THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

Inescapable God

January 16, 2000
John M. Buchanan

Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a
college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to
serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve, you don’t have to
know Einstein’s theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a
heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. —

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr.

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

INESCAPABLE GOD

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
January 16,2000

Psalm 139: 1-12
1 Samuel 3: 1-10
John 1: 43-51

“If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there
your hand shall... hold me fast.” (Psalm 139: 9,10)

Presbyterian theologian and elder statesman, Robert McAfee Brown wrote a personal
statement of faith one time in which he said that “there are little moments when vast
things happen.”

At a critical time in my life I happened upon two pieces of writing that made all the
difference in the world. It was a dry time spiritually. I had made a very tentative
vocational commitment by enrolling in Divinity School, but now it was time either to
move ahead with some degree of intentionality and certainty or find something else to do.
I longed for a sign, a voice, a personal assurance that this was God’s will, or at least a
pretty good idea. I got nothing. I looked for answers in text books, E read and studied and
wrote, trying as hard as I knew how, to establish some sense that I was on the right track:
that there was a God who cared about matters as mundane as how to earn a living and
support a family for several decades. What praying I did was pretty much in the form of
an inquiry: “Anybody there? Anybody listening? Anybody care?”

And, for some reason, my mother chose that moment to send me a poem that was, she
wrote, one of her favorites. She thought I might like it. I don’t know if it’s very good
poetry. But it has an arresting title and it not only captured my imagination, but changed
the way I think.

Francis Thompson’s, “The Hound of Heaven:”

“T fled Him, down the nights and down
the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
Thid from Him, and under running laughter,
Up vistaed hopes I sped
and shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasamed fears
From those strong feet that followed,
followed after.”

There is, in that poem, a notion of God and of our relationship with God that was quite
unlike anything I had ever heard before. My assumption was that God existed somewhere
“up” or “out” there, if not in a literal heaven with golden gates and streets of pearl, then in
some far recess of the universe, or perhaps in a mysterious dimension of existence
inaccessible to our human perceptions. Furthermore, my theological assumptions, such as
they were, included God interceding dramatically in history and in the lives of other
people. But in moments of candor, I was deeply suspicious because, frankly, nothing like
that had ever happened to me. No voices in the dark calling my name, no bolt from the
blue knocking me down with a sure sense of God.

Overall, my assumption was that God was a mystery, a good mystery, and our human
task, maybe even the highest human task, was to seek God, pursue God, to try to find God.

And then I encountered this poem with its astonishing assertion that sometimes human
beings flee from God and that God actually pursues and follows human beings—“down
the nights and down the days, down the arches of the years.” That is a very different God
from the much safer and predictable deity who sits in isolated splendor waiting for us to
seek and pursue and find. This is a God who takes the initiative in the divine-human
encounter and actually comes after us.

It wasn’t long after I received that poem that I encountered the second writing, the 139"
Psalm. I’m not sure how I had missed it before—sitting through all those weekly
responsive readings in church, but there it was again, a suggestion that God seeks and
finds us, and that there is nowhere we can go, either accidentally or purposely running
from God, trying to avoid God, that will take us out of the range of God’s presence and
mercy and care.

“Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your
presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; .. .”

I discovered Psalm 139 in an introductory survey course in Old Testament. For the most
part, religion in ancient Israel was a corporate activity. God created a nation, formed a
people. Individuality in the Old Testament is a matter of belonging to the community:
that’s what the Law of Moses is about—how to live as God’s community. It’s all corporate,
except, the professor told us, for the Psalter—which is the place in ancient Israel where
the individual emerges and shines. Many of the Psalms are personal—“The Lord is my
shepherd .. . 1 lift my eyes to the hills, from whence does my help come.” Psalm 139 is
intensely personal, an intimate confession of a person whose life-long relationship with
God was a result of God’s persistence, God’s search and pursuit, and ultimate finding of
the individual.

