the picture was only half painted and he needed to complete it before unleashing it on the world. But to those he chose to teach – his disciples – he gave a gift that has lasted for 2 thousand years. He revealed God as God had never been seen before. God’s power and glory was focussed on the man crucified. God’s kingdom became known through resurrection. God was embodied into human beings who, inspired by the way that Jesus lived and died, became the messengers and teachers of their own day. God’s presence was tangible, real and the love and compassion of Jesus was their new starting point. Jesus was part of a whole – and until such time as his picture was completed he cautioned his friends to build up their faith and hope before they were empowered by the Spirit at Pentecost. It wasn’t that he wanted to hide – only that the world was not ready.

Once the disciples, the apostles, were gifted the ability to speak of God and God’s son the Gospel set the known world on fire. It spread far and wide. The cat was out of the bag! People who felt downtrodden and uncared for found a community of hope and love. Then something called the Church came into being. To keep the purity of the good news it was felt necessary to write rules and regulations, to limit the stories told about Jesus, to decide what being Christian meant. An essential evil maybe – but in the years ever since we have been cloaking God, Jesus and the Spirit in mystery, dogma, and behind closed doors. In the 21^st century God is hidden from sight, embalmed in rituals and prayers and holy smoke screens.

When “The Church” began it was in a very simple form. It was in houses, with  Jews who went to the synagogue (where allowed) on the Sabbath and then broke bread together and worshipped in houses on the first day. Because the nature of the first day was of work, their worship had to end at daybreak. The Acts of the Apostles and the Letters show that it was not a complicated vision. Caring for each other, making sure that those who were able gave to those who had nothing, kindness and healing hand in hand. The impact of wealthy churches, endowed with buildings that take more and more money to care for has become the curse of our age. Things are not so simple now – money management and increasing bills have overwhelmed the people. More and more congregations are doing what has happened in Ifracombe, as aging congregations have given up on massive Victorian buildings that they cannot heat (and I heard last week that Southernhay will worship in their hall during the winter because their beautiful sanctuary costs too much to warm) We are beginning to know that we have to regain some simplicity, to heed the words of Paul to the Colossians about how to live a holy life – with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Forgiveness and forbearance must be charged with love for one another.

God does not need our buildings to hide in – God is everywhere. God would want us to stop confining God and become free in unleashing the Spirit on our world. The problem is increased by churches whose walls have no windows onto the world. In Birmingham there is a church (a URC!) which needed some updating. They turned the seating in the sanctuary by 90 degrees, and took away the original eastern wall with its stained glass window replacing it with a clear glass screen. The bus stop outside this window became the means of this becoming “The Church in the World. How we could possibly translate that visibility here in Exmouth I could not tell you – I am no architect! What I do know is this – that if we keep God hidden behind closed doors and thick walls we will not survive. Our faith has to be worn as a badge of pride. People need to know that our Christian lives are not confined to one hour a week on Sunday.

Enabled by the Spirit, as our forebears were, we need to get God out of hiding and into our communities. We need more honesty in our faith so that we proudly proclaim what we believe – not as a dogmatic “we are right” but as a proclamation of God’s love for all, embodied within our service to bring in the Kingdom. Bringing God out of hiding and letting God be God more obviously in our society is a vision that we need to be building. That would surely be a suitable legacy for the church founded by the vision of one noble lady here in Exmouth!

Revd Barbara Bennett