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The Light of New Hope
Even though we have a very open back yard, one of our boys’ favorite outdoor games to play is hide and seek. We have two trees, one clothesline pole and one Little Tykes toy ride-along car as hiding places, but Jackson and Wes will still go out there every afternoon when it’s nice and hide in the same places. They know they will eventually be found, but the thrill that comes from being discovered is half of the fun.
Robert Fulguhm, the author of All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten shared the story of a group of neighborhood children playing hide-and-seek out outside his home office window.
He was trying to work as he listened to the kids running and yelling, screaming as they tried to escape the one who was “it”. All of the kids had been found except for one boy, who was hiding in a pile of leaves under Fulghum’s window. He says he thought about going over to the base and telling the other kids where the boy was hiding. Then he thought about setting fire to the leaf pile to smoke the boy out. Finally, the chaos was getting so loud that he leaned out of his window and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Get found, kid!”
Even as we age, we still play Hide and Seek, but we start to make our hiding places a little more sophisticated. When we get together with our friends, we may stop hiding behind trees but we may start hiding our true selves behind what is socially acceptable . We may no longer hunker down under a pile of leaves to escape from our loved ones but we may start covering up our anxieties, fears and pain with defensiveness, anger and denial. We become so adept at hiding out from our true selves that eventually we forget we are hiding, and we become lost – lost to our passion for living; lost to the focus of our lives; lost to our purpose in the world; lost to our true identity as men and women, boys and girls created, loved and redeemed by God, the maker of all things. Even as young people and adults, we need someone to come along and yell at us, “Get found, kid!”
The men and women, boys and girls that Isaiah was speaking to in our lesson today knew what it was like to be lost. They had been hiding away from their true identity as God’s chosen and beloved people for so long, that they felt lost, abandoned by their Creator. When the prophet from today’s lesson from Isaiah came to them, he brought a message that God had found them in their lostness.
Prophets are people who speak God’s truth to God’s people. When that truth is a word of judgment against us in good times, it is hard to believe – in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, book of 1 Samuel, the Israelites did not want to hear from the prophet Samuel that having a king to rule over them would bring trouble to their community; they wanted to be like all the other nations around them and have a king. Later on, their second king, David, did not want to hear from the prophet Nathaniel that he had despised the word of the Lord by stealing Urriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and having Urriah killed and would suffer the death of his son for his actions. When things are going good for us, we don’t like to hear God’s truth spoken when it conflicts with what makes us happy.
But when the prophet speaks the truth of God’s unfailing and undying love in the bad times, it can be just as hard to believe. In Isaiah 43, the prophet is speaking to the Israelite people as they were living in Babylon in exile. They had been conquered by the Assyrians and forcibly removed from their homeland. They were living as refuges, torn away from all they knew. For decades, they had been estranged from what was familiar, what was true – they felt like they were lost to God.
And here, in the words of the prophet, God comes, telling them to get found! Now, God says, right now, in the midst of your hiding, when all feels lost, I say do not be afraid, because I am here to save you. You are not lost to me. I know your name. You are mine.
They were still in waters of bondage, the rivers of oppression. They were struggling through the fire of life. And here is God, finding them in the midst of their exile, in the midst of all that is wrong in their world and setting it right again. God tells them you are precious to me. I find honor in you. I love you. No matter where you go, I will gather you in because I created you, I formed you, I saved you. You are mine.
God has made us, God has formed us, God has saved us from ourselves. God calls us by name – we belong to God. Our most basic identity is as a child, a son or a daughter of the most high, of the Lord our God, of the Holy one of Israel, of our Savior. We are never lost to God, because we belong to God. We cannot hide from his love. God is always calling out to us, “Come, be found by me!”
Today, we celebrate and remember when Jesus was baptized, and we celebrate the baptism of one of our own babies, Owen Massey Jones. As we heard earlier, when Jesus went down to the Jordan River with all the people to be baptized, the Holy Spirit found him in a powerful way. He was named by God – Beloved – and given an identity for all to know.
This is what celebrate in baptism – that we are found and named by God’s love, claimed, named, saved as a child of the Most High. We don’t have to do anything to be named Beloved and precious by God. That is why we celebrate the baptism of infants in our tradition. We don’t earn God’s love by what we do – we are given the gift of that love by virtue of our birth and by the gift of Jesus’ death on the cross, where he carried our sins and cleared the way for us to be united with God. God’s grace is present with us before we even know it, like when we are an infant. When, by that grace, we realize that God in Christ has come to find us and release us from the dark and hidden places of our lives, we begin to live into our identity as God’s beloved, as God’s precious ones, as ones who are created by and saved by the God of the universe.
Today, do you need to be found? Are you hiding from something? From a part of yourself that you feel isn’t lovable to your friends, to your family, to God? Are you lost to the possibility of a new way of life, of a new hope? Then come to the water that Jesus went through for you. For in the midst of the raging waters of life, God is carrying you through. In the calmness of the waters in this place, God is ready to wash you clean and give you new life. Get found, kid. You are beloved. You are precious. You are God’s child. Amen.