Again, that is a very different idea of God, one that puts religion in a whole different light.
Instead of the human pursuit of God, religion becomes the activity, the place and way
human beings respond to God’s initiative.

That is a theme that appears throughout the Bible. In one of our oldest stories, God comes
to a young boy, Samuel, and it is in a voice in the dark. Only Samuel doesn’t recognize
the voice. He thinks it is the voice of the old priest Eli, with whom he is living and
apprenticing. ‘Samuel,’ the voice says, and Samuel gets up from his bed and goes to Eli.
Three times it happens: the voice says his name, Samuel thinks it is Eli calling. The third
time Eli, who now suspects that the voice is actually God, tells Samuel to answer. The
initiative is all God’s and God’s wonderful persistence. It takes four tries to get Samuel's
attention, and the sense of the story is that God will stay at it as long as it takes. Old Eli’s
role, the priest’s role, interestingly, is not to be the voice of God, but simply to suggest that
Samuel might try listening to the voice calling his name, an interesting paradigm for
professional ministry—instead of preaching, helping people hear the voice of God calling
their names in the middle of their lives.

Does any of that sound familiar to you? We Presbyterians are not very good at talking
about our personal religious experiences. We’re far better at discussing ideas about God
than describing personal experiences of God. And, as far as conversion, a topic Martin
Marty recently described as “one of the most private acts in life... which occurs in the
deepest recesses of the heart... ,” we aren’t at all comfortable talking about it.

And the reason is that for many of us, at least, we cannot pinpoint a time or date, there
was no singular moment, but rather a life-time of moments, a long and slow process, both
hot and cold, including times of certainty and times of doubt. Psalm 139 suggests that our
conversion is, in fact, a process, and that God has been pursuing us across the years.

When Bob and Dalia Baker joined a team of missionaries from many different
denominations in Tirana, Albania, Bob was asked when he accepted Jesus Christ as his
personal Lord and Savior. Bob’s answer was pure Presbyterianism. He couldn't
remember a day in his life when Jesus was not his Lord, Bob said.

People who think and reflect about their religious experience are helpful. Writer Anne
Lamott describes it in terms of a slow, gradual return to church and faith out of a life that
was falling apart at the seams, standing outside a little Presbyterian church, looking in,
listening to the singing, one day stepping through the door and acknowledging that God
had been pushing, nudging, prodding. Finally she said simply, “ ‘I quit.”” Actually she
punctuated it with an earthy phrase that is not “pulpit friendly.” “I took a long breath
and said out loud, ‘All right, you can come in now.” (Traveling Mercies, Some Thoughts
on Faith, p.50)

Kathleen Norris, raised in the faith, but self-exiled from it for years of seeking, searching,
dabbling here and there and finally, returned to her family’s farm and went to church in
Lemmon, South Dakota, writes: “I came to understand that Ged hadn’t lost me, even if I
seemed for years to have misplaced God.” (Amazing Grace, p.104) Kathleen says that
suspicion of religion ran so deep in her that she feared conversion, thinking it might
silence her as a writer. She credits several unconscious mentors who nudged her gently,
without even knowing they were doing it. But her observation that God had not forgotten
her even though for years she seemed to have misplaced God, sounded familiar. Or, as
someone said, “If you don’t feel as close to Ged as you used to, who do you supposed
moved?”

Perhaps it’s because it sounds so familiar, but Frederick Buechner’s story is my favorite.
it’s in a book he wrote years ago entitled, The Sacred Journey. Life, according to

Buechner, any life, his or yours or mine, is a sacred journey into which God speaks and
comes. That’s what makes it sacred.

Buechner’s was not a church family. What religion he had came in bits and pieces from
occasional visits with grandparents. After college, he taught English for a while, joined
the army, and ended up in New York trying to be a writer and discovering that he could
not write a word. He tried a number of options, including a love affair that failed.

