I wonder how you view the coming year. What sense do you have about what it may hold? Maybe you are hopeful and optimistic, or you may like to be hopeful but can’t help feeling a little cynical and negative. What about your faith? Are you finding it easy to be full of faith and trust in God, or are you wondering where God has got to? Today, at Epiphany we are called to reflect on how God is revealed to the non-Jewish world. Wise men came from outside Israel to visit the one they recognised as born King of the Jews. They discerned that there was activity in the heavenlies, that the Almighty was at work. But I want to start with the opposite position. What about when God is not revealed? What do you do when there is no obvious sign of the divine around you? If this was a journal article not a sermon I might give it the title ‘When God goes missing’. Of course, theologically, that is wrong; God cannot go missing. But that maybe our experience. It is not uncommon for believers to wonder where God has got to. Where is He hiding? Even the greatest saints have written about the lack of a sense of God’s presence for long stretches of time. Mother Theresa admitted that she had had no clear sense of God’s closeness to her for over 30 years; and yet, of course her life and work expressed sacrificial love at a divine level. Now it may be that this is not your experience at the moment, that you are blessed with feeling the warmth of God’s love and easily hearing Him speak truth to you. If that’s so, then you can take a nap and we’ll wake you up at the creed. For others of us, as we face forward to 2012, there may be a longing that it will bring more of an experience of God’s presence than we have had in recent times. So what do you do when God goes missing? I want to offer two suggestions.
1) First of all, remember that revelation is, just that, revelation. It is a gift which only God can give. The gifts we unwrapped at Christmas didn’t come to us because we asked for them; they are freely given, otherwise they wouldn’t be gifts but payments or debts repaid. Have another look at our first reading. Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, a Greek, not Jewish city. In vs. 3 he says that the mystery was made known to him by revelation. Then in vs. 5 he says that in former generations this mystery was not made known, but now it has been revealed. God has come out into the open. He has shown himself in the person of Jesus Christ. There is the general revelation: that Jesus is born in a time and a place, so that all can find out about him. Then there is the personal revelation, when the Spirit of God lights up the truth about Jesus, that He is the Son of God. Paul himself moved from general to personal revelation on his journey to Damascus. And if we are not sure that we have had that light switched on within us, not had that ‘I see’ moment, then it is something we can ask for. It is a gift God wants to give all of us. But it remains a gift and we can’t demand it from God. For those who had that moment of personal revelation a long time ago, maybe we need to fall back on the general revelation: do I believe that Jesus came as the Christ, the unique unveiling of God? Well then, I hold on to that truth which exists independently of my present experience. That’s the first suggestion I would make.
2) The second suggestion I offer is this. Look out for signs of His presence in the world, signs of His glory. There is a great scene in an episode of Rev. (If you haven’t watched it, Rev is a sitcom about Adam Smallbone, a Vicar running an inner city church). It is summer, a heatwave, and Adam is sitting on a park bench talking to Colin, a straight-talking, streetwise character from Manchester. Colin asks the Vicar if he believes in ghosts and Adam says No. ‘Why not?’, asks Colin. Because, says Adam, I’ve never seen one. ‘But you’ve never seen God and you believe in Him.’ ‘Yes, Colin but I see God everywhere (and he looks around) – I see him in that butterfly, in that crisp packet… well, maybe not in the crisp packet, but there are signs of Him everywhere.’ And there is a truth there. It is a very healthy spiritual discipline to look for signs of God’s glory and then give thanks for them. Maybe, as we go into this new year, we can remind ourselves to be on the look-out for where God is at work, to be a ‘God-spotter’; if we expect to see God at work we are more likely to do so. The wise men were alert, they were reading the heavenly signs, and the star, for them, was a sign that something significant was happening. They were open to being guided. They had also learned to take notice of what their dreams might be telling them. If they hadn’t, they would have returned to Herod, tell him where they had been and the story might have ended very differently.
This week I have been looking back over 2011 and asking myself, ‘Where did I see God at work, where were the signs of His glory?’ And I surprised myself at identifying many, examples, too many to list here. Let me mention 2 briefly, and maybe it will encourage you to look back too, before looking forward.
The first is the delight of watching our grandson grow, being transformed from the fragility of a new-born to the more robust stage of toddlerhood (well nearly, more like stagger-hood so far). The joy of observing small children discover more and more about life is truly wonderful – full of wonder – and evokes praise for the author of life.
The second, and most profound sign of God at work was during our visit to Israel. It was in the Palestinians we met, who in the face of daily injustice maintained their dignity and moral strength. One such was Husan, one of our guides. Husan grew up in Bethlehem and gradually became aware that another power had control of his homeland. Even so, his wake-up call came when his father took him to Jerusalem for the first time when he was 12. Husan innocently spoke loudly in Arabic to his father and received a sharp reprimand. ‘At that moment’ he told us, ‘I knew saw fear in my father and knew something was horribly wrong’. Like other teenage boys he took out his frustration by throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers. Then at 15 he was arrested for forgetting to carry his ID. He was put in prison for 6 months and was treated badly. That experience made him more angry and on release from prison he immediately went back to throwing stones and making life hard for the Israeli soldiers. He had to leave home and was on the run for 2 years. He was shot in the leg and still walks with a limp. It was enough to make him embittered and engage in more violence. But then he heard about another way, about non-violent direct action. He studied non-violence as a way of resistance, adopted it and now teaches it to others. It is a transformation that has the hallmark of God’s Spirit on it.
I could give many other examples of how I have seen God at work in people in this past year, both young and old. The challenge for me this year, at those times when I wonder if God has gone missing, is to stop wondering and to seek wonder; to look for signs of His glory. I pray that I can go through 2012 expecting God to be revealed and notice when He is. Amen. |