Get found
Scripture Text:
1 Samuel 16:1-13, John 9:1-41
Sermon:
In the diocese of Chicago, for quite a few years now, we haven’t been allowed to play hide and seek in our churches. “Keeping God’s People Safe” is a program that thinks very carefully about our lives in church and situations where children and adults can get hurt. Sometimes those situations are not those we would think of, otherwise, which is why the diocese requires that lay leaders and all church staff take the training so that we can keep a trained eye out and keep us all as safe as possible in this place that we call God’s house.
How could hide and seek be dangerous? Well, it’s because when you hide in hide and seek, you hide alone and in a place that’s hard to find. Sin is real, my friends, and there are some mean and broken adults and even children out there who have decided that it’s all right to hurt others, especially when they can keep it all a secret. Hide and seek is a game that can open a door to a few too many secrets. And so, we don’t play it at church.
But what about playing hide and seek in our everyday lives? Sometimes it might seem that the safest way to protect ourselves from other people (and maybe from God, too) is to hide. It might be hard to imagine that we’re lovable people, so it might seem like a smart idea to hide behind a mask of your choosing. Or to get conveniently lost.
And yet, it tends to be the lost people that God seeks out. God’s chosen people are the Jews, not the cultured Egyptians, the powerful Babylonians, or the industrious Canaanites. God chose a small group of former slaves who bicker their way across the desert for 40 years before they get themselves together to reach the Promised Land. And yet they still worship God today, our brothers and sisters through our ancestor Abraham.
And God chose a lost kid to be the king of Israel. In the reading from First Samuel, God sends the prophet Samuel – the sort of Obi Wan Kenobi of the Old Testament – to Bethlehem, a farming town just down the road from the palace, to find the next king. God sends Samuel to the family of Jesse, and when Samuel sees Jesse’s eldest son, Eliab? Whoa. This guy was something else: tall, strong, maybe with one of those grins on his face like he’s got it all figured out. This has got to be the next king of Israel, Samuel thinks! Let me read it to you again:
When they came, [Samuel] looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.” But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
Samuel meets the next brother, and the next, and the next. And God whispers in his ear each time, “Nope. Nope. Nope.” And finally Samuel has to ask Jesse: Um, do you have any more sons? Jesse replies, “Well, my youngest kid is out keeping the sheep.” (Keeping sheep? This is not a kingly activity. It’s smelly, lonely, and kind of humiliating.) But when David appears, all the bells go off and we know that this will be the famous, and infamous, King David. Now, David’s a shepherd but he’s also no Ugly Betty and the Bible is not above telling us about it:
Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.
And so, the little brother who was just a shepherd, hidden away by his family, becomes the greatest king Israel has ever had.
And the Blind Man in John’s gospel, who didn’t ask to be healed, by the way, received his sight from Jesus and becomes the star witness in a farcical court of unbelieving neighbors, authorities, and even his own parents. The Blind Man has to face harsh questions, a lot of fear and suspicion, and the possibility that he could get thrown out of his synagogue. Jesus has pulled him out of the hiding place that was his life as a blind, forgettable beggar and made him a disciple and an evangelist.
In the end, it’s everyone else in the Blind Man’s life who can’t face coming out of hiding. No one wants to believe that someone who’s always been blind has been healed or that it was Jesus who did it. Who’s really blind here? They hide in plain sight from the way Jesus has shown God’s love like a searchlight onto the blind man. Maybe they didn’t want their lives to change, even for the better, maybe they prefer what they know to what they don’t understand. It’s so easy to stand and shake a finger at them, but really, I look at my own life and so often, I’m no different.
The thing about hiding is that it’s predictable. You have some control when you’re hiding. You may be able to peer out and see or hear others who can’t see or hear you. You are sheltered from what’s going on around you. But hiding also means that it’s harder for you to be surprised by God. Harder to be surprised by God’s love for you, because you aren’t taking the risk of putting yourself out there, where God’s love is much more abundant than we tend to imagine. And the diocese is right: hiding is also dangerous: it’s lonely, you can be vulnerable to whatever might creep into your hiding place alongside you, and you may not been seen or heard if you need others to come and help you. And yet, it’s so easy to believe that hiding is the safest thing to do.
There are many things to hide behind and many ways to get lost. David was hidden by his family. The Blind Man by his disability and his poverty. Sometimes other people do things that hide us, and sometimes we choose how we hide. Perhaps because this is Lent, I wonder if we also hide behind our sins. Our sins can be convenient excuses for why we can’t do this or that. And so sins aren’t always scary, often they’re deceptively comfortable; like eating wonderful sweets that are also slowly boring holes in our teeth, or a having few more drinks before we’re going to drive somewhere, or sleeping too long when we should be up and about in God’s world. I once heard a pastor preach a sermon where she confessed to us: “I like my sins. My sins are a part of who I am; and I’ve gotten sort of attached to them. I find, against my own good intentions, that I don’t want to give them up.”
Hiding is comfortable. Staying lost can sometimes seem very safe. Staying in bed seems so much more preferable than getting up most mornings! But allowing ourselves to feel, really, how fully and deeply God loves us means getting “un-hidden” and “un-lost.” What is that like? Maybe scary, maybe freeing, maybe something to make some tears flow, maybe something that would make you angry, even. But theologically, becoming un-hidden is seeing yourself as God sees you: complete with sinfulness, but created by God and loved by God.
Robert Fulghum wrote a book of feel-good stories back in the 1980s called Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. They’re corny but they’re great. Here’s a story he tells in that book: He was watching some kids in his neighborhood play hide and seek, and one of the boys was an excellent hider – such a good hider than when he hid in a pile of leaves in Fulghum’s yard, the seekers were looking everywhere, but they couldn’t find him. Finally, Fulghum noticed that the other kids had given up – they stopped looking for the kid in the leaves and were going on to something else. Fulghum wondered what he should do (perhaps just the way God wonders about us sometimes): should he go find the seekers and tell them where to look for their friend? should he go over to the pile of leaves with a match? Instead, he decides to yell at the leaves what I think God wants to yell to each one of us: GET FOUND, KID! And the kid did.
Amen.
