Creekside Church Sermon of December 1, 1996 "Come Down Here " Isaiah 24: 1-9	Rev. David Bibbee
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Confession is good for the soul, so how many of you have locked yourselves out of the car? It's so frustrating to see the keys mere inches away, but they may as well be a light year distance because you can't get to them. I see a similarity with our search for God. We know what we are looking for. Together we have invested lots of church years into the search. We've sat through scads of services, sermons, and studies; we have read book after book and the Bible cover to cover to learn what God has done, what God wants done, and what God is up to now. But like those keys dangling from the ignition of a locked car, God can seem so inaccessible.

Information about God is important, but it is no substitute for the experience of God. Two and a half centuries ago the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, "There is no lack of information in a Christian land. Something else is missing." That something else is what concerns us. "Oh, if I knew where I might find him," Job said of this powerful, awesome, elusive, mysterious, ever-present, yet hidden God.

In today's lesson, Isaiah wonders the same. "Why don't you tear open the sky and come down." He is not intimidated by God. His tone is emphatic. "If you're half the God you say you are, then come down from the clouds and show yourself!" There is exhaustion and exasperation in his voice. Isaiah is now an old man. Much had happened since God first appeared to him when he was but a young man in the temple. In 587 B.C., God's people were conquered and carted off to exile in Babylon. Now Israel has returned to the rubble that was once the center of their spiritual lives. There is no temple, no King, no land, and now it seems, no God.

"You treat us like we have never been your people. You have hidden from us; and abandoned us for our sin. Tear open the sky and come down." Have you ever spoken to God this way, if not out loud, then in the silence of your thoughts? Has it ever seemed as though you are praying to an empty sky? Have you ever prayed for someone you loved dearly, only to hear the echo of your own voice? We all have. We hear detailed descriptions from people who have heard a great, deep voice, or seen a brilliant light, or had some profound encounter with the Almighty, and we sometimes take that to be the norm. We conclude that we either don't rate, or think maybe we have turned our thee's and thou's around, or we start ending our prayers with amen instead of ah-men. Then we might see or hear something like everybody else in the Bible seemed to hear.

Everything back them seemed so dramatic. Their experiences so much more certain than ours. True, the ways the God encounters are described sound more intimate and immediate, but I don't think the manner God was known is any different. Given a choice between an earthquake and a still small voice, God opted for the quiet. As Isaiah stood amid the rubble that was once the temple, the tape recording of the awesome encounter with God years before was rolling, yet all he heard now was an eerie silence. "If only God would speak like in the good old days. Why don't you tear open the sky and come down?" If you think the characters of the Bible could summon God with the mere snap of a finger, better think again.

Just for once we wish we could have some undeniable, irrefutable, even momentary glimpse of God...one you could be certain of yourself without wondering if it was real or imagined...an experience that others could see and confirm as the real article. But often the encounter with God is so quiet, so personal that if another is present at the moment it happens, they would likely notice nothing.

One bright summer morning when I was about ten, I walked out the back door of my house to go play with my friends. But no sooner had I closed the door when I heard something over my head. I looked up to see a monkey swinging on the electric line leading into our house. The sight of a jungle animal in Marion, Ohio wasn't a typical phenomena. I looked away several times to be sure I wasn't imagining it. I looked closely to make sure it wasn't a squirrel with a thyroid problem, then I shot into the house screaming, "Mom! Come here quick! There's a monkey in the back yard!" "A what?" "A monkey!" I pulled her out the door and pointed up and there sat a robin. "Quit trying to pull my leg," she said. "I'm not. I tell you I saw a monkey," I insisted. It was just like in those shows where someone sees a ghost or some such thing, but when they go to show the others, it's gone. Everyone I told laughed at me, and after awhile I started doubting myself.

Three days later I was doing something in the back yard when I happened to look up, and guess what I saw swinging on the power line? This time I quietly walked into the house, pulled Mom away from the ironing board, led her by the hand out the door, pointed upward and said, "What do you call that?" "That's a monkey!" "I rest my case." What a relief that someone saw what I saw and substantiated my claim.

