Where Are You?

Where Are You?

Genesis 3:1-13

January 13, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Questions. We are constantly being asked questions. Go to a restaurant and they ask, “What would you like to drink? What do you want to eat? Do you want fries with that?” Go to the doctor’s office and you’re asked to fill out a form that has gobs of questions. “What issue brings you in today? How long have you been experiencing symptoms? Who is your insurance carrier?” Facebook asks us, “What’s on your mind?” and Twitter asks us, “What’s happening?” We ask each other questions of varying sincerity: “How are you?” “What’s going on?” “Did you see that game last night?” When you think about it, questions—asking and answering things—constitute a pretty big part of our conversational life.

What’s true about our conversations with each other is also often true of our conversations with God. Maybe not publicly, but we ask God questions like, “Why did you do that?” “Why did this happen?” “Could you please give me what I want?” “Why can’t you do what I want right now?” We question, we demand, we expect God to answer and do our bidding. So here’s a question: do we get confused as to who is God and who is not? Recently, it hit me that while we spend a lot of time expecting God to answer our questions (and preferably, we’d like him to answer the way we want him to), we spend far less time giving attention to the questions God asks us. Yes, it’s true. God asks questions. All through the Bible, God asks questions of human beings, and for the next few weeks, we’re going to look at several of those questions. It’s a “Role Reversal” when we end up as the answerer (if that’s a word) rather than the questioner, but in each case, as we’ll see, there’s a good reason God is asking the question he’s asking. And in each case, he expects an answer. This morning, to get us started, we’re going to look at what is, as far as we know, the very first question God asked humanity (cf. Larsen, Questions God Asks, pgs. 5, 9): “Where are you?”

It’s a common enough question. When my kids were little, one of the games they loved to play was “hide and seek,” or as they sometimes put it, “hide and come find me.” Most if not all of you have probably played that game from time to time. When they were little, we lived in a fairly large parsonage that had a lot of hiding places, and so sometimes it would take me a while to find them. Luckily, neither one of them wanted to hide for very long, so they would tell me at the start, “Now, I’m going to hide in the upstairs closet. You count and then come find me.” And I faithfully did my duty. If only all hidden things in life were so easy to find! Around our house these days we often play games like, “Where is my phone?” and “Has anyone seen the remote?” Our favorite apps these days are “Find My iPhone” and “Tile.” I’d like to put one of those “tiles” on just about everything so that I can find it when I need it. I’ve tried standing in the middle of the family room and saying, “Where are you,” but it doesn’t work with those things like it worked with the kids, or like it worked for God with Adam and Eve.

The question comes early on in the story of creation, but we need a little background to be able to understand it. The book of Genesis tells us that God created everything we see, and that at the beginning of time, Earth was a paradise. It was beautiful, a garden, and the first two humans, called Adam (a Hebrew word that simply means “man”) and Eve, had everything they needed. As the story goes, there is one tree they are instructed not to eat from, but along comes a talking serpent and suggests to Eve that God lied to her. The serpent tells Eve that when God said they would die if they ate from that tree, God wasn’t telling the truth. And so Eve takes a bite, gives some to Adam, and lo and behold, it seems that the serpent was right. They don’t immediately die—at least not physically. But the story tells us that something does die on that day, and that death is played out in the next part of the story, the part we read this morning.

It’s late afternoon or early evening. It’s a time when the heat of the day begins to break in the Middle East as a breeze sweeps in from the sea. Even still today in Israel and the larger Middle East, late afternoon is when people begin to come outside, to take walks, to be with each other because the heat begins to dissipate and it’s more bearable outside. It’s been that way from the beginning, so that’s the setting the author of Genesis describes in this passage as God comes down in the cool of the day to take a walk with Adam and Eve. We get the sense that this has become a regular pattern of sorts, and at this point I should probably insert a couple of other comments. First of all, I know some people struggle with whether or not the account in Genesis is literal or not. And while I don’t struggle with that, I understand how you can. But whether you accept it literally or as more of an archetypal story, either way is still, all these centuries later, tells us something about humanity. And that leads me to the second comment, which is about the way God is pictured in this story as a big human being. God is not like us. God doesn’t have legs that need to be stretched by an afternoon walk. He doesn’t necessarily make noise as he comes through the plants. What that imagery is trying to tell us is that in those moments Adam and Eve became aware of God’s presence. It’s not that God wasn’t always present, or that is he isn’t always present with us. But again, this is a story trying to communicate something about God and humanity, trying to share something of what God is really like in the midst of our limited understanding. So we take the imagery for what it is (cf. Wright, Genesis for Everyone, Part One, pg. 49). In some way, Adam and Eve, who have broken God’s one rule, and who decided they needed to hide from God because of that, somehow they become aware that God was looking for them. They heard—whether with their ears or in their spirits—they heard God calling out, “Where are you?”

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of trying to find someone in the midst of a crowd or in an unfamiliar place. Maybe you can hear them moving or talking, but you’re not sure where they are, and you find yourself calling out something like, “Where are you?” I learned this week of a pretty cool parallel to this idea found in creation. Take a listen.

