Finding God Among Us

sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37

In Indiana you can get a driving permit at the ripe old age of sixteen. If you do well enough in Driver’s Ed, you don’t even have to take a driving test. You just go down to the DMV with a parent, show them your grade card, get your picture taken, and you’re all set to wreak havoc on the traffic patterns of unsuspecting citizens.

Well, I was one of those lucky students. No nerve wracking trip down the road with a stranger and her clip-board in the passenger’s seat for me. No steering through orange cones. AND, no parallel parking test in the middle of rush hour traffic on Main Street. It was a little anti-climactic, but there’s no doubt that I felt a sense of freedom and pride when I got that first little piece of laminated plastic. I was finally an adult … despite the red flag behind that goofy smile on my face.

Later that year, with hours and hours of local driving and one family trip out west under my belt, my mom and brother and I set out one morning for Cincinatti. It was a 5-6 hour trip south from our house N. Manchester, and we needed to be there by noon to board the river boat for my aunt’s birthday party.

My mother is naturally a morning person. So she started out the drive at 5:00 with my brother and me asleep in the back of the van, but after a couple of hours, she needed a break and a nap herself. So, I was called upon to take up the driving. The sun was up by then, and I settled in for an hour or two on the interstate with soothing music on, the heater running, and the cruise set at 63 miles per hour (on my mother’s insistence, of course – I would never drive over the speed limit myself.)

You might guess what happened next. After about twenty minutes, I nodded off for a few seconds which was more than enough to send us off the road, down the embankment, and into a guard rail. All three of us walked away from the accident without so much as a bruise; though the van lost all four tires, a good portion of the back right fender, and the entire back hatch. Needless to say, we did not make it to the birthday party, but we did have plenty of time to calm our nerves while we waited for my father to come and pick us up.


I learned a few things that morning. The first was that if you don’t hit the brakes, the cruise will keep a car going … very fast … whether you are on the road or not. The second was that my mother’s thoughts about guardian angels may not be quite as silly as I once thought. And the third was exactly how far I can push myself when I am at the wheel.

Only once since that morning have I nodded off while driving (one time to many), and I was fortunate enough to have an alert passenger along with me to wake me before the car was out of control. But, there have been many times when I have “zoned out” on the road – when I have been driving without any real awareness of what I was doing. I come to my senses at a stop light or a turn in my route, and I realize that I can’t remember the last several miles of driving. I don’t know how I made it where I am. I don’t know what I missed seeing or hearing along the way. I only know that I must have covered the miles in my own lane, driving … safely? Strictly speaking, I stayed awake, but I certainly wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been.

Of course, that’s not the best way to get from one place to another … behind the wheel of a speeding car on autopilot, but I suspect that many of you have had the same experience. And, I think that most of us have passed through days or months or years of our lives in the same way. We go through the motions that keep everything running smoothly – more or less, and we arrive at some major event (a birthday or an anniversary or a crisis in our family) and we wonder where the time went. How can it be that Meredith is driving now? When, exactly, did Brent start looking down on me? Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were celebrating Easter? Where did the time go?


It’s part of human nature … letting time sort of slip past while we wait for the big, memorable moments to come. At least I hope it’s not just me. I think it’s not just me, and I’m pretty sure that it’s nothing really new because I think that’s what both of our scriptures are talking about.

“Beware, keep alert,” Jesus warns us. “Keep awake, … for neither the angels in heaven, nor the [Son of Man,] but only the father knows the day or the hour.” In other words, don’t fall asleep at the wheel. Don’t even let yourself zone out. Pay attention because you never know when God is going to show up, and it could go badly for you if you are not prepared.

As Carrie pointed out last week, that’s not exactly comforting. It put us on edge because it makes us think of a vengeful, judging God – a God who would throw the unenlightened or the unfaithful into an eternal fire. That’s not the God we like to think about.

It’s all well and good for Jesus to speak of doom because he is the one person who will never have to worry about whether or not he is a worthy. The rest of us are not so lucky, and it seems more than a little unrealistic to expect that we could stay alert all the time, be prepared all the time, produce fruit all the time. It’s a superhuman task, and I have trouble even understanding what it would look like to live that way.

