One of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture occurs barely 64 verses into the book of Genesis. God, walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening breeze, calls out to Adam and Eve, Where are you?
Hiding, of course, caught like two children with their hands in the cookie jar by a parent who’s arrived home sooner than expected. Their fig leaves give them away: they did what they’d been told not to do and are cowering in the foliage in shame.
I know the downside of daring to reference most anything in the first three chapters of Genesis. We can get our collective knickers in a knot arguing intelligent design vs. Big Bang and evolution. But, for the moment, let’s not go there. Squabbling over the literal truth of the creation narratives in Genesis usually blinds us to the Bigger Truths they speak—Truths not dependent on the literal truth of the plot and non-divine characters of the narratives themselves.
And one of these Bigger Truths is the poignancy of Where are you?—poignant because of what such a simple question tells us about the nature of God. That this is a God who did not create, then disappear, but gave us life and the freedom to live it as we choose. And then, when we use that freedom to choose to turn away, a God who goes after us. A God who, in fact, spends all our lives pursuing us, searching and asking, Where are you?
It’s not just poignant. It’s extraordinary. Indeed, relative to the gods of many other religious traditions, it’s unheard of.
But to those of us who make our spiritual home in the Abrahamic tradition, maybe it shouldn’t seem so extraordinary. Yet it is.
I remember the one (and, as it turned out, only) time I went camping with my dad. I got separated from him in a place neither of us knew. Dad didn’t have a map and smart phones and GPS hadn’t been invented yet. So he just took off searching through the woods, calling my name. Where are you? Just like, at times in my own life as a parent, separated from one of my children, I just took off searching for them, calling their name. Where are you?
It’s what parents do.
Yet this seeking, this going after, is extraordinary because this is God.
And being God, which means being omniscient, God knew where Adam and Eve were just as God always knows where you and I are. Yet, God still searches for us because the searching that God does, the questioning—Where are you?—isn’t for God’s benefit. It’s for our benefit. The searching and the questioning are an expression of the love of which the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, love from which nothing—no height, no depth, nothing in all creation—can ever separate us. The divine love that enfolds us. The love we cannot lose no matter how lost we ever become.
A God who spends all our lives searching for us usually does so because we’ve lost our way. Were we not lost, we’d have no need for God to search. But lose our way we do, and so the question God asks, Where are you? may first be an expression of love (which is what makes it poignant) but is also a reminder: Look at where you are, [insert your name here]. Is this where I’d want you to be?
Just as when Elijah ran from Jezebel as fast and as far as he could run, all the way to Mt. Horeb, thinking that, in the process, he could run so far away God wouldn’t know where he was. But God knew, and God is there. And the still, small voice whispers from the silence, Where are you, Elijah? What are you doing here? Is this where I’d want you to be?
And as it is with you and me as individuals, so it is with countries. They, too, get lost. We can just look around ourselves at the moment. The case can be made we are seriously lost.
This is not a pretext to call for Christian nationalism. God forbid. It is a call, as we find ourselves dangerously adrift in the Ways of Empire, that we can answer in terms of what we know God would want (Where are you? Is this where I’d want you to be?) without embracing rhetoric of judgment and supremacy and exclusivism. A call we can answer by doubling-down on our embrace of the Ways of Love: service to others instead of power over others, compassion instead of domination, freedom instead of control, welcome instead of exclusion, peacemaking instead of violence, humility instead of privilege, love instead of fear. The kinds of things the Garden of Eden, serpent and all, seems to represent.
Is this just naïve?
Well, history might suggest that it is but, then again, when in history has a critical mass of people fully embraced the Ways of Love? The allure of Empire and it’s promises of wealth and power and control has proven too difficult for most people—and most countries—to resist. Still, when the Ways of Empire go sideways (and, eventually, they almost always go sideways) the Ways of Love can assert an allure of their own. For awhile. People, sometimes hearing snippets of the voice of the searching God—Where are you? Is this where I’d want you to be?—answer by filling streets and newsfeeds with placards and postings urging service, compassion, peace, humility, and love, long enough, usually, for some to believe they’re catching the glimmer of a new light dawning. But, in time, the allures of Empire find their voice once more (hegemony, after all, is a very powerful thing). And once more we start down the path of losing our way.
The key to not getting lost, of course, is choosing not to turn away from God to begin with. The key is to cling tenaciously to being found, to living found, to being instruments of found. By which I mean living from and being instruments of the Ways of Love. By which I mean simply living in ways that manifest the Kingdom of God on earth.
It’s one of those Bigger Truths in the first three chapters of Genesis, and what we’re called to do: find our way back to Eden and stay found.
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