Living With the Hidden God

Romans 10:5-15

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

So what’s going on in this story?  How should we hear it?  And why is so much space allotted to a story that doesn’t mention God’s name – or even whether God is involved?  God doesn’t appear to be part of the story.  Maybe you’ll find that a bit odd.  But maybe that’s the key to reading the story well.  Because much of the time it’s not all that clear that God is involved in our lives either.

 

There was a kindergarten Sunday School teacher who asked the class to identify a picture she held up.  She said, “Class, what is this brown furry animal with a bushy tail?”  One boy raised his hand and said, “It sure looks like a squirrel but I’m still going to say Jesus.”

There is pressure on people of faith to give religious sounding answers to many of life’s questions.

Part of the tension, difficulty, and confusion for people of faith is living with the drama of the biblical story of God’s decisive intervention to save us – and to hold that story in a rather ordinary, daily life.  Both these things are real for us – the confession that God saves and the admission that life is pretty ordinary – but it is difficult to know how to keep them together.

The reason we continually read Scripture together, including stories like this one, is that it provides us help in times of confusion or discouragement.  It’s a story designed to remind us that God’s presence is often hidden from view.  God’s ways are hidden from us.

I can imagine our young people struggling with their development, their sexuality, their friends, the demands placed upon them, their uncertain futures – all this is enough to overwhelm them.  All these daily realities might very well make it hard to believe that God is a close and loving presence that sticks with them in all they do.

I can imagine adults struggling with disappointments in family life, in marriage, in work and friendships.  These middle of life challenges might very well make it hard to rest in the simple belief that God loves us and calls us to live with hope in the future and in the joy of serving others.

I can imagine those retired and dealing with issues of ageing who struggle to find God’s presence in their lives.  Their years of work are coming to a close.  Their kids are raised and gone.  Their independence is in jeopardy.  Simple pleasures like being able to live in your own home, drive your own car, make your own choices – all this is threatened as we age.  And these end of life challenges might very well make it difficult to find God’s loving presence as a daily reality.

These are the times in life when trust in God’s promises to love us and bless us come under threat.  We are tempted to waver in our faithfulness, to question the value and worth of belonging to God’s people.  We begin to wonder whether all we’ve held true is really true at all.  Or perhaps we’ll be tempted to simply lessen our commitment to a way of life that has given us meaning and purpose in the past.

This story offers us encouragement by reminding us that God is hidden.  God is hidden beneath the details of your daily life in a way that calls for continued trust and patient hope. 

Notice too that this story is told on two levels – it’s a small-scale story about family but also a larger story about nations.  It’s a story that invites us to reflect on the powerful influence of family and politics in our own lives.

This family isn’t exactly a model of what we want our families to look like.  For a family right at the center of God’s plans to bless the world, they are disappointing.

Now granted, this is just one snapshot of the family’s life.  And you know, if you entered the Witt household right at the moment when mom and dad are tired and one son has broken something, one has spilled something, and one has forgotten to flush the toilet again – well, that’s not going to be a pretty snapshot either!  But this story of Jacob and Joseph offers a window on a family with real problems.

It’s a family whose life is poisoned by favoritism, competition, jealousy, selfishness, hatred, violence, revenge, and deception.  They would be great candidates for reality TV.

Our families play an enormously powerful role in our lives, both for good and for ill.  If you happen to be born into a stable, loving family – it doesn’t mean that life will be easy, but it does mean that you’ll have the confidence and support to face anything that comes your way.  And if you happen to be born into a family with parents who are damaged and irresponsible, a family characterized by abuse and neglect - that will give birth to painful effects that last a lifetime.

Some of the fiercest fights happen between family members.  Two brothers from Copenhagen, Denmark make some of the world’s most interesting beers.  Mikkel Bjergso is a master brewer and founded Mikeller Brewery.  His brother Jeppe formed a company that distributes the beer.  They’re famous for creating special beers that are carried by some of Europe’s best restaurants.  Oh, and the brothers are identical twins.  But they had a falling out, which is not uncommon in family businesses.   And Jeppe moved from Copenhagen to Brooklyn and began his own brewery.  Want to know what he named it?  Evil Twin Brewing.

