Silent But Not Absent (Bowie)

Do you ever pray and God is not there? Maybe he is, but he's just not listening? You sense he is there but then he's not. All you hear is the "divine echo". Why do we pray? Is God even listening? It's like He's about to speak, but then He walks away. Silence is always awkward. Does that seem like the God we know? God is always answering prayers and doing amazing things, but He doesn't answer my prayers. What do we do with the silence of our God? "God, will you just say or do SOMETHING?" Johnson Bowie, at http://www.fusionatl.org/p/12081/Default.aspx, begins his series, "God on Mute" by talking about silence in the midst of pain and suffering. His grandfather recently died and this set him on a journey of exploring silence from God. During the 430 years of slavery of the Israelites, from Joseph to Moses, God doesn't say a word. In the Bible, it says to go to God and He will give us answers, but does He? In Matthew, from chapter 17 through 27, there is no indication that God speaks to Jesus. Is it possible that Jesus experienced the same thing? The last thing we see where God speaks, before he "disappears" is where Jesus is transfigured before Peter, James & Johns. On the other side of this, Christ is on the cross asking His Father, "Why have you forsaken me?" Martin Luther, who started the Protestant movement in the 1500's, referred to God at times with a word, "obscondidus dios" (spelling?) which means "the God who goes missing". Eugene Peterson, a premier theologian, says that "the story in which God does His saving work arises among a people whose primary experience of God is His absence". The phrase "hester panum", which means "the hiding of the face" appears 30 times in the Old Testament. God, where are you? Johnson absolutely believes that God speaks. But he doesn't believe He's a God who always speaks. There is no scripture that says God is always going to talk. How can we reconcile the fact that God answers some prayers and doesn't answer others? Like, how can God answer our prayer to get to a gas station when we run out of gas, but yet He seemed to have ignored the Holocaust? On the flipside, often times we, as Christians, respond differently to God. Silence might drive one christian away from his faith, cursing God on the way while another christian pleads with God and asks for His guidance. In Matthew 7:24, Jesus talks about how we should establish our faith; not on sand, but on rock. The same wind, the same waves and the same rain slam against each home. This clearly tells us that we all will experience crisis, but it is us who must maintain our faith and build our house on the rock. Joseph was his father's favorite son. His father loved him. His brothers hated him. He tells his brothers a dream he has that he will rule over them, so they sell him into slavery. Meanwhile, God doesn't say a word. We pick up in Genesis 39:2 where it says, "and God was with Joseph". What?!? No he wasn't!! These kind of things don't happen to God's people, right? But then things get worse. Potiphar's wife tries to seduce him, he's framed for rape when he refuses to sleep with her and he's thrown in the dungeon. We pick up in Genesis 39:21, where, again, it says, "But the Lord was with Joseph"!! In the dungeon, for years, God was with Him and Joseph knew this. He interpreted dreams for some prisoners, but was forgotten for two more years. But then Pharoah had dreams and calls for Joseph. Joseph interprets his dreams and then, almost instantly, he's made second in command over all of Egypt! Okay, now we see God with Joseph, right? That is how our God works! He promotes us miraculously. Paul, in Romans 8, says "nothing can separate us from the love of God". Isaiah 49 talks about how the people screamed to God saying He had forgotten them and He responds saying that a mother can't forget her child. If we think we're forgotten, He says to look at His pierced hands. Psalms 23, David says, "yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for YOU ARE WITH ME." Saint Theresa once wrote, "Every difficulty in prayer comes from one fatal flaw; that of praying as if God were absent." A survivor of the Holocaust, Ali Visal, writes this story which Johnson reads. One day, coming back from the gallows, there is public display of the hanging of a child and two adults. As the guards are reading the verdicts, the adults say, "long live Liberty", but the child says nothing. "Where is God?" was a voice behind Visal. Then the chairs are kicked over and the two adults die almost immediately, but the child was too light to die right away. He just hangs there for nearly thirty minutes struggling between life and death. The people are forced to watch his face as he dies. "Where is God?" is says the person to Vital again. "Here He is; hanging from the gallows." Vital hears himself say. In the midst of tragedy, we decide that God is dead or He is right there with us. In Jesus' greatest moment of silence, the thief on the right and the thief on the left had the same choice. One said, "God is dead", but the other said, "let me be with you in Heaven." In the time of Jesus, the people wore these things called prayer shawls or "little tents" as their names meant. They where white and blue to symbolize Heaven and the Holy Spirit. The Jews would pull these "tents" over there heads and just pray to God, alone under the material. In Matthew 6, Jesus says not to pray openly where everyone can see us, but rather to go pray in private. In Matthew 11, Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Johnson invites his audience to come up on the stage and to wear one of the shawls or "tents" where they can pray, surrounded by the image of Heaven. Once again, an amazing delivery by Johnson.

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