You Cannot Escape God!

One of my all time favorite preachers,
one of my favorite “Princes of the Pulpit,”
was Harry Emerson Fosdick.
Pastor of the great Riverside Church in New York City,
Fosdick became known, world around,
as a great teacher, preacher, writer, and hymnist.
His brilliance sparked a ray of hope in thousands of young
seminary students all over the nation during the middle-part of this century,
because he called for a return
to the ancient, orthodox truths of the Church
In a day and age in which Liberal Personalism
and Unitarian-Unversalism was quickly taking over this nation's Pulpits.
Fosdick preached literally hundreds of sermons on the Eminence of God,
and on the radical presence of Christ,
in the Scriptures,
in the preaching of the clergy,
in the Prayers of the People,
and in the Sacraments of Holy Communion and of Christian Baptism.

For Fosdick, God's presence in the lives of Christians was not just a theory,
It was not just some abstract theological argument,
It was a fact of Christian life itself.
But Fosdick had not always known God's presence.
As a young man, plagued by fears,
by self-doubt,
by his own sins,
Fosdick lost sight of God's presence.
As a young man, Fosdick was captured by the powerful grip of depression,
the tug of which was too powerful for him to resist.
Month after lonely month,
he went about his daily studies
blind to those around him who loved and cared for him,
blind to the hope of the Gospel which he was studying to proclaim,
blind to the presence of God, at his very side.
Month after lonely month.....
until, early one Fall,
Harry Emerson Fosdick purchased a handgun.
It would be simple, he thought.

His parents lived on a farm, out in the country.
He could find a place to hide from his parents,
a place where no one could possibly find him
until long after it was way to late.
No one could stop him.
And so, hiding in the upper loft of his Father's barn,
he loaded the pistol
put the muzzle to the side of his head, and pulled the hammer back.

Just then ... in the distance ... Fosdick could hear his Father Calling ....

"Harry!"

“Where are you, Harry?”

“I need you.”

Fosdick says that he was so stunned
by the distant voice of his Father calling him,
that he dropped the pistol and went running up to his parents house
to see what his Father wanted.
Only, when he got there he discovered that his Father wasn't home.
It was not his earthly Father calling him,
It was his heavenly Father.

“Harry, where are you? --I need you.”

Fosdick had tried to escape.
He tried to escape the world,
he tried to escape his calling,
he tried to escape God.
But he couldn’t hide from God.
God needed him--
just as God needs you.

Like Harry Emerson Fosdick,
we sometimes try to escape.
We sometimes try to hide from God, and segregate our lives from God's life.
But it is, always, a fruitless attempt.

We cannot escape God,
even if we try very hard.
We are his children,
we bear his Name,
the Name of his Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
He knows each and every one of us much better than we
can possibly know ourselves.
He is closer to us than our very skins,
even our unimportant hairs are important to him, each hair has it's own number--

[pull one and give it a long, ridiculous number.]

This divine intimacy,
intimate almost to the ridiculous degree,
is what the psalmist saw and knew when he wrote Psalm 139.

This divine intimacy--
The presence of God in Jesus Christ our Lord--
is the miracle of the Incarnation.
Imagine:
The Holy God,
The Holy and Mighty One,
The Holy Immortal One
He, who is beyond all that is,
of whom we can know nothing out of ourselves,
reached into time became one of us, so that we might know him.

We are finite,
we are limited to time and space,
we cannot get out of this reality,
And so the infinite God of all that is,
is beyond our ability to know--
But God was not willing to leave us here to perish.
He breached the gap of our inability so that we could know him.
The only way to God,
the only way we can know Him,
is in Christ Jesus, Our Lord, who is God, the blessed Trinity.

How can you possible expect to hide from this
Holy,
Mighty,
Immortal One?

Why should we even want to hide from Him?
Why do we, like Harry Emerson Fosdick,
run from the One who loves us so much that he died that we might live?
Why do we even hide small areas of our lives from God?
It sounds so stupid, doesn't it?
Then why do we do it?

What areas--no matter how small--have you tried to hide from God?
If you have trouble with this question, then meditate on it for a minute or two.
For all practical purposes God is usually assumed to be restricted
to the spheres of religion, private morality, and personal piety.
The world of commerce, politics, science and technology is open territory,
free from God's meddling.
God is not seen, by many, as intersecting the world outside these walls.
In our personal living, we segregate God by
cordoning Him off from certain areas
in which we might find Him an uncomfortable presence.
ambitions in business and political life,
our power of reproduction--otherwise known by the misnomer "Rights"
sexual life,
family life,
use of intellect,
use of money,
use of time.
Think about it, for a moment.

Two Sundays ago I had with me Brother Eldridge Pendleton
of the SSJE, an Anglican Monastic Order of which
I am an Associate Member.
One of Eldridge's Brothers in the Order is Fr. Martin Smith,
who wrote an excellent brook on Reconciliation with God.
In it, he asks the reader to consider some important questions
regarding how we view and treat God.
They are excellent questions and I have taken
a few of them and modified them for you today.

1.What are the big things in your life, and how does your relationship with God stand in comparison?

2.In your heart of hearts, do you think there are some areas of life where the ways of Christ crucified are futile and unreliable?

3.Are there areas of your life where you have acted as if God had no say or even any interest?

4.Where, in your life, is there fear, cynicism, defensiveness? Where is there obsession, fanaticism, hero-worship, addiction?

You're answers will determine if you've been running from God.
And you, yourself, know the answer to that question.
And, if you have,
then this sermon is for you.

The darkness that we have tried to hide ourselves in,
the darkness of sin,
the darkness of apart-ness from God,
cannot hide us.

If you say, with the Psalmist,
“Surely the darkness will cover me,
and the light around me turn to night,”
you will be wrong.

The darkness of sin will not hide you from God.
For, “with God the darkness is not dark,
the night is as bright as the day;
darkness and light to God are both alike.”

Regardless of your sins, God can and will find you;
Your sin will not hide you from God.
Sinners and Saints -- both, so often, are one and the same
And God is with them all.

You Cannot Escape from God.
He's got you.
Like Fosdick, in your darkest night
you can hear him calling your name.

[Call out the names of several in the Sanctuary]

You Cannot Escape from God.
All you can do is fool yourself.
You are his . . .
We are his children
He is always with us.
Glory to God!