Seeing God

This week we will listen to “I Saw God Today” by George Strait. It has a pertinent message for the first week of the Easter season: recognizing God in the midst of a chaotic world. Like the disciples on the Emmaus Road who didn’t recognize Jesus, God is often in our presence and we fail to see it. This week we will seek to have our eyes opened that we might see the Lord.

“Seeing God”
Brimfield Faith UMC
April 11, 2010

Genesis 28:10-17; Luke 24:13-35

INTRO – GONE COUNTRY
Growing up I would tell people I listened to pretty much all kinds of music, except country music It wasn’t until I met my wife and was forced to listen to country music that I began to realize that it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. The twang wasn’t as thick and the lyrics weren’t as hokey as I had thought. While it didn’t become an instant favorite, I came to realize that country music has its merits. As I was preparing for this series, it gained a few more points when I discovered that country is the type of music Jesus would have listened to if he was living today. Think about it, what else would a blue collar, carpenter living from country side listen besides Rascal Flats, Tim McGraw, and Johnny Cash.
Of course, we have no idea what type of music Jesus would listen to today. Since this is a bit of an unusual sermon series, I want to explain why we’re doing it. First and foremost is that many of you listen to country music. I think it is important to connect real life issues to spiritual ones. This is why I use movie illustrations, discuss current events, and address real life dilemmas. Faith is meant to be an integral part of everyday life not simply a Sunday morning endeavor.
Instead of treating everything in life as spiritual, we often create a division between the secular and sacred. Country music frequently bridges that divide and helps us realize that there is no separation between the secular and the sacred. It is one of the few musical genres that frequently sing about spiritual things in non-spiritual ways. There is a song on the radio called “People are crazy” that demonstrates this perfectly. The chorus is “God is great. Beer is good. People are crazy.” To see the spiritual component of everyday life can be challenging at times and my primary aim for Gone Country to make this pursuit easier.

BRIDGING THE GAP
I chose to start this series with the song, “I Saw God Today,” because it speaks to these very issues of seeing God in a chaotic world, and of discovering the spiritual in everyday life. George Straight expresses the sentiment of many Americans in the chorus of the song. “I’ve been to church. I’ve read the book. I know He’s here, but I don’t look near as often as I should.” The truth is we don’t look for God in everyday life. In fact, much of culture teaches us not to look for God. Instead we embrace a false dichotomy between the secular and the sacred.
We functional have placed God in a box and think that God only speaks in certain ways and through certain means. We subconsciously practice this line of thinking without even realizing it. Thinking that praying must be done with our hands folded and eyes closed instead of driving in the care or throughout the day at work is an example of this dichotomy. We think we must carve out time for spiritual pursuits instead of integrating them into everyday life.
In the Old Testament and in the Israelite mind, there were no separations between sacred and secular. Functionally, all of life contained a vital spiritual component. This is one of the reasons there are pages upon pages in the book of Leviticus that detail dietary laws. The average American does not consider eating a spiritual act in the least. To the average Torah-keeping Israelite eating was a deeply spiritual endeavor. The Israelites weren’t perfect in this practice though and they too regularly separated the spiritual from everyday life.

JACOB AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
The primary reason that the Israelites and Americans isolate their spirituality from the rest of their lives is because it is part of the human condition. We are fallen, broken, and lost people. We live in broken relationship with our Creator and outside of our created purpose. The human condition results in spiritual blindness. We not only separate faith from life but we fail to see God moving, acting and speaking in our lives. The Scriptures are full of stories where everyday people who keep their faith compartmentalized and miss God as a result. The story of Jacob’s ladder is a great example of this.
To appreciate the story fully you need a few background details about Jacob. Jacob was the younger of a set of twins born to Rebecca and Isaac. Jacob received his name from the way he exited the womb, grabbing his brother Esau’s heel. Jacob literal translates ‘heal grabber’ and generally means deceiver. As you read Jacob’s story, a good bulk of it is characterized by deceitfulness. He swindled Esau out of his birthright as first born. Then he stole the Father’s blessing from Esau. It was this act that set’s Esau off into a rampage vowing to kill Jacob as revenge. Jacob, then, flees for his life. The dream of Jacob’s ladder comes shortly after Jacob has fled for his life. When waking from the dream Jacob declares, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”
Jacob’s life had been characterized by deceiving and manipulating others. His efforts to pull the wool over other people’s eyes led to him becoming blind to the presence of the Lord in his own life. After the dream and the revelation of the Lord, Jacob’s life takes a turn towards being aware of God’s presence and serving the Lord. By the end of his life, Jacob becomes Israel and the Father of God’s chosen people.
While Jacob’s story is a prime example of the transformation that occurs when we learn to recognize God’s presence in the world, it doesn’t provide us with many tangible action steps. We can hope for a theophany, that is the Lord directly appearing to us, or we can rely on the wisdom and guidance found in other parts of Scripture. For the majority of you that aren’t banking on the dreams, I want to spend the rest of this morning devoted to looking at how we can see God in the world.

