Where Are You?

“The Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”  Genesis 3:9

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
              June 10, 2012
              Emmanuel Church

              When I was a senior in high school, at the urging of my best friend, I decided that I would do something completely different from anything that I had ever done before in my life, and so I tried out for the Spring play that year, the old screwball comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace.  Perhaps you remember the classic movie version, directed by Frank Capra, and starring Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, and Raymond Massey, involving the young reporter Mortimer Brewster, his fiancé Elaine, and Mortimer’s two crazy aunts, who had a bad habit of killing lonely old men by lacing their drinks with arsenic and hiding their bodies in the house?  Drama had never been an interest of mine, but our public high school had an excellent drama director and my friend convinced me that if I didn’t try acting in my last year of high school, I might never again find the time or courage to do so.  And so I tried out, and somehow was able to land the leading role of Mortimer Brewster.

              For those of you who have acted before, you know the effort involved:  memorizing lines, learning the blocking for each scene so that you are always in the right place at the right time, mastering gestures, vocal dynamics and inflection.  There is a lot to remember.  And then perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is overcoming – or, at least, managing – the anxiety of performing in public.  For weeks before opening night, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare:  standing out there on stage before all my friends and family not remembering a single word of what I was supposed to say. 

              The performance went just fine, I’m happy to say, with only a few small gaffes.  But still, I remember the struggles with stage fright and that nightmare.

              This little dream from my childhood embodies a common anxiety: the fear of being vulnerable, exposed, judged.  And you know, as well as I, that there are many variations on this theme in the universe of human dreams.  For example, I know many experienced preachers who, even after years of preaching, are still haunted by nightmares during the week of not being able to cobble a sermon together by Sunday, and then being caught in the pulpit with nothing to say to their congregation.  And then just last week, my dear wife told me about one of her own recent nightmares:  showing up in an exam room to take a history final, only she had no idea what was going to be on the test and was utterly unprepared.  You know the dream.  I suspect you have had one like it.  Indeed, psychologists tell us that this is one of the very most common dream patterns:  showing up for a test of some kind without having studied, or without knowing what is to be covered on the test, or discovering that the test is written in some foreign language that you do not know, or always having your pencil tip break every time you try to answer a question, or running out of time before you can get anything written. 

              You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that dreams of such universal experience reveal something important about the human condition.  Indeed, long before Freud and Jung, the Bible taught us that that we should pay attention to our dreams – think of the dreams of Jacob, or Joseph, or Abraham, or the three wise men.  The ancients understood that the unbidden communication in the night opens sleepers to a world different from the one they manage during the day. The ancients dared to imagine, moreover, that this unbidden communication is one venue in which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might often seem, come to us.

              Our dreams of vulnerability and exposure – of failing to perform on stage or on a test – point us to a primordial reality of our creatureliness that is nowhere more famously captured than in the story of the Garden, a small excerpt of which we heard in our first lesson.  God creates a world of mysterious and unimaginable beauty, he places man and woman in it, invites us to delight in the world, to care for it, and to enjoy each other’s company.  But, there is one catch:  He tells us just as clearly not to overstep the bounds of our humanity, that we are not to try to become like Him, godlike.  He admonishes us to stay clear of the forbidden fruit.   And yet, being human, we can’t help but wonder what it might be like to be God, to have the knowledge and power and control over the world that God does.  And so we eat.  And the great consequence for humanity of seeking to be God, as our first lesson teaches, is that we are exposed, made vulnerable, literally made aware of our nakedness before God.  And out of fear for what we have done, we hide.

              This is the great narrative of the Fall.  And there is, of course, a rich and vast theological commentary on the story – starting with Paul and running through Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Barth and Bonhoeffer, among others – an explication of what we call the doctrine of sin, of human brokenness.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the subject, and a great deal of controversy has swirled about it.  Especially for those of us who come out of the Reformed tradition (and, yes, my name is Luther and I come with plenty of that baggage), I fear that a little too much attention has been devoted to the darker side of this story, focusing on the actions of Adam, Eve and the serpent:  to the act of disobedience, to the serpent as a demonic figure, to the shame and guilt that follows as a consequence of sin.  But what I want to suggest today is that perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the good news in the story, the good news that we hear when we focus not on what Adam and Eve do in the story, but on what God does.

              Listen to the story again.  What does God do immediately after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit?  He doesn’t abandon them out of disgust.  He doesn’t destroy them out of anger.  Instead, he seeks them.  He goes looking for them.  Indeed, he takes on a human form to chase after them.  In a scene of subtle beauty, verse 8 reads:  and then “[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. . . .”  Here, barely three chapters into Genesis, we get the first hint of the lengths to which God is prepared to go to draw us back into relationship with Him.  In this simple scene, we get a glimpse and we hear the barest whisper of the Incarnation to come:  God’s willingness to enter our world, to become like us, to take on a human identity, so that He might restore the relationship that we have broken.

              And, having chased after Adam and Eve, what does God then do?  He asks them a simple question.  Chapter 3, verse 9:  God asks, “Where are you?” 

              When I used to teach the Old Testament to middle schoolers, I often started the course by asking:  Does anybody know the first question God ever asks in the Bible?  It would usually stump them, especially these days when most teenagers have never even cracked a Bible.  And then I would make them search the opening chapters of Genesis to find it, all the while trying to persuade them that the very first question that God ever asked humanity is probably one worth knowing and thinking about.  And sooner or later, they would find the question.  And at first, they would think it is a somewhat comic question.  “Where are you?”  Why on earth would God – the all-knowing Creator of the universe – have to ask such a question.  Surely, he knows where Adam and Eve are.  And I would quickly agree with them.  Of course, God knows where Adam and Eve are.  So, why then, I would ask my students, do you suppose, God asks the question?

              At this point, one of the more astute students in the class, invariably a girl, would usually pipe up:  “because God wants them to answer the question for themselves.”  When my pedagogy was working, this line of questioning was one way to coax my students to move from a literal interpretation of the story to a theological one.  God asks the question not because he is looking for Adam and Eve’s geographical location in the Garden.  He knows exactly where they are.  He asks the question because God wants Adam and Eve to ask and answer the question, to reflect on what has just happened and what they have done.  The question God poses is:  So, where are you now in relationship to me?

              I suspect each of us came to church this morning at different places in our journey with God, perhaps very different places.  For some, God may seem quite present – close to our hearts in prayer, keenly felt in our relationships with those we love, manifest in the beauty and mystery that surrounds us.  For others, though, God may for whatever reason seem distant just now.  His presence may be obscured by the burden of worries or fears, or as the result of a broken relationship or a loss, or because of a debilitating condition of one sort or another.  Indeed, maybe some of us woke up this morning haunted by our own dreams of vulnerability or powerlessness, weighed down by the anxiety of being a fallible and limited human. 

              Yet, no matter where you are in your journey, the good news I hope you hear in our text from Genesis this morning is that God is seeking you.  He has not and will not abandon you, no matter what you have done or not done, no matter how hard you may be trying to hide, no matter how far you may stray.  If you listen closely enough, I promise you will hear His footsteps.

              So, as we leave this place this morning, I invite us to open our ears and our eyes in new ways to God’s presence in our midst.  Listen for Him in the music of the birds, in the crashing of the waves on our shore, in the laughter of our children, in the small talk of friends and family.  God is there, in all of it.  And He is relentless in chasing after us, in seeking our company, in drawing us closer to His heart.  And through it all, as He seeks us out in all of our various hiding places, He keeps asking each one of us that same, simple question:  Where are you?