INTRODUCTION: Our first reading today is from the Hebrew Scriptures, the 29th chapter of the book of Jeremiah, verses 12 through 14. I’ll be reading from a modern-language version of the Bible called The Message, which phrases things in ways that catch our attention. Let us listen for God’s Spirit speaking through these words.
Scripture: Jeremiah 29:12-14
God says, ” When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. When you come looking for me, you’ll find me. Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed…”
INTRODUCTION: Our second reading today is from the New Testament Book of Acts, where the Apostle Paul is preaching outside on a hill in Athens, Greece on the site where the judicial court met. In his famous hillside sermon, Paul invites people to notice the statues around them and consider whether or not they believe that God is more than just a statue.
Scripture: Acts 17:22-28
So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. “It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, ‘to the god nobody knows.’ I’m here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you’re dealing with.
“The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn’t take care of himself. He makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make him. Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just fumble around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote; he’s near. We live and move in him, can’t get away from him! One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’
Sermon: “How Do We Notice the Presence of God?”
Today, I’m beginning a sermon series on the topic “Noticing God,” a series based on a book of that same title by Richard Peace. Richard Peace is a retired seminary professor and member of a UCC church on the North Shore here in Massachusetts.
In the introduction to this book, Professor Peace quotes another professor, a famous theologian and philosopher from Princeton, who says the following:
In spite of my religious faith, the ability to preach sermons and to give lectures that were as good (or bad) as those of the next person, most of the time God seemed remote. Although I had a doctorate in philosophy and theology, and had read a lot of books, I did not know what it meant to have an awareness of God in daily life, or how one went about achieving it. How was it that in all my church attendance and advanced education I had not learned such an elementary matter?...[M]y condition would have been easily recognizable by anyone familiar with spiritual theology, a branch of theology that has been neglected in recent times. My condition is called a desire for God’s “habitual presence.” (Diogenes Allen quoted in Noticing God, p. 13)
A desire for God’s habitual presence—or for noticing God in every day life—we know what that feeling is like, don’t we? I dare say that our desire for God’s presence in our daily lives is a big part of why we are participating in this livestream. In our culture, on Sunday mornings, there are A LOT of other things we could be doing: sleeping late, going out to brunch (or getting take-out brunch, in this pandemic), attending a sporting event, painting our living room, catching up on reading—just to name a few. And all of these are good things, in and of themselves. They are things most of us enjoy and engage in from time to time. Nothing wrong with that. But we are here this morning--or watching this worship video later in the week-- because we have each recognized that there is something that we value even more than spending our “free time” engaging in leisure activities or home improvement projects.
We have recognized, as Richard Peace puts it, that human beings are created by God to “inhabit two worlds”--the physical AND the spiritual. Or, as our second Scripture Reading from Acts says, in God “we live and move” and exist. We are not separate from God, but deeply connected.
But here’s the thing. Despite being created by God to inhabit two worlds—the physical and the spiritual—the spiritual world takes a lot more effort for most of us to notice. Perhaps because in our culture, in general, we are not taught HOW to engage with the spiritual world. From the moment we are born, the focus in our culture is on how to survive in the physical world. We are taught how to feed and dress and clean ourselves, how to read and write and make a living—and thank God we can and do learn these things! These skills are necessary for our survival! But unless our parents bring us to church and Sunday School, unless we are brought up on the great stories of faith or are taught HOW to pray or meditate or do yoga, we may miss out completely—like Princeton Professor Peace quotes at the beginning of his book--we may miss out on learning HOW to notice God in our daily lives.
In fact, many of us, in our culture, are so UNtrained in how to notice God, that the skeptical side of us may even question God’s existence. Or think that God is trying to be obtuse, trying to hide from us. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
God is not trying to hide. It’s that we haven’t trained our eyes—or our hearts—how to see him. (or her.)
Those of you who have glasses and are near sighted—like me—do you remember when you first got glasses? What the experience was like? I do. I was in 6th grade, and my next-door neighbor, Jonathan, and I got glasses around the same time. I remember his amazed, joy-filled reaction when he got his glasses and ran over to tell me about them. “Marlayna, Marlayna, the trees have leaves!!” For years my friend had simply assumed that trees were fuzzy blobs and he had never stopped to think where leaves came from in the fall. Now he knew! Learning how to notice God is like getting glasses for the first time and realizing that what we always thought was fuzzy actually has a shape and substance. We just don’t know how to see it.
Another analogy. I remember learning somewhere, ages ago, when I was a kid, that the chickadee was the state bird of Massachusetts. I remember thinking at the time that the chickadee was a stupid choice, because I had never seen a chickadee and I had lived in Massachusetts my whole life. (Now, if the state bird had been a seagull or a pigeon, that would have made sense to me, because I was always seeing those.) But then, twenty years or so ago, my husband Paul gave me a “bird clock” for Christmas. From LLBean. It’s the kind of clock that, instead of ringing each hour, it tweets--in the original sense of the word: each hour is a different bird call. I remember hearing the chickadee call—8 o’clock—for the first time. “So that’s what a chickadee sounds like!” I thought to myself. And then, wouldn’t you know it, later that year when I was out walking the dog, I started hearing chickadees everywhere! (I started hearing other birds too, 7 o’clock, 9 o’clock, 5 o’clock, but I couldn’t come up with their names…) It’s not like all those birds suddenly appeared when I got the clock; it’s that I didn’t know enough to notice them before…
One more analogy. You remember radios? You know, the things we used to use to listen to music before we got computers and cell phones? Maybe you still use them sometimes in your car? Well, in order for a radio to work, we have to turn it on. Duh! And more than that, we have to tune in to a channel. If we don’t tune in to a channel, what do we hear? Nothing. Static. It’s not that the radio waves aren’t there; we just don’t hear music or the news until we are on the right wavelength. We have to be tuned in to notice and hear what is said. I think that’s what our first scripture reading is getting at: “God says…When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.” In other words, we have to do something—we have to open our hearts, our ears, our eyes, our minds--to be receptive.
Now, you may be wondering, “How do we do this? How do we open our hearts, ears, eyes, minds? How do we tune in and notice God?” Well, each Sunday in this sermon series—I am going to talk about a different way we can notice God. And it is my hope that our eyes and ears and minds and hearts can get more and more tuned in to God’s wavelength. I hope that together we can deepen our faith and spirituality and let God transform us for the better. May it be so.
Let me offer a prayer*:
Creator God,
It is in our lives that we become aware of your life.
It is in the rhythms of our world
That we hear your pulse, your breathing, your footsteps.
Over these past several months when we haven’t been able to physically gather for worship in our beautiful church building,
we have come to realize something very important:
that you are NOT contained in the sanctuaries we build for you; Your sanctuary is the whole world
that you have made.
We can find you anywhere and everywhere--
On the sidewalks we pass,
The highways we travel,
The rooms in which we live,
The sky and the sea and the land which embrace us
And tickle our senses,
Even on websites we surf and apps we download.
But even more than this we can find you
In the eyes we meet, the hands we hold,
The person looking back at us in the Zoom window,
The human stories that we hear and tell…
We thank you for your loving presence, give us the grace to notice you more and more everywhere we look. Amen.
*prayer adapted from a prayer found in Touch Holiness
Rev. Dr. Marlayna Schmidt
Franklin Federated Church
Franklin, MA