GOD IS EVERYWHERE!

(Preached on Sunday, September 9, 2007)

Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?  Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?                                                                                      -Psalm 139:7

 

This Psalm is one of the most beautiful, widely loved of all religious poetry.  A great Scottish theologian and mystic, Erskine of Linlathen, is reported to have said that the one bit of writing he would wish to have with him on his deathbed was Psalm 139.  (On a personal note, this Psalm has always been one of my favorites as well.  For years I shied away from preaching on it.  It speaks to my gut.  It speaks to my heart.  I was fearful of ruining that connection by analyzing it too much.)

 

The Psalmist is expressing a very profound, yet simple, truth about God.  By speaking from the heart, from the gut, the Psalmist is telling how he has experienced God.  In simplest language that truth about God is this: GOD IS EVERYWHERE!  A very simple statement.  Yet a profound truth that we do not really arrive at through rational, thinking processes.  For the truth is we do not have the language, or the mental capacity, to really understand what we mean when we say that God is everywhere.  As finite, limited creatures, we cannot even think about being everywhere ourselves, so we struggle to relate this statement about God to any personal experience.  We can relate to it, as the Psalmist does, through personal experience of always finding God wherever we are, even in some pretty amazing places.  But we cannot relate to it from God=s side of the relationship.

 

Thank goodness we don=t have to.  We don=t have to keep struggling for words to bring us closer to God for God has spoken the Word that brings God closer to us.  The way we most clearly know God is in the person of Jesus the Christ.  And the way we most clearly know Jesus is through the stories about Jesus which we have compiled in the Scripture.  When we look at the teachings and stories Jesus used to express his understanding of God and God=s presence we see that they are drawn from the creation.  Jesus looked at life, at creation, that is, at nature, at people, and he saw the presence and activity of God in everything and everywhere.

He used his senses.  He looked with wonder and awe at the world around himself.  He looked for the movement and desire for good in the world, in his life, and he saw it as the presence and work of the Spirit of God.  He brought a new attitude, a new way of seeing the world, and seeing God=s presence in the world.  When we catch Jesus= new attitude, we will be amazed at the places where we will begin to see the presence of God.

 

One time when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in a Soviet prison in Siberia, he was exhausted from the hard labor, weak from starvation, and suffering from an untreated illness.  He felt that he could not go on.  He stopped working, knowing that the guards would beat him severely and maybe even kill him.  Then another prisoner, a follower of Christ, took his shovel and in the sand at the feet of Solzhenitsyn drew the sign of the cross, and then quickly erased it.  Solzhenitsyn says that the hope and courage of the gospel flooded his soul, and it enabled him to hold on.  Was he saved by the sign of the cross?  Yes!  But he was also saved that day by that caring fellow, a Christian person who cared enough to remind him of hope.  Even in a place like the Gulag in Siberia, a place as despairing as Sheol, Solzhenitsyn found the presence of God.

 

Frederick Buechner relates a story from his time in the Army: AOne winter I sat in Army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating my supper out of a mess kit.  The infantry training battalion that I had been assigned to was on bivouac.  There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud.  The sun had gone down.  I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat.  It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me.  I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it anyway, mud and all.  And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again.  With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months.  Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.@  Even in the darkness of cold, drizzle, hunger and fatigue, the presence of God can be found.

 

This new attitude, this new way of looking at the world, is a big part of what Jesus was trying to teach.  He taught with stories, but also by modeling the attitude himself.  He showed us that we don=t need to be suspicious of every person around us; we don=t even need to be suspicious of the stranger or the enemy.  Jesus looked for good in every person, and he found it.  Jesus expected the best from every person, not the worst, and most of the time that is how people responded to him.  Jesus says we can approach the world, life, other people with this same attitude.

 

As we embrace this attitude and allow the Spirit of Christ to open our eyes and ears, our hearts and minds, we will begin to recognize the presence of God all around us.  Suddenly, everything will become sacred.  No longer will we approach life in a divided manner, where we encounter God only on Sunday morning when we go to church, and then have to tough it out alone the rest of the week.  We will begin to recognize the presence of God all around us.  In the Rule for his order, St. Benedict has a deeply sacramental understanding of the whole of life.  Everything in the world can speak to us of the presence of God.  In her study of the Rule of St. Benedict, spiritual writer Esther de Waal has discovered: ASeeking God does not demand the unusual, the spectacular, the heroic.  It asks of me as wife, mother, housewife, that I do the most ordinary, often dreary and humdrum things that face me each day, with a loving openness that will allow them to become my own immediate way to God.@  In other words, as we become very present to what we are doing at each and every moment, as we embrace Abeing in the moment@ as they say, we will discover the presence of God in each and every moment.  We do not have to rush through our activities to get tot he holy part of our day, for every activity, every part of our day, is holy. 

 

We begin to discover that we do not have to search so hard for God, for God is already there, present with us, caring for us and loving us and getting us through the day.  After all, God is everywhere; we had just not been aware of it before.

Finally, as we embrace this attitude of Jesus, it will have a profound affect on our view of other people and on the way we relate to them.  No longer are they competitors or enemies or even strangers.  Now they are living, breathing, flesh-n-blood presence of God near us.