Wouldn't it be so much better if the God moments we experience would be obvious to everyone? Wouldn't it be to God's advantage to not be so stingy with miracles and come down into this old God starved world and make Himself manifest in such a magnificent, bold and clear way as to cause the believers to shout, "I knew it!" The folks who didn't care less to shout, "I blew it!", and all the atheists to fall on their knees and shout, "I believe it!"?

I doubt it, because whether God wrote us a message in the stars accompanied by the music of a celestial orchestra or some such stupendous thing, the result would not be what we are really after. When we utter that plaintiff prayer with Isaiah, "Tear open the sky and come down," we are not after proof that God exists. What we ultimately care about is whether or not God wants to be in relationship with us. It's not a message written in the stars that we long for. It's a word written upon our hearts. It's the conviction upon which faith is built, that a relationship with God is not only possible, but that God desires it.

So if God desires to be present to us, why isn't God's presence more obvious, or as someone put it, "If God is so wild about us, why is finding him such a hassle?" Maybe it has something to do with our desire. Maybe God remains hidden in the shadows of our experiences, veiled in such a way that only the eyes of faith can see him, so that we will show that we want to want him.

The people I've spoken to who started a search for God and abandoned it, often site as their principle reason the lack of tangible results. No voice. No sign. No sensation. Nothing to show for the effort. But what we fail to realize is that this seeming absence is God's way of calling us to look and listen more intently. By his absence, we are drawn to desire God's presence even more. Madeline L'Engle observed that God can use the work of people who don't believe in God to make an eloquent case for God. Such was the case with a short story written by the French philosopher John Paul Sarte called, "The Restaurant."

A man goes to a restaurant to have lunch with a friend. The maitre d' escorts him to a corner table where he waits anxiously for the friend. The appointed hour comes, but the friend does not appear. Minutes become an hour and still he waits. He keeps looking at the door then at his watch. His eyes follow every person who leaves and enters. He looks at everyone in the restaurant. Everything and everyone has become organized around the expectation of his friend's arrival, but he never comes. Finally he decides to wait no longer, but as he gets up to leave he is struck by the realization that his friend has been everywhere because he has been nowhere. By being absent, his friend was in another sense present.

We have an expression which conveys this truth. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Not seeing the one we long for makes us yearn for them even more. We will probably always have that desire for God to slice open the sky and pour his radiance upon our questioning and doubt. There are those times, as Isaiah says, when God does awesome things we do not expect. But the MGM Grand revelations are rare compared to God's preferred method of drawing us to Himself. Like someone said, "Maybe God speaks most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we might know Him best through our missing Him."

The problem really isn't with God's presence. It's our perception of that presence. It is waiting for the shout and missing the whisper. That is why during this advent season we devote ourselves to patient waiting and listening. We do it precisely because in this time of drawing near God's most profound self-revelation, we are most in danger of missing it. The break-neck pace, the pseudo-cheer, the orgy of excess pushes the wonder of God's presence into the background. God won't shout to be heard over the refrains of Deck the Halls, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, and last year's classic, "You Ain't Gettin' Diddly Squat 'Cause You Really Messed Up This Year." The problem isn't God's presence. It's all the stuff that keeps us from being present. How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.

In C.S. Lewis' book, The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, who is the devil, is rubbing his hands together with glee. At last he and his emissaries have succeeded in drawing people's attention away from God. Watching humanity dash here and there, he says, "Now this is an achievement. They're busy all the time making choices about things that don't matter. We've got them now. They're terminally distracted."

What is distracting you from sensing the incursions of God into your life? What is it which is keeping from sensing God's incursions into this church? What absorbs our attention and energy that doesn't matter?

You lock the car door with the keys inside. They are only inches away, yet inaccessible, and until help comes, you are going nowhere. How inaccessible God seems. How stuck we feel. How we long to see a tangible evidence of God's presence to gain some strength to face today and hope for tomorrow. Tear open the sky and come down, please God.

But advent reminds us that outside the inn at Bethlehem, a child was born...God did come down. How many people were looking for a spectacular appearance and missed it? Most people saw only a baby born to a poor couple. Another mouth to feed. But to the few who were receptive to God and listened, this baby was God with us.

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