Sunday next before Lent – evening
Sunday 3rd March 2019
1 before Lent – evening
Exodus 3. 1-6
John 12.27-36a
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
How many of you can remember playing hide and seek?
It’s an age old game that still is played today in countless families. We can still remember favourite hiding places and recall of the thrill of hide and seek from our childhood. Someone once said it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found . The dynamics of hide and seek are more than a game. They represent a strategy that we adults resort to at challenging times in our lives, hiding from ourselves, hiding from other people, and hiding from God.
We read that Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. The appearance of an angel in a flame of fire out of a blazing bush led him to step unwittingly on holy ground. When he heard the voice of God, he knew he had to hide his face if he was not to be consumed by the blinding radiance of God. So also Elijah hid his face in the mouth of the Cave when he met God. Hiding from God is the human response of fear and shame. “Where are you?” God asks Adam and Eve as they try to hide from him in the Garden of Eden. And people with any sense of the divine have been trying to hide from God, out of fear or shame, down the centuries.
Religion can provide a good hiding place from the excesses of God as it tries to domesticate, make routine and protect us from the wild demands that we might face. People have always tried to avoid the growing sense of calling and vocation. “We are,” said Martin Luther, “Gods enemies before we are his friends,” and our fear of falling into the hands of God, can make us fugitives on the run, from the pursuit of the one who will not give up on us.
There is a famous poem called the Hound of Heaven, written by Francis Thompson in the 19th century. In the poem, the hound following the hare, never ceasing in its running, resembles God pursuing the fleeing person. For many Christians that is the way, and sometimes the poem itself has been the means by which they have felt cornered by God. Traditionally priests were dragged to their ordination protesting their unwillingness to submit until the will of the people prevailed. Someone else has said “you sometimes think you want to disappear, but all you really want is to be found.” Yes, it is a disaster not to be found. And there is anguish when, like the Psalmist’s complaint, we feel it is God who is hiding from us. The consolation must be that ‘you could not seek me if you had not already found me’. Our seeking God, is part of what it means to find him.
We are hidden in the waters of baptism to represent being found in God. As John puts it, we abide in Christ, and Paul says we are to be found in Christ. Being found by God, we find ourselves; being his captive, we discover our full freedom as the poet R S Thomas puts it:
I am the bush burning
At the centre of
Your existence; you must put
Your knowledge off and come
To me with your mind
Bare.
Yes, we like to hide; from God, from ourselves, but we can never get over the joy and thrill of being found, and to discover we have a special channel of communication with God himself. A gift the world knows not of, to have their life hid with Christ in God.
So with what or with whom are you playing hide and seek today? What (or who) are you trying to avoid? We all have something we would rather not face if we are honest….
It may be a difficult relationship; a tricky conversation that we have to have at work; for some it will be an unwelcome health diagnosis – for ourselves or for a loved one. In this month’s magazine I wrote about the difficulties many have today in discussing the issues around living with Dementia in one of its many forms. And I said it had largely replaced cancer – the Big C – as that illness that no-one would speak openly of.
Sometimes we behave as though if we hide something away, it is not real. But the truth is that such issues do not disappear and we may well miss the opportunity of accessing the very help we need to get us through such difficult times.
Here in church should be the one place where we feel able not to hide. To be totally honest with God and each other. For here should be a place of loving compassion and support – not judgement.
And here is where God will never hide from us. Amen.