Lord, as we journey through March and the days of Lent,
give us the courage to follow you on your road.
When life is hard, give us direction.
When we face turmoil, give us peace.
When there is joy, help us celebrate. You give us life every day. We thank you.
Amen.
The theologian Rev AI says this:
Searching for God in a church setting is described as
a deliberate, heart-felt pursuit rather than a passive experience, often involving active engagement with scripture, worship, and community. It is described as a journey that requires sincerity and the removal of distractions, with the promise that those who truly seek will find Him. It has to be a wholehearted pursuit: The foundational encouragement is found in Jeremiah 29:13, which states "You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart.”
A lot of people begin their search for spiritual meaning when life is hard or it has lots of questions.
So I took my car to the garage for a service the other morning and I’d booked a courtesy carfor the day.
“We’ve only got a manual,” said the man.
“That’s fine!” I said.
Except it wasn’t fine! I got a little way along the road and the thing stopped and my brain couldn’t work out what to do. The thing I needed to remember was to press the clutch in to change gear. I’ve driven an automatic for the last six years. To be able to move I had to quickly remember what to do I’m different circumstances. A bit scary when you need to do this as you are about to get on the motorway!
In life we need so often to dig deep into our resources when things suddenly need us to cope. I think that’s why we need to know the basics of how to live well. Spiritually when we can’t move, we need to remember what we so easily forget. That God loves us. That Jesus is with us. And… that we need to breathe in panic and think. I found shouting at the car “ WHY CANT I GET YOU TO START?”wasn’t helpful! I felt like Basil Fawlty and his car, bashing it with a tree branch giving it a thrashing because it wouldn’t go! May weknow we have the resources in us
to keep moving. And to move may need a search.
So I want to think about two scenarios where God is yearned for.
First, in desperation.
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him,. He walks everywhere incognito.” So wrote C S Lewis, who had his own spiritual battles when life was hard especially in bereavement.
When life suddenly throws us a huge curveball, we reach out for help. Let’s consider Psalm 121. What does the Psalmist say? I look to the hills - where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. Great change and bold journeys can only be undertaken by looking upward to the mountains. Not just any mountain, more likely Sinai or Horeb – mountains where God is close and gives information or can be perceived. Perhaps all high places were thought closer to God.
Certainly, the psalmist is clear: help comes from God. Deeply reassuring words – God does not sleep or slumber but watches over us in everything, in all our comings and goings, and protects us from falling, or from the sun that is too bright. We are reminded that God does this in part because He is the Creator of heaven and earth. The psalmist does not want us to think about other gods - either those of the ancient world which did not have our best interests at heart, or the other gods of our lives today - those other things we give priority too, rather than let our Creator take care of us.
The Psalm is a strong affirmation that the God who created all that is, even us, will be the one who provides help. Whether the road is easy or tough, God is there. Our help comes from the Lord. This is good and reassuring news that we do not have to do it alone. Such a perspective reminds us that we believe in a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, an all-encompassing God who will not abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. For God is faithful.
So we remember those who today need the Lord to keep their going out and their coming in especially if life is tough from this time forth and forever more. God’s love can be found on the journey.
Then secondly I think there are those searching for a new beginning. The spiritual quest is alive in these days. Let’s think about Nicodemus.
Nicodemus meets Jesus on a rooftop in Jerusalem under cover of darkness. Nicodemus is one of the most powerful people in the Israel of his day. He is credentialed and respected. His identity is carefully curated out of law, privilege, institutional authority, and the opaqueness behind which the elite can hide. His coming in the dark has at least as much to do with his life, as it does with the time of day.
Nicodemus represents every rigid structure of power and exclusion, every institution that operates in the shadows, every system that tells people who belongs and who doesn't, who is worthy and who is not. Is he visiting because Jesus is a celebrity or is there something genuine in his search?
Some scholars believe that Nicodemus coming at night is him sneaking around in the shadows so others don’t see him. Another suggestion is that nighttime was when rabbis got together to wrestle with the tantalising theological questions of their day and he was respecting Jesus as someone with a proposition to listen to.
Jesus gives Nicodemus an offer of a wild and free, unbounded new life in the presence of God. Instead of another aspirational mountain to climb or yet another self-improvement programme, Jesus offers something far more radical inviting him into the light of a life blown open by the Spirit of God a complete make-over; a new start; a re-birth. “You need to be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses. This is what the Spirit does.”
And then we get John 3:16, a verse so familiar that we risk no longer hearing it. This is not God's love for the church, or the deserving, or the theologically correct. This is God's love for the whole gloriously complicated, achingly beautiful, deeply broken human family and all of creation. Don’t we need to hear of that today?
At the end of this encounter, Nicodemus disappears … except he doesn’t. He crops up twice more. In John 7 he speaks up hesitatingly for Jesus on a point of law to the chief priests and Pharisees, and in John 19 he and Joseph of Arimathea ask Pilate for permission to take and care for the body of Christ after the crucifixion.
Has Nicodemus has come into the light? Has he taken a stand? Is he a believer? There’s no definitive answer.
Surely, we must never be afraid to bring your questions to Jesus, but must also be prepared to be changed by the answers. I suggest any church must be ready for people wanting to know more about Jesus.
And what of us – how will we know God’s love in Jesus this week? Jesus tells us we must be born again. God tells us he is the help. Babies spend a lot of time resting, and more importantly perhaps, absorbing love and being embraced. Moreover, they can't do much. They are almost entirely helpless and powerless. They depend completely on someone else to have all their needs met. They have no resources which are not given to them by another. They also want quite simple things and communicate very simply and clearly to get them, crying out for what they need.
All of these things are challenging and counter-cultural for us. We seek to be independent and in control, we do anything to avoid feeling powerless, and sometimes we can't even identify our deepest needs to ourselves, let alone ask for them to be met. Yet, over and over again in scripture, this is what God demands for us.
In the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, to not understand who provides for you is idolatrous; to be faithful is to know that everything comes from God. And when Jesus says we need to be born again, this is the total vulnerability that is required to really follow Him and truly accept God's love. We need to be prepared to be still and just accept love.
We need to acknowledge that we are powerless. And we need to cry out, with confidence that we will be heard in our need.
Remember the old story and how we get it wrong so often…
A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
"Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."
"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"
God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."
To return to my prayer:
Lord, as we journey through March and the days of Lent,
give us the courage to follow you on your road.
When life is hard, give us direction.
When we face turmoil, give us peace.
When there is joy, help us celebrate. You give us life every day. We thank you.
Amen.
