Locating the Big Guy

Sermon: Exodus 33:12-23
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Oct. 16, 2011

This Old Testament episode involving God and Moses may seem a little odd to us from our vantage of perhaps 3000 years later. I don’t think the issue is much different, though, from what many of us face today. That issue is locating God.

Moses on Mt. Sinai is just trying to get a look at God. He’s been doing his bidding for quite a while. It’s not been easy to be the go between God and this unruly bunch of malcontents. God keeps telling him he knows him by name and all that good stuff. Moses says in effect, that’s all very fine, but you never let me see you. You talk to me out of burning bushes, behind boulders and down from the clouds, but what do you look like? God says, okay, you can see me but I have to protect you from the full frontal effect. My full brightness would melt your retinas, even kill you. So, God shows Him only his backside. Pretty illusive, I would say.

For many people down through the ages God has seemed very illusive, even absent. Where are you, God, when I need you?
I want to read you an account of this very experience. It was sent to me by my cousin Dan.

Father John Powell, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago writes about a student in his Theology of Faith class named Tommy. “Some twelve years ago I stood watching my university students file into the classroom for our first session. That was the day I first saw Tommy. He was combing his long flaxen hair which hung six inches below his shoulders. It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with hair that long. I guess it was just coming into fashion then. I know in my mind it isn’t what’s on your head but what’s in it that counts, but on that day I was unprepared and my emotions flipped. I immediately filed Tommy under S, S for strange…very strange. Tommy turned out to be the ‘atheist in residence’ in my course. He constantly objected to, smirked at or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving Father/God. We lived with each other in relative peace for one semester, although I admit he was for me at times a serious pain in the back pew. When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam he asked in a cynical tone, Do you think I’ll ever find God? I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. No, I said emphatically. Why not? I thought that was the product you were pushing. I let him get five steps from the classroom door. Then I called out, Tommy! I don’t think you will find Him, but I’m absolutely certain He will find you. He shrugged a little and left my class and my life.

Then a sad report came. I heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out he came to see me. When he walked into my office his body was very badly wasted and the long hair had all fallen out as a result of chemotherapy, but his eyes were bright and his voice was firm, for the first time, I believe. Tommy, I thought about you so often. I heard you were sick, I blurted out. Oh, yes very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It’s a matter of weeks. Can you talk about it, Tom? I asked. Sure, what would you like to know? What’s it like to be only 24 and dying? Well, it could be worse, he said, like being 50 and having no values or ideals, like being 50 and thinking that booze, seducing women and making money are the real biggies in life. I began to look in my mental file under S, where I had filed Tommy as strange. It seems everybody I try to reject by classification God sends back into my life to educate me. What I really came to see you about, Tom said, is something you said to me on the last day of class. I asked if you thought I would ever find God. You said no, which surprised me, but you said He will find you. I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time. But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me it was malignant that’s when I got serious about locating God. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven. But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened. Did you ever try anything for a long time with no success? You get psychologically glutted, fed up with trying and then you quit. Well one day I woke up and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may or may not be, I just quit. I decided I just didn’t really care about God, about an afterlife or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable. I thought about you and your class and thought about something else you had said. ‘The essential sadness is to go through life without loving.’ But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without telling those you loved that you had loved them. So I began with the hardest one, my Dad. He was reading the newspaper when I approached him. Dad? Yes, what, he said without lowering the newspaper. Dad, I would like to talk to you. Well, talk. I mean it’s really important. The newspaper came down three slow inches. What is it? Dad I love you. I just wanted you to know that. Tom smiled at me and said it with obvious satisfaction as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside of him. The newspaper fluttered to the floor and then he did two things I never remember him doing before. He cried and he hugged me. We talked all night even though he had to go to work the next morning. It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears. To feel him hug me and to hear him say he loved me. It was easier with my mother and little brother. We cried, too, and we hugged each other and started saying real nice things, things we had been keeping secret for so many years. I’m only sorry about one thing, that I waited so long. Here I was opening up to all the people I had actually been close to.

Then one day I turned around and God was there. He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with him. I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop. C’mon. Jump through. C’mon. I’ll give you three days, three weeks. Apparently God does things in His own way, at His own hour. But the important thing was that He was there. You were right. He found me after I stopped looking for Him.

Tommy, I practically gasped. I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize. To me you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make Him a private possession, a problem solver or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening to love. You know the Apostle John said that. He said that God is love, and anyone who lives in love is living in God and God is living in Him.

Tom, could I ask you a favor. You know when I had you in class you were a real pain but you can make it all up to me now. Would you come into my present Theology of Faith course and tell them what you’ve just told me. If I told them the same thing, it wouldn’t be half as effective as if you were to tell it. Ooh I’m ready for you, but I don’t know if I am ready for your class. In a few days Tom called, though, and said he was ready for the class, that he wanted to do that for God and for me. So, we scheduled a date. However, he never made it. He had another appointment far more important. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed. He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of man has ever seen or the ear of man has ever imagined. Before he died we talked one last time. I’m not going to make it to your class. Would you tell them for me, tell the whole world for me.

Where is God located? Maybe not on the mountain. Maybe not in the crisis when we think He should rescue us. Maybe not even in church. He resides in the hearts of those who love, and have the courage to say it and act on it.