You might not have that kind of explosive rift in your family, but we’ve all come from families with some kind of strife and stress, favoritism, division, regrets and wounds.  Usually the pressures of family life result in some kind of sibling rivalry.  Or in competition for the affection of the parents.  Or one side of the family doesn’t talk to another side. 

Our dealings with our families can be so problematic that God’s quiet presence in our lives can easily go unnoticed and overlooked.  We might get so caught up in our family’s success or failure, glory or shame – that we cannot see God at work in the middle of all of it.

And what’s true for our family lives is true on the larger stage of politics as well.  Part of Joseph’s story concerns the regional dominance of Egypt as a world empire at the time Israel was just beginning to take shape as a people.

We all get our political news in different ways.  Maybe some of us still watch the evening news (I think they still have that, don’t they?).  Or perhaps we watch one of the 24 hour news networks that caters to our particular slant.  Maybe some of us still read the physical newspaper.  Others of us read our news online on websites or blogs.  Some of us get our news from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or simply by other people’s links on Facebook and Twitter.

However you get your political news, don’t you sometimes get the feeling that the events that transpire on the world stage have a power that just dwarfs our own personal lives?  During the past six months, what are the news stories that have dominated your attention?  The Ebola outbreak?  Fraud and corruption in huge transnational corporations?

Like many of you I’m perplexed and discouraged by the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel and Palestine.  Those long running feuds between Sunni and Shia Muslim Arabs, and between Muslims and Jews – those have an enduring power that resists any easy answers.  And for all of the world’s attention and our own military intervention, we basically have nothing to show.  A few years of forced quiet by foreign governments has done nothing to solve the long running problems of these regions.  The toll these wars take on women and children, on innocent civilians, on local economies and educational opportunities – it is difficult not to despair.  Where is the God of peace and hope and forgiveness in the midst of all this political violence?

Closer to home we are confronted by news related to immigration.  The politics of immigration not only includes the fact that we Americans can’t seem to find reasonable solutions for how to deal with undocumented immigrants.  There’s also the political reality of the many impoverished, hopeless, violent countries to the South of us that are causing this flood of migration.  If you read about how bad the situation is in parts of Honduras and Mexico, where drug cartels and thugs murderously control the streets – no wonder families are scrambling to smuggle their kids into the US.  I don’t blame them.  I’d do the same thing.  Where is the God of justice, the God who is King of Kings, Lord over all earthly governing powers? 

Whether it be family life or politics, all of us have the experience of skepticism or cynicism about the reality of God’s loving presence in the world.  Joseph’s story alerts us to this experience of our own lives as “godforsaken.”  These are times when God is nowhere to be found.  We come face to face with the fact that life is confusing and ambiguous.  We can’t get any clear grip on the purpose or meaning of our lives.  This is a common human experience.  And for people of faith, it can erode our trust in God’s loving presence.

We’re tempted to say, “I’m not sure if God is real at all.   And even if God is real, it’s not very clear to me what God is doing.”

Our reading from Romans today reminds us that our basic confession is a confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.  This confession is firm and clear.  We’re confessing that Jesus Christ is the clearest expression of who God is and what God is like.  We’re confessing that the course of Jesus’ life shows us with clarity what God is up to.  God is at work blessing, healing, restoring, forgiving, reconciling, and empowering people.

God’s project is to call into being a new community of people expressive of God’s loving plans to bless the whole world.  We should start there.  You should know this.  If you don’t know this, then we pastors and leaders haven’t done our jobs.  We’re here because we’ve been graciously called into this place as a family gathered around the Lord Jesus Christ.  And God creates us as this new people so that in the ways we live together, serve and love others, God’s purposes for all creation come through a little clearer: we’re to be a community of response to the love of God.

And when we confess that Jesus is Lord, we’re confessing that God is hidden.  This makes all the difference in the world.  In Jesus Christ, God is neither gone nor absent.  God is hidden.

When Jesus was among us, people with working eyes and normal abilities noticed nothing special.  All that powerful grace and beauty was obscured by his ordinariness.  All that dazzling, blazing glory was hidden in his unremarkable, everyday life.  All that surging life-transforming power was hidden in his death by crucifixion.  In these ways God is training us for how to live with the hidden God.  We give ourselves fully to God’s claim on our lives, trusting in a reality that we cannot always see.  And we pray for the Spirit’s help as we walk forward together.