16th
Sunday after Pentecost
September
16, 2007
Rev.
Elizabeth Macaulay
“A Sought-After People”
Psalm 139: 1-18
Genesis
3: 8-9
Luke
10: 1-10
Two snap shots from Cat
Tails day yesterday in
The day is spectacular.
The sun is out and the air is laced with the sacred scent of mini doughnut, and
the folks walking about and sitting about are happy people.
Our second service
band, “Living Waters” played from eleven until twelve. We were set up in the
middle of a grassy field. It was great to be sharing with the community the
quality and power we experience on a weekly basis.
While we were singing,
Kathie and Bill Currie were at a booth sharing information about our church.
They spelled Lisa Oster, who was there pretty much from ten until five
yesterday. When you see her, a bow would be appropriate.
So the two stories come
from Kathy. First is this: there was a woman who was working the booth for a
church from another denomination. She was very friendly and warm as she
approached the table, but as she reached out her hand to take some of the
literature resting on the table she did this:
“Oh, Methodists!” and
she snatched away her hand and got herself away as quickly as she could.
I don’t know what her
history is with Methodists, but I know it is powerful!
Second snapshot is
this.
As they approached the
sound of the drums and the guitars and the vocals, a young woman leaned into
her friend and said “Ugh, a Jesus band”.
But they stayed. And
they listened. I guess we were a different sort of Jesus band, not of the “ugh”
variety.
So there
we are. Within minutes of each other, these events under the canopy of God’s
good sky point to the varieties of ways we are in life, and the varieties of
ways we sort in life, and the varieties of ways we can make snap decisions
about who and what is worthy of our time and energy and sometimes, even if we
think things are an “ugh”, if we let them speak for a time, they prove
otherwise.
This morning we heard
some powerful texts. About how we are seen and known from the
very moment of our coming into being. Fully: our thoughts, our failings,
our triumphs and our comings in and goings out. We heard in the text from
Genesis that while Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil - an act very clearly forbidden them by God - and they knew
themselves to be in the wrong and forever changed by it, God sought them out
anyway. God didn’t abandon them. And we heard about how it is Zaccheaus, a tax man - something infinitely more detested
in his culture than a Jesus band - was exactly the person Jesus wanted to sit
at table with. A sinner by anybody’s calculations, Zachheaus
was a sought after by Jesus. Not abandoned to living on the fringes, but
specifically sought after.
And here is what I
would have us take into our hearts on this day.
We too are sought
after. By a God who knows us intimately and loves us
lavishly.
In our
failings. In the places and ways we hurt each other. In our attempts to live free. In our glory
and in our wretchedness. God seeks us out. On purpose.
God reaches toward us,
even as we so desperately try to hide from God because we are so convinced that
our badness means we will be abandoned.
Did you ever notice
that when you have done something really wrong your first instinct is to hide?
One of my earliest memories
had to do with a big mound of dirt and rocks in the drive way of my house.
There must have been a reason why it was there, and there must have been some
pretty good instruction about how it should stay there.
But for some reason, a
rock from that pile ended up in my hands and I lofted it - as hard as a kid can
- at one of the neighbors.
And then I ran. I ran
fast and I ran into the comfort of a hiding place - a neighbor’s fort. And I
stayed there for a long time, because I knew darn well I was going to get into
a lot of trouble and I was scared and I was ashamed.
So I hid. Until I was found. And I wasn’t kicked out the family for
throwing a rock. I wasn’t abandoned.
Theologian
Sallie McFague speaks a definition of sin I like very
much. Sin, she says and I paraphrase, is anything we do that makes us want to
hide from God. Sin is that sense in our souls that what we are about is not
good for us or for others.
And because we are all,
in so many ways, four year olds in wrinkled-skin disguise, we still go to our
default setting when we think we have done something wrong - we still try to
hide.
And one of the saddest
things of all is that we try to hide from God.
I share with you a
parable. It’s from the book Healing
the Shame that Binds You.
There once was a man
who was sentenced to die. He was blindfolded and put in a pitch black cave. The
cave was one hundred yards by one hundred yards. He was told there was a way
out of the cave, and if he could find it, he was a free man.
After a rock was
secured at the entrance to the cave, the prisoner was allowed to take his
blindfold off and roam freely in the darkness. He was fed only bread and water
for the frist thirty days and nothing thereafter. The
bread and water was lowered from a small hole in the roof at the south end of
the cave. The ceiling was about eighteen feet high. The opening was about one
foot in diameter. The prisoner could see a faint light up above, but no light
came into the cave.
As the prisoner roamed
and crawled around the cave, he bumped into rocks. Some were rather large. He
thought that if he could build a mound of rocks and dirt that was high enough,
he could reach the opening and enlarge it enough o crawl through and escape. In
order to reach the roof, the mound had to be at least ten feet high.
So the prisoner spent
his waking hours picking up rocks and digging up dirt. At the end of two weeks,
he had built a mound of about six feet. He though that if he could duplicate
that in the next two weeks, he could make it before his food ran out. But as he
had already used most of the rocks in the cave, he had to dig harder and
harder. He had to do the digging with his bare hands. After a month had passed,
the mound was nine and one-half feet high and he could almost reach the opening
if he jumped. He was almost exhausted and extremely weak.
One day, just as he
thought he could touch the opening, he fell. He was simply too weak to get up,
and in two days he died. His captors came to get his body. They rolled away the
huge rock that covered the entrance. As the light flooded into the cave, it
illuminated an opening in the wall of the cave about three feet in
circumference.
It was the opening to a
tunnel that led to the other side of the mountain. This was the passage to
freedom the prisoner had been told about. It was in the south wall, directly
under the opening in the ceiling. All the prisoner would have had to do was
crawl about two hundred feet and he would have found freedom. He was so
completely focused on the light that it never occurred to him to look for
freedom in the darkness. Liberation was there all the time, right next to the
mound he was building, but, it was in the darkness. (Healing the Shame that
Binds You pg. 150-151)
Here is what I want
church to be for any who enter these doors. I want it to be a place where we
remind each other that God seeks us out constantly. God is reaching toward us
with love and there is nothing so shameful that God doesn’t reach out to us
yet.
Whether we have thrown
a rock at a neighbor, whether we have an addiction that has us looking for
light in places where it will never be found, whether we have harmed our
partners with choices we have made. No matter what it is, hiding from the love
of God is just plain not going to bring us into healing. It is only going to
keep us in a very cramped and lonely place where our soul withers and finally
gives up hope of ever feeling the warmth of open air again.
Sometimes the only way
into healing is through exploring the darkness. Owning the
realities of choices and actions and attitudes that make us want to hide from
God and others.
But it is exactly
through becoming willing to do the work of exploring those places we have
hidden away where the light can’t reach them that we find our way to freedom. Because we don’t have to do our work alone any more.
God walks with us,
intentionally seeks us out when we are feeling most wretched and alone. And if
we are really wise, we trust that and we become willing to talk to others about
our pain so that they can walk with us too.
As the people of Jesus
the Christ, we believe that we are the Body of hope and healing, one for the
other.
So we are the people
who take people out of trees where they are hiding because they feel judged or
shamed or so far out of the cultural mainstream that they cannot imagine that
they will ever be welcomed into polite society.
We are the people who
remind each other that God seeks us each through the power of love.
And we are the people
who allow ourselves to be reminded and talked down out of the trees.
Amen