Sermon: Searching for God

 John 1:43-51
Searching for God
James Sledge                                                                            January 14, 2024 

When I first began to think about going to seminary, I contacted a career counseling service that was connected to the Charlotte Presbytery. The idea of seminary seemed pretty far fetched for a 35 year old with a wife and two kids, so I wanted to do what I could to confirm the idea. Among the battery of surveys and instruments they gave me was something known as the “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” a personality inventory used by lots of companies, counselors, colleges, and church governing boards to help people understand their own and other people’s style of doing things. I’ve saw an article a few years ago questioning the validity of this indicator, but I think it is still popular.

The Myers-Briggs information was interesting and helpful, but I didn’t need that test to tell me that I was an introvert. Myers-Briggs doesn’t use the terms introvert and extrovert in quite the same way most of us do in regular conversation, but to a significant degree, I fit what most people mean when they use the term introvert. I was shy growing up, and I would go broke if I had to make a living as a door to door salesperson.

And so it will likely not surprise you to learn that while I enjoy going to social events with friends and family, my idea of torture is to find myself at a large social function where I do not know a soul. I don’t think there is anything that can make me feel more alone than to be wandering about amongst people who are talking to one other, hoping that I will spot a familiar face.

Some of you know what I’m talking about. Even some extroverts don’t like to find themselves in such a situation. They will probably manage to make a connection with someone faster than I might, but I don’t know that many people like to find themselves in a situation where they know absolutely no one. Very few people can tolerate being alone all the time, and I think being by yourself amongst lots of people I don’t know is one of the worst kinds of alone, where there are others all around, but I am connected to none of them.

But all it takes to completely change my experience is for someone to spot me, pull me in, speak with me and introduce me to some people that she knows. Suddenly I am not alone. I am with people. I can relax. I can enjoy myself.

Being truly alone for extended periods is an intolerable experience for most people. There’s a reason that solitary confinement is considered a particularly cruel sort of punishment. We are social creatures. We need human contact. Even more, we need people who know us, who we feel comfortable enough around that we don’t have to try to impress them. We need people we can trust, who we can talk to, who we can relate to.

But this doesn’t seem to function just on a human, interpersonal level. Many people find it just as unnerving to contemplate being all alone in a larger sense. Many people seem intuitively to sense that there must be a divine presence of some sort in the vastness of the cosmos. And to some degree, all religions are an attempt to forge a connection with that presence, to know God and to be known by God.

But there are some inherent difficulties in this attempt. Unlike the person we see at a party but do not yet know, God is very often not nearly so obviously present. The search for God can often seem like a struggle. The Apostle Paul speaks of humans searching and groping for God despite God being near to us. 

Theologians say that one problem which comes between us and God is sin. Now by sin they don’t mean things the bad things we do. They are speaking of a more fundamental problem, sin as a condition. Think of sin along the lines of alcoholism. It is an orientation toward certain behavior, a tendency. The wrong things we do, the ways we live that are contrary to God’s ways are the result of this tendency in the same way abusing alcohol tends naturally to flow from being an alcoholic. 

In the case of sin, our natural tendency is to substitute things other than God for God. Sometimes our substitutes, our idols if you will, are obvious, things such as money or success valued above all else. Sometimes our idols are more subtle, especially when they are good things taken too far, family, nation, church, and so on. 

This tendency to create substitutes for God makes it difficult to recognize and know the true God. God usually turns out to be quite different than we envisioned, and so it is easy for us to miss God. God defies our assumptions about how God should act, what God should be like, and so we often embrace a god of our own creating rather than the God of all creation. It’s easy to reject the true God and the call to be God’s people when that call doesn’t fit with our assumptions, doesn’t cohere with the god we’ve created for ourselves.

The difficulty of knowing God is present to a degree in both of our scripture readings this morning. In the story about the boy Samuel, God seeks to be known. God already knows Samuel, and calls him by name. But Samuel does not know God, and he is unable to correctly perceive that it is God calling him. Only when someone who does know God helps Samuel understand the voice he hears, can he respond to the God who beckons him.

In our gospel reading, Jesus seeks out people and calls them to follow him. From its beginning, the Christian faith has spoken of Jesus as the way in which God seeks to deal with this problem of knowing God. Jesus becomes a way that God can be encountered, can be known. Through Jesus’ humanity, God reaches across the gulf that sin puts between us and God.

But the mere fact of Jesus’ coming does not completely undo all the difficulties of knowing God. Nathanael ends up recognizing Jesus only with Philip’s help, and only with the realization that he is already known by Jesus. Jesus’ humanity makes God more approachable, more knowable, but many who meet him still reject him. Nathanael nearly did.

For those of us who grew up in the church, for whom the life of faith has always surrounded us like air that we breathe, we may not always appreciate the difficulty of knowing God. Sometimes this is because a deep relationship with God has been so much a part of our lives that we scarcely remember life without it. Sometimes this is because we have grown so comfortable with an image of god that we have created for ourselves. 

Regardless, our comfort level with church often makes us oblivious to the struggle of others to connect, to know God. In a world where church is no longer an integral part of the culture, the norm is more and more the person who was not raised in church, who is unfamiliar with its rituals and patterns. For more and more people in our community, congregations are a social function they’re not likely to attend because they’re pretty sure that they will know no one, that they will be totally alone in the midst of a crowd of people. 

And the tragic thing is that often these people have heard God call. They’ve gotten some inkling that God desires a relationship. Sometimes that tug gets strong enough that they even consider trying church, assuming that the people there know something about God.  But if they come where they’ve heard that God is to be found, and no one makes a connection with them, no one draws them in, if their aloneness only seems heightened, they may well conclude that God is not to be found here.

God is here. The risen Christ is here. But people may need others’ help to recognize him, to introduce them or help them see. God knows everyone of us by name, and in Christ calls everyone saying, “Follow me.” When we answer, Christ dwells in us and together we are the living body of Christ in the world. We become the embodiment of God’s love, of God’s welcome, of God’s desire to reach out and be known by all. Our lives, our worship, our caring, our hospitality bear witness to the one who knows each of us fully, and who calls each of us to full and abundant life as disciples of Jesus.

You are not alone here. You are fully known by the one who would die for you. There is no need to impress or worry about hiding your flaws. You are known. You are embraced. You are loved. And that love dwells in us most fully when, like Eli who helped Samuel hear God, or Philip who brought Nathanael to Jesus, we share God’s welcome and love with those who might otherwise miss them.