VIDEO: “Loons”

One person commented online that the loons play their version of “Marco Polo.” The wail the loons let out almost sounds like, “Where are you?” doesn’t it? I love the fact that they recognize each other’s voice, much like one spouse would recognize another’s voice, or a child might recognize a parent’s voice, or a creation might recognize the creator’s voice. In the text we read this morning, there is not a scene of Adam or Eve saying, “I wonder whose voice that is.” They know whose voice it is. They know who is looking for them. And they know that what has died is the close relationship they once enjoyed with the God who made them.

Did God really not know where they were? I mean, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, surely he can locate the only two humans on the planet, right? Some scholars speculate that God has chosen not to know where they are, and while I suppose that’s possible, I don’t think that’s what’s going on in this story (cf. Wright 49). So, why does he ask if he already knows? To me, it’s a little bit like that “hide and seek” game I played with my kids. I knew where they were, but I would pretend not to know sometimes so that they would give themselves up. I would conveniently “forget” what they had told me so that they would come to me. I think that’s some of what is going on here. God sort of “forgets” where they are—not really, but he appears to have forgotten—so that they will come to him. He wants Adam and Eve to make the choice to come back to him on their own terms (cf. Hamilton, NICOT: The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, pg. 193). He wants them to know he is looking for them, that even though they have broken his heart he wants to still be with them. When they are lost and hiding, God wants them to know what it feels like and what it means to be found.

Do you know what it is like to be found? In 2010, I took my first trip to Italy and Christopher and I had the chance to see the Colosseum, something I had wanted to experience for as long as I could remember. Once we got in, our guide, Daniela, gave us a brief orientation to the site, and then turned us loose to explore on our own. She told us to be at the exit within twenty minutes, so Christopher and I took off. I was in tourist heaven, taking pictures and exploring the different levels of the Colosseum. At some point, Christopher (probably tired of exploration) asked, “What time are we supposed to be back?” Oh, I said, I’m sure it hasn’t been twenty minutes yet. Well, it had been a bit more than that actually, and when we turned on the radios everyone in our group had, we couldn’t hear anything. No voice of the guide, no call back to the bus, just static. I had no idea, really, how long it had been, so we started heading back to the exit, but I had lost track of which way that was. So we wandered around for a little bit, then the radio picked up a voice. Just a slight sound, but it sounded like Daniela. She was looking for us. After listening and walking, we found not just the voice, but the guide. She told us they were about to leave us, and I can tell you, at that moment, it felt really good to be found.

Later, I’m sure, Adam and Eve would realize how good it feels to be found. In this moment, however, they know they are in trouble. While they may not have died physically, the relationship they have with God, their creator, has died a little. It has been broken. And yet…and yet, God, who could just give up on them and everyone who comes after them, that God still seeks after them. He asks, “Where are you?” and he still makes provisions for them to have a continued relationship with him. Even though things are not what they once were, God is not content to turn his back on them, or on us.

That’s a reason to be thankful, that no matter what we do or how many times we turn our back on God, he never turns his back on us. And that, to me, brings up an even bigger question: why does God even want to be in relationship with us? I mean, ultimately, as is promised and foreshadowed even here in the Genesis story, God will come in Jesus, give his life on the cross so that we can be forgiven and live forever with him. Why do all that? Why endure the pain and suffering of the cross just so that we can find our way back to him? Why does God, who can do anything he wants and doesn’t really need any of us, still want to be in relationship with us? It’s pretty simple: because he loves us. We are his creation, and he loves us. And honestly, love causes us to do all sorts of crazy things for the people we love. Love will cause us to go to the ends of the earth, if need be, to find the one we love. God loves us; he loves you, and do you know what? There’s not a thing you can do about it. You cannot do anything that will cause him to love you more and you cannot do anything that will cause him to love you less.

Yet we often turn our backs on that love. We, like Adam and Eve before us, try to hide from the God who comes looking for us. It’s really a ridiculous scene to think about, isn’t it? What did they hide behind that they thought was large enough to block God’s sight? Was Adam behind a tree, holding his breath? Was Eve behind a bush, hands over her head? Sort of a crazy image, isn’t it? Yet we find things to hide behind that are nearly as ridiculous—and we use them to not only try to hide from God, but to hide from each other. We forget that this sin, this hiding not only damaged the relationship with God. It also damaged the relationship between Adam and Eve. In my Bible, on one page, Adam speaks lovingly of Eve: she is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (2:23). And just across the page, he speaks accusingly of her: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree! (3:12). He’s gone from loving to accusing; the one sin breaks both relationships, and when that happens to us, we seek hiding places.

We hide behind our career, putting it before God and before others. Oh, sure, we say we are working all the overtime so we can provide nice things for our family, but our family just wants our time. We hide behind our technology. You know I’m a fan of technology; I love all the gadgets we have these days. They don’t call me “teknopasto” for nothing! But we are desperately distracted by our technology today, and we use it to make an impression on others rather than to connect with others. Online community is not real community because in real community, people know the real you, not just your “best foot forward.” And more than that, our technology gets in the way of our relationship with God. I’ll confess: it takes a lot of discipline for me in the morning to read the Scriptures and my devotions before I turn to Facebook. There are times I find myself scrolling through statuses and all of a sudden a lot of time has passed. “Why am I spending so much time doing this?” I’ll ask myself—even sometimes out loud because I need to actually hear that question. Technology is great, but if we’re using it to hide from others, or from God, maybe we need to turn it off so we can hear the voice of our creator saying, “Where are you?”

