Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 12, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Let me tell you a story about a man I know, a true story actually. He is quite advanced in years now, although still vigorous and mentally as sharp as ever. He grew up Catholic. In his youth, into his college years, he was powerfully attracted to the Catholic Church. He even considered becoming a priest, going so far as to talk to the local bishop about once. In the liturgy and the spirituality of the Catholic Church he experienced the presence of God. God was real to him, a real part of his life. The God whose presence he knew in and through the Catholic faith was a profound source of comfort and strength to him in his youth as he experienced his parents’ separation, his father leaving home, and the despair of the Depression and Dust Bowl era Mid-West, where the future looked awfully bleak to a small town lad from a broken home with no prospects and very little hope. His sense of the real presence of God in his life gave him the comfort and hope that the worldly reality of his life could not.

Then, he went to college. Rather than get religion, which he already had, he got "enlightened." As he studied psychology he began to doubt Christianity’s doctrine of free will. When that piece of the puzzle of faith was removed, the whole thing collapsed for him. Moreover, being an extremely intelligent and independent-minded young man, he could no longer tolerate the authoritarianism of the Catholic church, which (if possible) was even worse then than it is now. And so he gave up his plans to be a priest and left the church. He lost his faith. He lost his sense of the presence of God. God became for him not a presence but a profound, gnawing, aching absence. He has been seeking to regain his youthful sense of the presence of God ever since. He still attends church regularly, although not the Catholic Church; but he has never again felt the real, living presence of God in his life that he knew as a youth.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think we all have to admit that much if not most of the time we too experience God not as a presence but as an absence. At least I know I do. Jesus apparently lived with a virtually constant awareness of the immediate presence of God. There may have been saints of the tradition who have come close to that experience. I, however, don’t, and my guess is that most of you don’t either. Our Scripture passages this morning show that the men and women who wrote the books that we now include in the Bible shared that experience. We start with Job. I imagine you’re all familiar with the story of Job. By this point in the book, Job has lost his family, property and health. His so-called friends have tried mightily to convince that he must has committed some great sin, that he must be guilty of some horrible transgression against God, to have deserved such punishment. Job continues to insist that he is innocent, that he has done nothing to deserve God’s wrath. He feels that God has deserted him, that God is nowhere to be found. He utters the pitiful complaint: "O, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!" Job 23:3 It’s a nearly universal human cry. We all wish we knew where we could find God when we feel alone and oppressed. Job wants to know where to find God so that he can "lay my case before him...," that is, basically so that he can accuse God of injustice because of Job’s suffering. Most of the time we want to find God not so much to complain as to feel God’s reassuring, comforting love. Whatever the reason for our search, however, I suspect we can all sympathize with Job’s aching sense of the absence of God.

Psalm 22 starts out the same way. The words are not Job’s, but they could be. The Gospel of Mark tells us that they were Jesus’ words on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest." Psalm 22:1-2 Haven’t we all felt that way, at least on occasion? Those of us who have experienced profound grief certainly have, or at least I certainly have at times as I have grieved the death of my beloved wife Francie. Certainly we would all much prefer to feel the presence of God rather than the absence of God. These Scripture passages, however, tell us that a profound, painful sense of God’s absence is indeed part of the life of faith.

Yet in the face of that pervasive sense of God’s absence, our tradition insists on talking about God as a presence. Despite my personal experience of God as absence I too talk a lot about God as a presence in my life and in the lives of all people of faith; and I am here to tell you again that God really is present in our lives-always and everywhere present to us, calling us, wanting, indeed aching to welcome us home, to comfort and console us, to lift us up in our times of grief and pain. Because you see, I have experienced not only the absence of God. I have experienced the presence of God in my life and the lives of others as well. I’ve told you about some of those experiences before. I’ve told you about the time God lifted me up physically as I sunk to my knees in grief over Francie’s death. I’ve told you of Francie’s powerful sense of being held safe in God’s hands in her dying illness. I have felt God’s presence in my life calling me to pastoral ministry. I have many times felt the real presence of God in Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. I have had these and other experiences of the presence of God, and I know that many of you have too.

So what’s the problem? If God really is present in our lives, why do we, like Job and the Psalmist of Psalm 22, so often feel God’s absence? Why does it seem to us so much of the time that God is not present. Why has the man I mentioned at the start of this sermon never once in the past 65 years felt the presence of God that he once knew? Well, I’m not sure I have a total answer to those questions, but I believe that our sense of the absence of God is our doing, not God’s doing. I think it has something to do with a couple of things at least-like the fact that we expect things from God that God doesn’t give us, that is, we want God to be present on our terms, not on God’s. And the fact that we continually throw up barriers to our perception of God’s presence. Let me explain.

I think many of us expect God to appear to us the way God’s appearances are sometimes depicted in Scripture, especially Hebrew Scripture. We want bushes that burn but are not consumed. We want the pillar of smoke. We want a might wind, or maybe even earthquakes. We want angels we can physically grasp and wrestle with. We want God to speak to us on the mountaintop and to give us clear, concise commandments that we can more or less easily follow. We want Jesus visibly transfigured before us so that there can be no doubt who we are to follow. We want visible tongues as of fire to signal the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Well, maybe things really happened like that in Biblical times. I don’t really know. I know, however, that they don’t happen that way in our times. At least, they don’t happen that way in my life or in the lives of anyone I’ve ever known. In my experience, God actually makes God’s presence known not in flashy displays full of sound and fury but in stillness, in quiet, as a still small voice speaking to us in the night, quietly and persistently calling to us. Or as a vision granted in a dream or a daydream. Or as a physical sensation of our being touched and lifted up by a force we did not expect and cannot explain. God makes God’s presence known when we are quiet enough to hear, and when all of our defenses are down and our souls are laid open, bare before their Creator. We have to change our expectations about what the presence of God looks like.

And we have to be open to the possibility that God is present. That isn’t always easy for us modern types. We are children of the Enlightenment and of the Scientific Revolution. The presence of God can’t be demonstrated logically or proved scientifically. It is a sense, a feeling, a knowing that we can’t explain and can hardly express. So many modern people don’t believe that it is real. We have to put aside our skepticism, our doubt. To a large extent this means getting our minds out of the way and opening our hearts to God. There are lots of ways to do that, but at some level they all involve silencing the mind. God speaks not so much to the mind as to the heart. So practice silence. It is a great help in opening ourselves to the presence of God.

Silence has another virtue. One of the great barriers to our awareness of the presence of God is the constant head noise that we carry around with us all the time. Even when that head noise isn’t putting up other barriers, like that rationalistic skepticism I just mentioned, it still gets in the way. God’s voice is quiet. It speaks not always in words but in silent yearnings, in aches of the heart, in longings for a better world, a better, richer life. If our attention is always on our internal monologue, there’s no room for a dialogue with God in the quiet movings of the soul. So once again, practice silence.

And pray. Silence is perhaps the most profound prayer, but God wants us to invite God into our lives. Go ahead. Don’t be shy. Ask God into your life, then open yourselves to the unexpected, surprising ways God may answer that prayer. God really is present. God is that reality in which, as Paul says, we live and move and have our being. God is the realm of the Spirit, the Holy all around us and within us. God longs to be present in our lives, is reaching out to us without ceasing, without rest. The problem isn’t that God is absent. The problem is that we make God absent, we shut God out with our false expectations and intellectual barriers to God’s presence. As Joseph Campbell says somewhere, the problem is that we have scales over our eyes that filter out the presence of God. So let’s get out of the way and let God in. God’s absence is our doing, not God’s. Let’s stop the doing and let God in.