LESSONS FROM THE EMMAUS ROAD
To glean wisdom about seeing God in the world, I want to draw from one a story found in Luke 24. It is the story of two of Jesus’ disciples, who are walking home on the afternoon of Easter. They are dejected because they don’t fully comprehend the events of the past several days. They failed to recognize that Jesus needed to be crucified and resurrected to fulfill the Scriptures. As they are walking, a stranger joins them and along the way explains the Scriptures. Upon arrival at their home, they invite the stranger in for supper. At the table the strange man, breaks the bread and in the act the disciples realize that the stranger is Jesus. After a period of spiritual blindness, they, like Jacob, recognize they have been in the presence of the Lord. This story, I believe, touches on two keys to seeing God in the world.

#1. The first key to seeing God in the world is to know the Scriptures.
As the two disciples walked the road to Emmaus with the stranger, he explained the Scriptures to them. It wasn’t until after the Scriptures had been explained to them that they were able to see that God was in their midst. While nature can reveal certain things bout God, the Bible is the primary means through which God is revealed in the world. Without the Scriptures we are left guess as to what God is doing in the world.
In the song, “I Saw God Today,” Straight suggests he saw God in a variety of ways: “I saw a couple walking by they were holding hands…” A few lines later, “I stood there a minute takin’ in the sky, lost in that sunset…” Then he sings about, “My brand new baby girl, She’s a miracle…” In each of these cases, we take for granted that God is in them, but we cannot be sure in that without a knowledge of the Scriptures.
Take the first example of a couple holding hands. In some cultures holding hands in public, or any public display of affection, is considered obscene and offensive. Yet when we read Scripture, we learn about the importance of husbands and wives loving one another. In 1 John 4, we read: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” So when we see a couple in a loving relationship, we can recognize the presence of God at work in their lives.
The same can be applied as we watch a sunset. If we watch a sunset through the eyes of a secular scientist, we might think about how the atmosphere refracts the beams of light to create a colorful sky. When we look at the sunset through a spiritual lens, we see the beauty of the God who created the entire universe. Even the birth of a child can been seen through a secular lens. Yet with Scripture, we recall the words of the psalmist in Psalm 139, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”
Knowing the Scriptures enables us to recognize and reflect upon God’s presence in the world and in everyday events. Of course, simply having a through knowledge of the Scriptures will not ensure that you will see God. Memory verses don’t guarantee that you can see and appreciate the beauty of God. In the chorus of the song, Straight touches on this point: “I’ve been to church. I’ve read the book. I know He’s here, but I don’t look…”

#2. The second key to seeing God in the world is to tune your spirit to God’s Spirit.
If we are going to successfully recognize God’s presence in the world, we need to learn to sync are spirits to God’s Spirit. This is actually much easier than we might imagine because we have been created with build in God-radar. Inside of each of us, whether we realize it or not, is a little piece of God. We have been created with the image of God inside of us. When we come into the presence of God, the little piece of us alerts us to this reality.
We begin tune your spirits is by listen to your gut. I think the gut feeling we all get at certain times is God’s Spirit stirring inside of us. Often times, I believe it is trying to alert us that we are in the presence of God. The disciples on the road to Emmaus articulate this with the statement, “Were no our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening up the Scriptures to us?”
Our gut typically won’t tell us exactly how we are in God’s presence, but it alerts us like a metal detector alerts us to metal in the ground. We’ve all seen the old guy walking along the beach with the head set on waving the metal detector along the beach. Whenever the detector senses metal it makes a beeping noise. While the treasure hunter knows they are near metal, they must dig into the sand in order to discover what is below.
Many of us go through life ignoring the beeps from the metal detector. We become oblivious to our gut instinct, and subsequently, God’s activity in the world.
We continue to tune our spirits by slowing down. The song sings, “His fingerprints are everywhere, I’d just slow down to stop and stare, open my eyes and man I swear, I saw God today.” If you want to recognize God’s presence in the world, all of the clichés apply here. Slow down. Live in the moment. Stop and smell the roses. If we live life at breakneck speed, we will get whiplash every time to try to see God in the world. God moments can only be truly appreciated when we slow down our lives.
The practice of Sabbath can help significantly towards slowing life down and recognizing God’s presence in the world. Sabbath, originally, was the seventh day of the week and was intended to worship the Lord. God created us with a need to rest and be restored. To practice Sabbath of any sort you will need to fight for it. You will have to carve it out of your schedule. You might have to turn of cell phones, Blackberry’s and computers. When we practice a slowing down and a Sabbath we will be able to see God more clearly in the world.

CONCLUSION – ASK THE QUESTION
Hopefully, this morning has helped you to realize that recognizing God’s presence in the world isn’t as hard as it seems. It begins with acknowledging that everything in the world has a spiritual component to it. God is active in all facets of life. We simply need to learn how to see it. Most of this task can be accomplished by reflecting on one question each night before you go to bed: Where have I seen God?
When we stop to ask the question, we will be able to relate to the sentiment that “I Saw God Today” captures. I hope you will begin to ask the question. We will be asking the question corporately as we Go Country with Christ over the next several weeks. God’s presence can be seen in all aspects of life. There truly is no separation between the sacred and the secular. We will see that God’s Spirit can even be discovered in country music…
Let’s pray.