But, I can connect with the sentiments expressed in the poetry of Isaiah. It’s a bit more human. Sure, it says … sure we have strayed from the path. We have not lived as well as we should have. We haven’t kept all the laws or done all that we could have to be perfect followers, but that’s not entirely our fault. But what do you expect? You used to come down and make the mountains shake. You used to tear open the heavens and speak to us in burning bushes. And we knew that you were here with us. And we knew what you wanted us to do. And we knew that you cared about us because you blessed us with your presence. Then you went away … or at least it feels like you went away because we stopped seeing the big things and hearing the VOICE speaking to us. And we had to start trying to figure things out ourselves. Don’t be angry, we’re doing our best … or at least we are trying.


Two very different voices there in the scriptures. Two very different points of view, but they are both clear about one thing. God’s presence in the world changes things. When God’s face shines on us, we notice, and we feel that strange mix of fear and love that we call awe. We are moved to live more righteous lives – to follow the rules and listen for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If you’ve ever felt that sense of awe move you, you know how powerful it can be to sense God’s presence around you, and I can only imagine how much more intense the feeling would have been when God walked among us as Jesus.


And here we are … at the beginning of Advent. We’re coming awake again to celebrate the incarnation – to celebrate the fact that God did come and walk among us. And it’s a wonderful and joyous time. But, the truth is that God is always walking among us. God has been among us – walking, working, moving, and shaping our lives and our world all this time. God has not hidden her face from us, we just haven’t been paying attention. We’ve been on autopilot … again, and who knows what beautiful moments we’ve missed along the way.


Just before our wedding, the pastor who married us gave us one last piece of advice. “Do your best to pay attention during the ceremony because if you don’t, you won’t remember anything.” We have gotten much the same advice from many people as we have raised our family. “Cherish this time. Pay attention so that you can enjoy all the wonderful moments because they pass you by so quickly.”

It’s good advice. I tried my best, but I don’t remember very much of what actually happened on my wedding day. I try my best to each stage of my children’s development and to cherish each moment, but I am still caught off guard when Sebastian tries to remind me of something that happened a year ago and I can’t remember it. Just the other day, he came home from school and asked if he could do his homework, and I found myself wondering where the little boy I knew had gone. I just don’t know how to pay attention well enough to notice everything.


So how do we pay attention? That seems to be the big question behind all of this. How do we stay alert and present to our family or to the needs of our neighbors or to the presence and activity of God among us?

Honestly … I don’t know. I am sure the answer is different for each of us, and I have yet to find my own way.

I don’t think that many people have ever found a way. There is nothing definite in the gospels or in any of the other scriptures that I know. Jesus and Paul, the prophets and the Psalm writers, they all call believers to stay alert. They all talk about what can happen when people get a little sleepy. But despite all their insistence on paying attention, they offer no specific guidance on how to do that.


There are lots of other suggestions out there in books written by people who have been struggling toward this goal just as we have. They talk about praying, serving, discerning God’s will, practicing compassion and active love and other practices that have talked about, and all of those things can help … do help. They point us in the right direction at least. But one of the most helpful things … for me … has been J. Phillip Newell’s reminder that “looking to God is not looking away from life but looking more deeply into it. They reveal to us that God is at the heart of creation – is the heartbeat of life…, enfolding the earth and all its people with love.”

Even though that’s not specific (or maybe because it’s not specific), that gives me hope. It tells me that whatever else I do – whatever practices I try, whatever different paths I walk for a time - if I look hard enough, I will find God … not far away, but right here among us.


There may not be one right way for all of us to stay alert or even for any one of us to pay attention. Perhaps we are only meant to try… to turn off the soothing music, turn down the heat, and turn off the cruise and give it our best effort so that we miss as little as possible. That’s my goal, at least, because “Once upon a time, a great big God was born as a little small child, and the world changed. The God is still changing everything – me and you and the world around us – in beautiful ways.

I don’t think we want to miss that. I’m not sure that we can afford to give up those chances to find ourselves awakened to awe at the presence of God: … the God who comes in spectacular ways - rending the heavens, shaking the mountains, lying in a manger, and rising from a tomb … and the God who walks with us every day, touching the world with vulnerability and love.

It comes easily in this season of anticipation – paying attention. We have a feeling of expectation. And the closer we get to Christmas … and the stronger that feeling gets, the more we notice the presence of God … the more aware we are to touch of the divine around us.

Maybe … if we pay attention this time around, we’ll learn how to stay awake – really awake.

Maybe we can carry that feeling … that awareness with us down the long stretches of our lives too.

And then when we look around, we’ll find God … right there among us.