Or, in other words, "Where are you, God?" "When are you coming?" [Shout and pound:] "Come now!" The first reading, from Isaiah, is full of yearning, a plea to a God who is seemingly nowhere to be found. As Jesus himself warns us: "Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come." As we enter into the season of Advent, we are called upon to look for God, but are we looking for God in the right places? I'm reminded of the old Country song, "Lookin' for love in all the wrong places." Are we, in fact, looking for God in all the wrong places? And if not, how do we know?

Another way of posing the question is to ask "Are we even looking for the right God?" I personally believe that we often look for the wrong God because we have made God in our image rather than allowing God to re-make us in God's image. When we look for a God of our own making, we engage in the age-old sin of idolatry. Idolatry has very little to do with statues or pictures of mythological creatures, the sort of things you see in museums and art books. Rather, an idol is anything to which we attribute more power than it actually has. Idolatry is confusing the created for the Creator. Idolatry is addiction to anything that is not God, or to any place where God cannot be found.

It is a simple truth of our fallen existence that we look for God in the wrong places and from the wrong perspectives. So often, we look for a God who will do our bidding. As Paul Neuchterlein of Emmaus Lutheran Church in Racine, Wisconsin has written, "If we are looking for the God…who will come with sufficient might to liberate us violently from our enemies and exact revenge, then, yes, that God is absent. But if we are looking for the God of victims, then that God has been with us all the time; one simply has to look in the right place."

In a sermon entitled "Knowing where to look for God," Pastor Neuchterlein has this to say. I quote it here because sometimes, despite the desire to be original in my preaching, someone else has simply said it better than I could ever hope to; and while I thought about passing it off as my own, I figured it would be better to 'fess up and say that, for once, God inspired someone other than me first. Here's what Paul Neuchterlein writes:

At Christmas we…celebrate that Christ has already come, that a great light has come to shine in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. But how does that make a difference to those who sit in darkness now?

The difference it can make, I think, is this: Since Christ has already come, we now can know where to look. More specifically, we can know to look in the unexpected places. Think of the Christmas story: the savior of the world, the king of creation, born to two poor people in a barn in tiny Bethlehem. Is that where you would expect God to come? Not really, right? And it never really changes with this Jesus. The Pharisees expected such a great teacher to be with them all the time. But they continually had to look for him among the tax collectors and sinners, the sick and outcast. Finally, it even ended with this Jesus hanging on a cross, the very last place anyone would have expected to find God coming into this world. So when we pray the prayer, "Where are you God?" perhaps what we need is to remind ourselves of where to look. Perhaps when we can't find God, it's because we look in the wrong places.

[He goes on to say:] I'd like to share a brief passage about looking for and finding God. It's from a book with a good Advent title, Night, for it describes one of the darkest places ever known on this earth: the Auschwitz death camp. Elie Wiesel [Vee-ZEHL] is a Nobel Prize winning author who survived Auschwitz and recorded many of his experiences in this book. If ever there has been a place on earth where we are justified to cry out, "Where are you, God?!" Auschwitz is the place. One particularly well-known passage from this book asks just this question. It describes the Nazis hanging a young boy:

[Now, I should insert here that while the passage Pastor Neuchterlein quotes is somewhat graphic, it is no more graphic than the accounts of Jesus' death in the Gospels. It is worth reflecting that stories like this one may even help us better understand Christ's suffering than the Gospel accounts themselves, to which we have become desensitized, much in the same way that television violence desensitizes our children. In any event, here is the passage:]

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live Liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. "Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. "Cover your heads!"

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?"

And I hear a voice within me answer him: "Were is he? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows. . ."

[Neuchterlein comments on this passage:] This is the Christian answer to the question "Where is God?", isn't it? When we are looking for God to tear open the heavens and come, we begin by looking at the one who was hanged on the cross for our sins. Jesus turns the whole question of suffering around. When we are suffering, or when someone close to us is suffering, we are often moved to ask "Where is God?" But with Jesus, suffering becomes the answer, not the reason for the question. In Jesus we begin to see that the answer to "Where is God?" is precisely this: God is with those who suffer. That's where God is. In Jesus we learn where to look for God.

Of course, we don't have to look to Nazi Germany for such examples, as our recent history teaches us all too well. Nevertheless, I was struck by the poignancy of Wiesel's [Vee-ZEHL's] account. At the same time, I'm left feeling that it would be easy for me to point to the events of September 11th or to the Holocaust and preach that God is most present when God is suffering with us-that the God who has been revealed in Christ Jesus is none other than the God who suffers with us and for us, and through that suffering, overcomes even the power of death and the grave-and still manage to dodge the issue of our own suffering. For while these examples are vivid and powerful, I believe that no matter how empathic we are, very few of us can readily access the incomprehensible suffering of being trapped in a burning building or being imprisoned in a death camp. Those are examples in the extreme, but the truth I am trying to communicate in my own poor way is just as true-and perhaps even harder to comprehend-in the mundane sufferings of everyday life.

And so I'd like you to reflect with me for a moment on where it is that you are hurting-right now…today. Of course, you are not victims of terrorism or genocide, and I want to resist labeling any of us as "victims," but the fact is, we do suffer. And when we suffer, where is it that we look for God? Even more importantly, do we find God where we are looking? For if we don't find God there, then either we are looking in the wrong place or we are looking for the wrong God.

So, instead of terrorism and genocide, let me name a few of the things that kill us slowly, that eat away at our souls and estrange us from each other and from God-and I apologize in advance if any of these things come a little too close for comfort: Alcohol. Food. Money. Lust. Ambition. Anger. Resentment. You know the usual suspects. It is our addictions, our pet sins, which entice us and distract us. We look to them as gods, or use them to distract ourselves from the true God. We use them to assuage our suffering, but they only increase it.

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence! …Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand."

It's Advent, and I know that these readings, and my reflections, have not been what one might expect to hear in order to get into the spirit of Christmas. Yet, if we are to greet the Christ Child when he appears, we need to make sure we are looking for him in the unexpected places, perhaps even in cramped, smelly, dingy places, like a manger-like our hearts.

Reflecting on the passage from Isaiah this past week at Staff Meeting, Charlie mentioned that in the burial office, we are reminded of the words from Genesis, "dust to dust, ashes to ashes." And yet, he pointed out, when you mix water and dust, water and ashes, you get clay. So let us bring the dust of our humanity, mingled with the waters of our baptisms, as clay fit for being re-formed in our Father's image. Let us allow the Potter to mold that clay as the Potter sees fit. Perhaps then we will stop looking for God in all the wrong places, and find God's hand at work where we already are. Amen.