Finding Signs of the Hidden God: Reflections on Isaiah 64.1-9

Finding Signs of the Hidden God

Reflections on Isaiah 64.1-9

 

RCL Advent 1B

3 December 2023

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

            From an early age I have been interested in archaeology.  I think that it is something my father encouraged by our frequent trips to the plains of east of Colorado Springs and to the open park areas of the Front Range of the Rockies to the west of us.  We would spend hours searching the ground for the various stone relics of the Aboriginal peoples who have inhabited those lands for at least ten thousand years or more. 

 

Then there was the trip to Mesa Verde in the southwestern corner of Colorado to visit the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, one of the peoples who learned to live with the land and then, when the land could no longer support them, disappeared into the surrounding tribes.  I remember stopping briefly just before we left the park.  We walked around to stretch our legs before the three-and-a-half-hour drive home.  On the ground I found some potsherds in the distinctive black-on-white geometric pattern of Anasazi pottery.  I brought them home only to learn that I had committed a federal offence.  Because I had found them on federal park land, I was obliged to report the find to the park rangers.  

 

Stone implements such as arrowheads, scrapers and knives as well as pottery are intensely personal.  They are not the product of a standardized industrial process.  Each one, even when it follows a pattern established for generations, is unique.  I’m sure that when each piece was new and shown to someone, they would say, ‘Oh, I know who made that!’  But to us, living thousands of years later, these objects remain anonymous.

 

In recent decades archaeologists working in northern Scotland excavating one of the oldest inhabited settlements found a piece of pottery.  At first the potsherd was added to a pile of other pieces.  But later, when one of the archaeologists was looking more closely at the piece through a magnifying glass, they made a moving discovery – the thumbprint of the potter.  Here, five thousand years after it was made, was evidence of the creator of this piece.  It was no longer anonymous; there was a person.

 

Those who have been studying Anasazi pottery have made similar discoveries.  These discoveries have revealed that pottery, originally thought to be the preserve of women, was primarily the work of men.  By the end of the Anasazi it was a work equally shared by men, women and young people.  All this was revealed by the study of the fingerprints, the last evidence of the people who lived and died in the arid lands of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.

 

Archaeologists commit themselves to finding signs of the hidden people whose artifacts remain after thousands of years.  Yet they have to reconcile themselves to the fact that they will never learn the identities of the people whose work lies on the laboratory worktable before them or under the microscopes that bring the tangible signs of the hands of living people into the light of day.

 

In some ways people of faith are archaeologists seeking for the hidden God in the midst of all the artifacts of human life.  There are times when the search for this hidden God is more challenging than others.  When terrorists murder people in their homes and civilians are forced to flee from their homes and hospitals are unable to care for the sick and wounded, it’s not easy to find signs of the God we believe has created us in the divine image.  When we continue to wreak havoc on our planet and resist the changes that we know are necessary, it’s not easy to believe that we are made in the image of God and that we’ve been pleased with ‘memory, reason and skill’.

 

For those who first heard the words of the prophet Isaiah that we have just heard, God seemed to be well and truly hidden.  After decades of exile they were returning to Judah and to the city of Jerusalem.  They were surrounded by the physical ruins of their homeland and by the hostility of the various peoples who had benefitted from the destruction of Israel and Judah almost a century before.  Their religious institutions, the spiritual framework that sustained their identity, were in tatters and many of the people were ignorant of the Scriptures and traditions that gave structure to the community.

 

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence . . . to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! . . . But you were any, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.  (Isaiah 64.1, 2b, 5b NRSVue)

 

            But we know from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that the people began to find the fingerprints of the hidden God and were able to reconstruct their lives.  We know from the book of Ruth that the people learned that the ‘foreigner’, the ‘other’, could be as faithful a witness to the hidden God as someone steeped in the tradition and descended from Abraham and Sarah.  

 

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.  (Isaiah 64.9 NRSVue)

 

            All around us, my friends, are the fingerprints of the hidden God who is revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth and through the Spirit of wisdom.  Each one of us is a fingerprint of the hidden God who is still shaping the world into the vessel of justice, kindness and humility that it is intended to be.  Our stories of confidence and hope in times of adversity are fingerprints of the hidden God who began this work by taking the risk to create humanity in the divine image with the power to be both life-giving and life-denying.  

 

            This Advent begins with our community on the cusp of new chapters in the ministry God has entrusted to us in this place and in these times.  Sometimes our neighbours will need us to reveal the signs of God’s presence and activity in a world that often conceals that presence and activity under the shadows of our own life-denying rather than life-giving choices.  So let us begin this new year by re-committing ourselves to discerning the fingerprints of God in this precious clay vessel that is our world.  Those fingerprints found impressed upon our lives and the lives of so many other disciples of Jesus are signs that God has not so hidden from our daily sight that we cannot catch glimpses of the love that will not let us go.  We are, after all, the work of God’s hands, hands that have left their imprint upon us and all God’s beloved.