In the Bible, God is always showing up in the places people least expect God to be. For example, when the Jews are living in exile in Babylon, they may be expecting God to tell them to resist getting too comfortable, too close, to such a God-forsaken place – a place that has just been responsible for the downfall of God’s chosen people. Instead comes the decree – “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 19:5-7). * They will be blessed even in the land of their enemies?
In the book of Acts, Peter is preaching to Cornelius’ family – Gentiles – in Joppa when the Holy Spirit, apparently frustrated at Peter’s long-windedness, goes ahead and pours itself out on the people gathered. I can imagine what Peter is thinking: “Wait! The Holy Spirit isn’t supposed to come until I baptize these people!” But Peter realizes that God is already with and in these people to whom he thought that he was bringing the Holy Spirit. At this point, he can only say: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47)
And then in the gospel of Mark, early on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome bring spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. When they get to the tomb, they find the stone rolled away, the tomb empty, and a man in a white robe who tells them not to worry – Jesus has been raised from the dead. “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7).
Jesus is going to meet them in Galilee? Isn’t that where this whole thing started? Really? He’s going to meet them back in their home region? I can imagine the disciples thinking: “Nothing big ever happens in our hometowns. Jerusalem is the special place, the place of the temple, the place where God lives, the place where all holy things MUST take place.” But here they are being told to return to Galilee, because they will find that Jesus is already there.
It seems that no place is off limits for God. God is always where we least expect to find God – in the out of the way places, and in what we might deem the “God-forsaken” places, and in the most ordinary of places, and even in our own backyards. As Metropolitan bishop Anthony Bloom says: “There is no reason to look for God anywhere other than the place we are in. For if we do not see God, it is not God who is absent from us, but we who are absent from God.”
What good news this is for everyone! What good news this is for the Church! After all, if we are honest, we know that the Church is full of atheists. Not the kind we usually think of. I mean, we believe in God. We recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday. We don’t even cross our fingers behind our back. But we are what Parker Palmer calls functional atheists.
Palmer describes functional atheism as “the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.” [1]
Many of us are functional atheists, if we think about it. If we are serious about evangelism, about being the Church in the place in which we find ourselves, then we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. We feel like it’s up to us to get the momentum going and to make things happen. It’s up to us to bring God to this place.
But God is already there! The Holy Spirit is already at work. It’s not waiting for us, just like it wasn’t waiting for Peter. The task is not for us to make God present. The task is for us to have the eyes to see God already at work in the place in which we find ourselves, and then to join God in God’s work. The task is for us to walk reverently and expectantly on the earth – expecting to meet God. And when we do, to see that place as church and to build a metaphorical altar in that place.
This takes faith, it takes time, and it takes practice in learning how to see. It means being part of a community, paying attention to where life-giving interactions take place – for God is there. It means sitting on a street corner and truly watching the people who walk past – who are they, where is God here? It means seeing where the hungry are fed, the lame begin to walk, the blind see, the captives are set free, and those whose voices are silenced begin to speak. It means having the imagination to recognize the variations on these themes. And then it means joining the Holy Spirit in the work the Holy Spirit is already doing.
As Peter found out that day in Joppa, it is not all up to us. God is always already here. What a relief!
* Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
[1] Parker Palmer, “Leading from Within,” Center for Courage and Renewal, http://www.couragerenewal.org/leading-from-within/.
An Honest Hope 