Where is God

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Through centuries God’s voice cried in the wilderness.  How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in the temples.  How often it was drowned or distorted?  Now we behold how it gradually withdraws, abandoning one people after another, departing from their souls, despising their wisdom.  The taste for the good has all but gone from the earth.  We heap spite upon cruelty, malice upon atrocity… There has never been more reason for human creatures to be ashamed than now. Silence hovers mercilessly over many dreadful lands.  The day of the Lord is a day without the Lord.  Where is God?

          Abraham Joshua Heschel, “I Asked for Wonder”

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Has God gone silent?

Has Jesus left the building?

 

Has the Sacred decided to depart

Is the day of the Lord without the Lord?

Where is God?

 

Is God gone, or have we simply silenced the voice of love

Have we drowned and distorted God’s Word

Have tried to contain the fire of the Spirit

The wild breath of God

In our sanctuaries and our creeds

 

We have attempted to trap the wind

We have slammed shut the windows of our sanctuaries

Hoping to contain that which cannot be contained

 

But a wind that cannot move cannot move us

 

We have attempted to enshrine the Sacred

We have invoked the name of God's most high

In the high places we have created

 

Claiming God in the halls of justice

In the stifling halls of power

 

But God is not there

The wind of God is blowing

In the wilderness

In poverty stricken cities,

 

God is tenting with the homeless

 

God is digging through the rubble of Gaza

 

The voice of God cries out in the wildernesses

Created by our greed, our hate, our lust for power

 

As we in the name of God

“heap spite upon cruelty, malice upon atrocity”

God shows up

 

Among those we would throw away

Exclude

Shame

Diminish

 

Where is God?

In the rubble of Rafah

Under a freeway overpass in America

In the waters of the Rio Grande

In a bombed-out building in Ukraine

 

God is

God is present

God is love and power mixed

 

God still speaks, still acts, still loves, still transforms

In the wild places

In the broken open places

Of great need

And great humility

 

If we go to church, it may well be

that we do NOT hear the voice of God

but if we go to a person in need

if we stand with an LGBTQI+ person

if we stand with the oppressed and suppressed

 

we might well hear God’s song of love

echoing in the wilderness