This past year I bought a great recording of Mendelssohn’s oratorio, Elijah. Probably the most well-known part is the tenor solo: “If With All Your Hearts, Ye Truly Seek Me.” The complete text says: “If with all your hearts, ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, thus saith your God.”

The idea behind the text is that, at some time or another, most of us will go looking for God. Not that we do it continuously…or devotedly. But at some point in our lives, the quest for God will consume us. It will take some of us to mountaintops and others to monasteries. Still others will go to places where human need is raw, the better that we might glimpse God in the faces of our hurting neighbors. The smorgasbord of world religions is ample proof of our eternal human quest to discover God.

This morning I want to suggest a counter movement. Before we ever thought of looking for God, God has been looking for us. From the very beginning, the Bible describes a seeking God. In the first book of the Bible, Adam is hiding from God. Which leads God to ask: “Where are you?” Unless I am mistaken, that is the first question God poses in the Bible. God wants to know where we are.

From beginning to end, the Bible is honest about the fact that all human beings, including you and I, may have our moments when we go looking for God, but more often we’re trying to hide from God. But God never gives up looking for us.

One of the most powerful and beautiful psalms, the 139^th, describes this eternal obsession of the Almighty to find us. Let me quote it for you in the familiar words of the King James Version I learned as a boy:

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit?

or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou are there:

if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning,

                                      and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand   shall hold me.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            (Psalm 139:7-10)

Think of it. Wherever we go, God will find us. “Making our bed in Sheol” is a death image. So is “taking the wings of the morning and dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea.” What is the psalmist saying? He is affirming that even if we die, God will hunt us down and find us.

Then we come to the story that never grows old the story we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It’s found in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. It’s the story of a lost boy and a father who is looking for him. But actually all of that chapter has the same theme, losing and finding. It begins with the story of a shepherd who loses a sheep and goes looking for it. Then we have the story of a woman who loses a coin and does the same. Then comes this precious story of the Prodigal. A boy leaves home and heads for parts unknown. But his father never turns off the porch light. Day after day we imagine him standing in the doorway scanning the horizon for a familiar face.

Helmut Thielicke, the great German preacher of the last generation, pointed out something most of us have recognized. The central figure in the parable isn’t the Prodigal Son, but the Waiting Father. As much as we can identify that father with every human parent who has had a wayward child and done everything possible to get back in touch, we know whom Jesus meant us to recognize in that waiting father: our Father God, our Mother God, the parent of us all.

The connecting thread of these stories in Luke 15 seems clear. Things get lost. People get lost. You and I get lost. And God organizes a search party. Even when we are indifferent…or downright hostile…God looks for us.

Hiding is sometimes deliberate. We wander off intentionally. I don’t know if kids play Hide and Seek anymore, but I remember many soft summer nights in Otsego when our gang of kids played it. Someone was chosen to be “it.” He then buried his face in a big maple tree and counted to a hundred by fives. Then he yelled: “Here I come, ready or not!” And we were always ready. Meaning that we were well-hidden.

The result was always the same. Either he found us, or we somehow “got in free.” But being something of a reflective lad even then, I recall that once I got to thinking: “What if I hide so well that people stop looking for me? What if I am still hiding when everybody else quits and goes home? Or quits to play another game?” I pictured myself wondering: “Aren’t you going to look for me anymore?” That led me to ponder the possibility that the true point of the game was not the hiding or the seeking, but the finding. How awful never to be found. Even more awful if no one cared whether I was found or not.

Many wise persons have pointed out that the most important things we ever learn in life we learn as children. That’s where our basic understanding of the meaning of life is set. Hide and Seek taught us that we want to be found.

But hiding is not always deliberate. We didn’t plan to hide. We just wandered off in places we shouldn’t have gone. Still, God goes looking for us even when we are unaware just how far we have wandered away from home base.

That’s good theology by the way. Before we ever had a thought of looking for God, God’s been looking for us. Let me illustrate. Picture taking your child or grandchild to Disney World. All of a sudden, you become aware that your child is no longer by your side, but has wandered off. At first, you do a quiet little search. You go one way and another. But when your ever-widening circles fail to lead to discovery, you panic. Your search becomes sweaty and emotional. You make inquiries. You enlist allies. You have them page your child over the loud speaker.

Eventually, you are successful. You hug your child. Then you scold your child. But your child gives you the dumbest look in the world, followed by the question: “What’s all the fuss about?” Your child didn’t even know she was lost. There’s nothing unusual about that. Most of us don’t. But the Bible seems to suggest that whether we realize just how lost we are, whether our hiding is deliberate or inadvertent, God is a relentless seeker. God is forever saying: “Here I come, ready or not.” And God will stop at nothing until we are found…all of us.

I have to tell you something that may bother some of you. I come from that part of our United Church of Christ that believes in universalism. That is, I believe that God never gives up on anyone either in life or after death. I know that may offend our human ideas of justice. What about the mass murderer? What about the child molester? What about the person who has spent a lifetime denying God? I really have no answer to those questions. From a human point of view, God’s ever-seeking love really makes no sense. We give up on people all the time. Wouldn’t God do the same?

Why don’t we want to be found by God? Well, some of us have our pride. The idea of a divine search party launched on our behalf makes us uncomfortable. There’s nothing wrong with us, we tell ourselves. We’re good people. We’ll come to God in our own time and way. But all the time we are telling ourselves those lies, we are wandering farther and farther away from God.

Thankfully, God doesn’t take our rejection personally or finally. Some years ago there was a classic Christian poem, much loved by preachers, written by a man named Francis Thompson. It was called “The Hound of Heaven.” The opening lines went like this:

I fled him down the nights and down the days;

I fled him down the arches of the years;                                                   

I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind,

And in the mist of tears I hid from him,

Up vistaed hope I sped;

And shot, precipitated down Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong feet that followed, followed after…

But with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, they beat

And a Voice beat more intensely than the feet…

Until I married Barbara I never had a pet dog in my life. Now I know what Thompson was talking about. Our little Princess is relentless. She will seek us out and find us whether we want to be found or not. And she whimpers and cries if we try to stop her.

Is it blasphemous to suggest that God is like Princess? I don’t think so. There is so much love in that little body for Barbara and me and it will not be denied until she has found us. And there is so much love in God for you and me and the whole human family that will not be denied. God’s out looking for us and nothing will stop God’s searching until we are found.