He wrote, “Every door I tried to open slammed on my foot. It all sounds like a kind of
farce when I try to set it down . . .Part of the farce was that for the first time in my life that
year in New York, I started to go to church regularly, and what was farcical about it was
not that I went, but my reason for going, which was simply that on the block where I lived
there happened to be a

church .. . and I had nothing all that much better to do with my lonely Sunday...”

I can’t improve on the way Buechner tells it.

The church wasMadison Avenue Presbyterian Church. The minister was a man named
George Buttrick. Sunday after Sunday Buechner went. “It was not just his eloquence that
kept me coming back.” He writes:

“What drew me more was whatever it was that his sermons came from and
whatever it was in me that they touched so deeply. And then there came one
particular sermon with one particular phrase in it that does not even appear in a
transcript of his words that somebody sent me more than twenty-five years later so
I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and liked it—
and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies
of all of us. Jesus Christ is King, Buttrick said, because again and again he is
crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward
coronation takes place, Buttrick said, among confession, and tears, and great
laughter.

It was the phrase ‘great laughter,’ that did it, did whatever it was that I believe
must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then. It
was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been
open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.” (p.108/109}

“Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?

And so, just on the outside chance that you may be fleeing from God, living your life in
what seems to be a normal, ordinary way, but is actually a way of holding God at arm’s
length, this idea of God’s persistent pursuit should be at least tantalizing.

And if your life is so full; full of job and family and complicated relationships,
professional demands and tight schedules, your bosses’ expectations which regularly
exceed the number of hours in the day, and long days with no time for leisurely lunches or
even pleasant human conversation, not to mention praying, you just might find intriguing
the ancient suggestion contained in these words:

“You know when I sit down and when I rise up,
You discern my thoughts from afar.”

And the next time you have to hurry to catch a plane after a busy day and a stressful trip
to the airport, fighting crowds, escalators, ticket counter, falling into your seat and, after
the irritatingly inevitable wait out there at the far reaches of O’Hare finally take off, and
reaching cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, you might find interesting and comforting and
maybe even provocative, these ancient words:

“If I ascend to heaven, you are
there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the
sea,
even there your hand shall hold
me fast.”

And tonight, or tomorrow night, when you fall exhausted into bed, you might be intrigued
by:

“You search out my path
and my lying down.”

And if your life can only be described as hellish: if nothing is working, if it all seems
tragically empty and lonely, if relationships are sour and work is boring—and there is no
light on the horizon—no promise, no hope—hear these words:

“If I make my bed in Sheol,” which is another word for hell, “You are there.”

And if you find yourself thinking a lot about your own finiteness, if the recent death of a
loved one, a close call, a dreaded lab report, the worst diagnosis you could imagine, if you
find yourself thinking about what someone called “the insult of our mortality,” hear these
words which I think should be the very last words any of us is privileged to hear:

“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness
shall cover me

and the light around me become
night,

even the darkness is not dark
to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.’”

“He fumbles at your spirit,” Emily Dickinson wrote.
And Frederick Buechner, again:

“What I found was what I had already half seen, or less than half, in many places
over my twenty-seven years without ever clearly knowing what it was I was seeing
or even that I was seeing anything of great importance. Something in me recoils
from using such language, but here at the end I am left with no other way of saying
it than what I finally found was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter
which.” (p. 1107 scones

meres

I love that tiny vignette in the first chapter of John—John’s different version of the call of
the disciples, Philip and Nathaniel. Nathaniel is, apparently tending to his own affairs,
living his life, going to work, paying his bills, taking care of business—and Jesus sees him
and approaches him, and Nathaniel says—“How do you know me?” and Jesus says
simply, “I saw you under the fig tree.”

That, I submit, is how it happens and how it is. Into our lives Christ comes. Into our lives
God speak our names, doing what we do, sitting where we sit .. . and waits, doesn’t force
the issue; speaks our name and waits as long as it takes . . . for our response, our faith, our
trust, our love, our ‘yes.’

“If I take the wings of the
morning,
and settle at the farthest limit of
the sea,
even then your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me
fast.”

Amen.