No Tent

Text: John 4:5-42
Other texts: Exodus 17:1-7

It is common to refer to people new to the habit of going to church as “seekers.” Some churches have special worship for seekers, different from worship for others, which I guess they could call “finders.”

There are a couple of problems with this. First, it divides people into groups based on some notion of spiritual progress, as if such a thing existed. And second and more important, it implies that God can be found in particular places, through particular means, and through particular efforts on our part.

It is hard for us to get over the idea that as far as God and we are concerned, we are the agents. We see ourselves as world-crafters, coming up with visions and implementing them, creating something from nothing. Being made in the image of God, we imagine that we are the same as God. That is a bit of a stretch. It is only God who creates something from nothing.

It is fine to demand things of God, to argue with God, and to complain to God. There is a lot of all those things in the Bible, including the passage we just heard about the Israelites whining in the wilderness. But that does not mean that we are the bosses. We have neither the authority nor the responsibility.

Even when we acknowledge that we are not the same as God, we think that it is our actions that lead us closer to God. Our work—to say it in a Lutheran way. Including the work of seeking God. As if to find God, we have to go looking for God. And that if we do not seek—and especially that if we do not do it right—we will not find.

We are driven to these thoughts because we miss God. We are afraid of God’s absence. Or we grieve that God is far away.

The Israelites ask: Is the Lord with us or not? It is a common question in times of trouble. Where is God when people are dying of famine, or plague, or drought? Where is God when people are exiled, or enslaved, or suffer humiliating defeats? Where is God when violence takes innocent lives, where is God when someone near to us is suffering?

Sometimes we think that this is God’s problem. That God is unaccountably and unfairly absent. But we just as often think that God is missing because we did not act in the right way or look in the right places. We are all too willing to blame ourselves.

We think there is a special way to God. That God lives in the Temple, for example, and that people must go there to meet God. Or that God is in the churches, where we have come together especially to be close to God. Or that God is present in a more intense way in a spiritual retreat, or in prayer, or when we are contemplating scripture.

We think there is a special path on which we must walk. We wonder whether we are abandoned and not favored by God because we have not found that path. Or perhaps that we are on some path that looks pretty good, but wonder whether we are tragically mistaken. We are doing stuff that seems right, but who knows whether it really is?

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, she wonders whether God is more on mount Gerizim in Samaria or more in Jerusalem in Judea. Neither one, Jesus answers. Not meaning that God will not be in those places, but that there are no places which are the exclusive abode of God.

When Jesus answers the woman about on which mountain is God’s favorite house, and after telling her neither one, he then adds one more thing: that the Father seeks the worshippers.

The seeker is God, not us. It is God’s search that matters, not ours. God’s longing for us, God’s work.

The woman at the well does not come to Jesus, Jesus comes to her. She does not discover him, he discovers her. The story of Jesus in the Gospels mostly follows this pattern. Some people come to Jesus to be healed, but many others are healed because Jesus finds them, suffering. Jesus tells parables about sheep that are lost and searched for and coins that are lost and searched for, the searcher, we gather, being God. Jesus approaches the first disciples and calls to them: Come and see.

Before God was in the Temple in Jerusalem, God was with the people as they wandered through the desert. God, like them, was a nomad, and God’s presence lived in a tabernacle or tent. God’s word was near because it was among the people.

But as the people settled the land and built permanent structures, God, like the institutions that tended to the people, seemed to settle in (so to speak) and people began coming to God’s house in Jerusalem. In the Gospel of John, in the prolog in which it says in English “and the word dwelt among us,” the phrase John uses here—and only here in all the Gospels—means God lived among them in a tabernacle. Back to the tents among the wandering people.

But for the Israelites and for us, God is not in one place and absent from others. Neither Temple nor tent nor church. God is not revealed in one program, or one kind of piety. There is not one path to God that we must carefully tread. A colleague wrote that our job is not to find the path to God, but rather to walk the paths where God is most likely to come find us. But even that is less than graceful. It does not matter on what path you walk, God will come to find you anyway. There is nowhere that God is not. You have searched me and know me, it says in Psalm 139, you have searched out my path and are familiar with all my ways.

For Lutherans, the official definition of the church is a place in which the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. All the rest, while nice and helpful, is not necessary. And for Luther, the essence of the Gospel and the sacraments is a word of promise.

There are lots of implications of that promising word, but one is that no matter where we are or what we have done, or are doing, or contemplate doing, God will come find us. The church is a place that is special not because it is especially holy and filled with the spirit of God more than other places are. It is special place because in the church we say that promise over and over again.