*Adapted from a sermon preached on November 30, 2008 at Peace Mennonite Church

I don’t know if you have ever watched young children play hide and seek, but it’s rather interesting to note how children of different ages play the game. One Thanksgiving gathering many years ago, I noted that my 12-year-old son had it down. He knew how to look—even how to pretend he didn’t know where the younger kids were for just awhile. And he knew how to hide—someplace where he could be found, but not too easily.

My six-year-old daughter was starting to get it. She would run around looking and if the grown-ups suggested places to look, she would go there. After she found her brother, she decided he had a good hiding place, so she just used that hiding place when it was her turn to hide.

But my two-year-old nephew completely did not get it. When he was seeking, he just followed around whoever else was seeking. When he was hiding, he promptly stood up, waved his hands, and yelled “Here I am.”

It strikes me that Isaiah is writing, in a way, about hide and seek. A kind of hide and seek that is much more serious than a game. A kind of hide and seek that is not a children’s pastime, but an adult undertaking as important as life and death.

Isaiah writes about the hide and seek that goes on between God and God’s people. And Isaiah is not the only one to write about this. The history of the ancient Israelites is woven through with this game of hide and seek between the people and God.

Sometimes the people are hiding from God: Adam and Eve hide in the Garden of Eden; Moses hides his face when God speaks from the burning bush; Jonah tries to run away and hide when God tells him to go to Nineveh. And God, it seems, is a very good seeker.

If you played hide and seek much as a child, you probably realized that the better you knew someone, the easier they were to find. Tom was afraid of the dark, so no need to check in the closets. Anna loved trees, so she was probably behind one or in one.

Reading through the biblical story, I think God’s success as a seeker comes from how well God knows the people. God knows that Adam and Eve, in their shame, will be hiding among the trees. God knows Moses and calls him by name. God knows that Jonah is apt to go in the opposite direction from Nineveh.

It’s not really much fun to play hide and seek with those who know you too well. Still, God as seeker is, at least theologically, a much more comfortable idea than God as the One who hides.
But in Isaiah’s version of the game, God is definitely the One who hides. Twice in this passage, Isaiah accuses God of hiding from the people. And the consequences of God’s hiding, according to the prophet, are severe. Isaiah goes so far as to blame the people’s sin on God’s hiddenness: “You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself, we transgressed.”

And Isaiah describes the consequences of this sin in stark terms: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” The prophet is referring specifically to the cloths women used during their menstrual cycles. A particularly disturbing image in a culture where menstruating women were considered ritually unclean.

Hide and seek with God is not child’s play. There is a sense of danger about this hidden God. The Israelites are experiencing a terrible feeling–the feeling that God is there, somewhere, but they cannot find God. God’s goodness, love, and protection are residing somewhere beyond their view.

God’s hiddenness here is in stark contrast to the stories the people know about God’s obvious presence with their people. God opened up the Red Sea. God led the people visibly with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God sent manna from heaven and made water gush out of a rock.

If the Exodus was the ultimate experience of God’s visibility, then the exile should have been the ultimate experience of God’s hiddenness. The nation of Israel had been conquered. All of the moderately wealthy and powerful people in the community—those who had not been slaughtered—were taken on a forced march. We read their psalm last week: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:1-4)

That Babylonian captivity was supposed to be the depth of Israel’s torment; the starkest time of the hiding of God’s face. And yet here they are, returned to Israel, and God still seems to be hiding. The Israelites did not experience the triumphant return they had expected. The temple is in ruins. The people are powerless and impoverished. Even though they are finally back home, looking in all the old places, still God is nowhere to be found.

We should note, as well, that the book of Isaiah is not the only place in the Hebrew scriptures that we read about God as the hidden One. God tells Moses that he will hide his face from the Israelites when they turn to other gods. Job complains that God has hidden from him. Many of the psalmists and the prophets lament the fact that God is in hiding. According to biblical scholar Barbara Brown Taylor, the Hebrew Bible mentions the hiding of God’s face over 30 times.

Notice that when people hide, God quickly finds them, but when God hides, the people do not seem to be very good seekers. So here is what I wonder: Is this game of hide and seek so unbalanced because God is such a good hider—or because we are such poor seekers?

If you happened to be in the D.C. Metro on my birthday (January 12) in 2007, you might have heard a young man playing the violin with his case open to collect money from passersby. If you had stopped long enough to listen, you might have put in a bit of change. He earned about thirty-two dollars that day. The money came from the twenty-seven people who stopped long enough to listen. Twenty-seven out of over a thousand who rushed by. If you had been one that stopped long enough to listen, you might have commented to the person standing next to you about the beautiful instrument the young man was playing. But you probably wouldn’t have known that the violin was, in fact, a Stradivarius worth over three million dollars.

And if you had been in Boston three days earlier, you might have spent $100 for a ticket to hear this same violinist—Joshua Bell. Plenty of people did, because the symphony hall was sold out. I wouldn’t have been at the concert–$100 is a bit steep for me. I’m not sure I would have stopped in the metro either. If I had been on a scavenger hunt to find the best violinist in D.C., I probably would have passed right by Jonathan Bell and his Stradivarius on my way to the Kennedy Center.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” We want our God to bring the seas crashing down, to be the pillar of fire, to rain down food, water, blessings in abundance. Just as we recognize a great musician by the stage, the formal attire, the hushed audience; we recognize God by the rending of the heavens, the booming voice, the prostrate worshipers.

Is God really good at hiding, or are we just poor seekers?

The better we know someone, the easier they are to find. The Israelites knew about the God of the Exodus—the crashing sea, the fiery pillar. That’s the God they were looking for. But they should also have known about God who blew the breath of life gently into creation; God who worked through a prostitute to save the spies in Jericho; God who placed Esther in the palace at just the right time, who led Ruth to the field of Boaz.

The Israelites were looking for God in the earthquake that is like fire. Only there was no earthquake. There was no fire. So they assumed that God was in hiding. If they had stopped long enough to listen, though, they might have heard the gentle whisper of God. The whisper that had caused Elijah to cover his face and stand at the opening of the cave.

Is God really good at hiding, or are we just poor seekers?

Maybe we are looking in the wrong places. Maybe.

But more to the point, maybe we are looking for the wrong god. Maybe we are looking for the god we recognize and understand and approve of. The god who agrees with our politics and answers our prayers with a “yes” every time.

Maybe we, like the Israelites, are looking for a god whose enemies are our enemies. A god whose power is undeniable, obvious, visible.

Is God really good at hiding, or are we just poor seekers?

I have my doubts that God is hiding at all. I think that God wants so much to be seen and known by us that God became one of us. I think God so much wants to be found that God entered the hustle and bustle of the world to live among us; to be available to all of us.

The Christian year begins today, with Advent. It is a time of preparation and waiting. May we use this time to get to know God better; to become familiar with the fullness of God–so when the crowd goes rushing by that common stable on Christmas morning, there will be at least a few of us who know enough to stop and listen.