The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
November 27, 2005 

The Presence of a Hidden God
Isaiah 64:1-9a  and Mark 13: 33-37 

Note: This sermon begins with a clip from the movie Elf in which a boy receives the exact skateboard he wants from Santa and then asks why Santa doesn’t appear to everyone on the news so that all can believe. The clip ends with Santa explaining that Christmas is about believing. 

Christmas is certainly a time for belief. And on this first day of Advent, we enter a time of preparing for our celebration of Christ’s coming at Christmas as we also prepare for his coming again in glory.  

But why does everything have to hinge on belief? Why is this a time of faith. Why can’t everyone just see God and know that God is real? 

In our reading this morning from Isaiah, the Prophet asks the same question—cries it out really, railing against God, 

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
      so that the mountains would quake at your presence—

as when fire kindles brushwood
               and the fire causes water to boil—

to make your name known to your adversaries,
      so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

What the prophet wants is for God to be so fully present that no one can doubt that the God of Israel is both real and the one true God. Of course, the prophet wants this so that the enemies of Israel will see that it is Israel who is in the right and their enemies should be scattered. Yet, as the prophet tells God, “You have hidden your face from us.” 

I began with the scene from Elf as it mirrors this problem in Isaiah. God is not present to all people in such a way that everyone believes. There is room for doubt. So if we do not all see the presence of God clearly, what is it that we see? 

The 17^th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his work Pensées,  

What can be seen on earth indicates neither the total absence, nor the manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a hidden God. Everything bears this stamp.[1]  

To more fully appreciate Blaise Pascal’s thinking on this topic, it helps to know a little about the man. For Pascal was seen as a genius in his own day. He was admitted to weekly meetings of French Geometricians at the age of 14, wrote an essay on conic sections at 16, and invented a calculator at 19. Five years later he invented the barometer. A philosophy professor of my in college said that he was the one to create the table of odds for poker, though I have never been able to confirm this, it certainly fits as he did work with another math genius of his day, Fermat, to create the calculus of probability. Pascal lived at the beginning of the Enlightenment and was no slouch when it cam to math and science at a time when both began to dispense with their need for God. Yet he wrote, “What can be seen on earth indicates neither the total absence, nor the manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a hidden God.”  

As to why this might be so, I’ll continue with Pascal. Earlier in Pensées, he had written, 

If he [God] had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day with such thunder and lightning and such convulsions of nature that the dead will rise up and the blindest will see him….

 

Thus wishing himself to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and no by those who do not.

 

There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.[2]  

As Jesus would say, it is for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. And sometimes, we hear other voices so strongly that we no longer tune in to the sound of God. We miss the presence of the hidden God, which is the very pulse of our world.

Pascal could write of the presence of a hidden God for God had been revealed to him in a powerful way. When Pascal died in 1662, a friend found a note sewed into the lining of his vest close to his heart. In the brief note, Pascal recounted a mystical experience of God that occurred eight years before his death on November 23, 1654. Pascal, philosopher and mathematician, encountered the living God he says from about half past ten at night until about half past midnight. He described it like this: 

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God. Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy….
This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.
Let me never be separated from him…. 

Pascal encountered the living God through prayer then words seemed to fail to describe the experience. I can imagine Pascal writing the saying I read earlier that all points to the presence of a hidden God with this description of his own mystical encounter with God sewn into his vest. Like the Prophet Isaiah, Pascal wondered why God was not revealed in such a way so that all would see and believe. But for Pascal, the reason was that God wanted to make it quite possible for those who seek after him to find him, while remaining hidden.

I think the reason that God is coy in this way is that when God is truly revealed to all so that no one may doubt, then our free will be out of the question. We would have no choice but to believe in God and to endeavor to do God’s will. Then no matter how loving God is, God would go from being the Divine lover of souls to the a dictator as even those who would wish to live contrary to God would have trouble doing so in the obvious presence of their creator. So God is neither fully absent nor so fully and powerfully present as to be undeniable. Instead, the universe reveals the presence of our hidden God. “Everything points to this.”

Advent is a time for preparing the way for the hidden God to be revealed. But remember that God’s revelation is usually a surprise. God was revealed that first Christmas in the most surprising way—born to a poor couple, his first bed a feed box.

God can reveal God’s own self to you as well, but it might not be what you first expect. So take Advent as a month of letting go of expectations. Ask God for revelation. Pray for God to show you a sign that the Jesus we preach is as real and present to you now, as he was present in a stable in Bethlehem.

Open yourself up to God this Advent through reading the Bible and through prayer. Ask for a deeper revelation.

No matter what you have experienced of God so far, there is more. Ask for more. Then begin to look for the presence of a hidden God. And be ready for a surprise.

It is that sort of expectation that Advent is all about.

Amen.