We can even use religion and religious practice to hide from God. Jesus often criticized the Pharisees for not living out what they claimed to believe, for hiding behind their religious practice so as to appear holy without actually connecting with God. At least once, maybe twice, Jesus entered the Temple courts and threw out everyone there who was selling stuff. They had turned what was known as the “Court of the Gentiles” into a market where they sold the stuff you needed for worship. It’d be like us selling Bibles and songbooks out in the lobby here, and required you to buy them before you could enter the worship center. Jesus throws them out because they had taken over a place of prayer, the only place the Gentiles (non-Jews) could come and pray. Those selling things would say, “But it’s for the Temple!” They had let their religious practice blind them to the nearness of God (cf. Matthew 21:12-17 and parallels). We are called “protestants” because of the “protest” of one man, Martin Luther, who spoke out against the abuses of the religious system in his day. He couldn’t reconcile the Bible’s proclamation of salvation by faith alone with the church of his day requiring certain actions and certain offerings. He believed the church of the Middle Ages had made the same mistake as the religious leaders of Jesus’ day: hiding from God behind their religious practice, or more pointedly, letting the religious practice become more important than God.

In our own tradition, John Wesley saw the same thing happening in the Church of England. If you were a citizen of England, you were a member of the church, and for many, all it took to be a Christian was showing up at church and making it through the Sunday morning ritual. Wesley believed there is more to the life of faith, and began preaching outside (when he was pretty much shut out of all the pulpits in England) and proclaiming a warm-hearted, passionate and compassionate faith. He spoke against the practice of religion that had no connection to the one who is Lord of all. And, to be honest, we who are the inheritors of this rich, Biblical tradition, find ourselves once again in a place where we are in danger of hiding from God behind our religious practice. In these next few weeks leading up to the special General Conference that many believe will determine the future of our denomination, there is a lot of talk from all parties about “preserving unity,” and some think it should happen one way and others think it should happen in another way. But while everyone is busy defending their practice, I keep wondering if we need to get quiet and listen to God say, “Where are you?” I wonder how much we’ve allowed God into the process. Oh, we’ve made a practice of praying and reading the Scriptures, we’ve gone through all the motions, but I’m not sure we’ve listened well for the voice of God calling us back to himself. Where are you, church? Where are you?

God asks: where are you? You know, we talk a lot about “finding God,” but the reality is he was always searching for us, calling out to us, watching for us to come back, to turn toward home. That’s the imagery we get in Jesus’ famous parable of the prodigal son (cf. Luke 15:11-32). When the one who has been away “in a far country” turns toward home, when he is just over the horizon, his father glimpses him and runs toward him. That’s a picture of God. If we give the slightest response to his question, to his call, “Where are you?” he will run toward us and welcome us home. Maybe some of you need to connect with God for the first time this morning; you have been turning toward home and today can be your day to stop hiding and begin a relationship with your creator. For others of us, we need to make better or newer connections with Jesus. We’ve known him for some time, but we’ve been hiding because we’re afraid he might transform us in uncomfortable ways. And he might. In fact, he probably will! But I can tell you that every time that’s happened in my life, it’s been for the ultimate good. So we connect with him through a regular prayer time, through worship (both private and corporate), through reading the Scriptures. Because when we’re connected, we find power for living. 

We also need connections with each other. Last Sunday, I experienced a clear and somewhat painful illustration of this. After our Night to Shine training, we got in a circle to pray and Jess was leading that with the microphone in her hand. Just before we started to pray, some sort of power surge went through the microphone and even though I was on the far side of the circle, I got a shock. It went all around the circle because we were connected. It was cool and painful all at the same time! But it reminded me that when we’re connected to each other, we receive power! When we’re connected to each other in good, healthy relationships, we begin to push back the darkness created at the very beginning. So, is there someone you haven’t connected with in a long time, I mean really connected with? Not just online; I’m talking about sharing coffee, or lunch, or if they live a long ways away, sending a card? Is there someone you need to reconnect with, maybe even someone you need to repair a relationship with? Another way we live this out is by connecting with a small group of some sort. Is there a group you can turn to, who encourage you in your walk with Jesus and help you follow him better? Is there a group who just loves you for you? I can’t tell you how much I value our LifeGroup and the ways we do life together. And the ways we share food together as well! In so many ways, they help me see Jesus more and more each week. They help me hear God calling to me, “Where are you?” And they help me to answer well. We all need people like that in our lives. Who is in your life who helps you know God better?

God longs to be in relationship with you because he loves you. He loves you; he just does. He’s calling out, “Where are you?” Don’t hide from him anymore. Come out in the open and follow him wherever he leads. Let’s pray.