Author: Justin DaMetz

Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident

Where is God?: A Sermon for September 29th, 2024

The following is a sermon I gave at Fellowship Congregational UCC – Tulsa, as part of our Youth Sunday.

When we first started discussing Youth Sunday plans way back in August, I presented to the kids all of the lectionary verses that were available for this Sunday. There was a passage from James, which they’ve been learning about for the last month; a story from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus and the disciples and who gets to act in Jesus’ name; a bit from the book of Numbers about the Israelites complaining to Moses about a variety of different things. But when I mentioned that one of the options was from Esther, that piqued their interest.

So we watched a video that told the story of Esther, and settled on not just reading one verse from the book, but instead telling the entire convoluted and kind of comical story, in our own way, which you just saw. I don’t have a ton to add to what the kids presented here, but I did want to kind of put a bow on Youth Sunday with a few thoughts about Esther, and what her story means for us.

One of the most interesting things about the Book of Esther, besides just the absolute soap opera drama of it all, is that it is the only book in the whole Bible that never once mentions God. Which is odd, right, considering this is the Bible, and this is a story about the Jewish people living in exile, and about their commitment to faith in the face of the oppression of Haman. The author of the book never once mentions God, and I don’t think that is an accident at all.

In our Call to Worship this morning, you asked the question over and over, “Where is God?” I hope the reason for that question makes a little more sense now. When I have been reading Esther over the last few weeks, and preparing for this Sunday, it is the question I have been trying to keep at the forefront of my own mind. Where is God in this story? What is God doing here in the lives of Esther and Mordecai? What does this story tell us about God, even in God’s seeming absence?

It’s actually a question I ask a lot, and one I imagine you do too, seeing as we are all at this church, and not some other one here in Tulsa. I know I ask this question because, despite almost a decade now of working in churches, despite a seminary degree and daily Bible reading and my work here at Fellowship, I don’t often feel God, if you know what I mean. Doubt has long been a part of my journey of faith; prayer is a struggle for me, because I don’t even always think God is real. Some days I do. Some days I certainly don’t

And I think that’s ok, and makes me a little bit better at my job. Because I remember being one of those kids, in the church I grew up in, going to youth groups and doing church things. I know that, even back then, maybe especially back then, I often wondered where God was. And I didn’t always get a very good answer to that pondering. Too often, the implication from youth leaders and pastors was that of course God is real, not in some abstract way, but like a real person in your life, and you should – YOU SHOULD – know that to be true. Of course, the flip side of such an attitude was that if you didn’t, then something was wrong with you. And, in those settings, that led to this whole slippery, circular logic of sin and condemnation and hell and fear and earnest but often fruitless attempts to DO faith a little better next time.

So, a story like that of Esther, where God doesn’t show up explicitly by name or action, is an important one for the work we are doing every Sunday morning in the youth wing. Because, God doesn’t always show up for us, not like we want. We are often left going, where is God? Why was God absent today, or this week, or in that place? What we see in the story of Esther is an important response to the universal question of, where is God? God may not show up in Esther to miraculously strike down Haman, or to speak to the King in a dream, or to command the actions of Mordecai and Esther. In this way, the Book of Esther is unique in the Hebrew Bible, considering its proximity to stories like that of Moses, or Job, or Noah. 

But, if we really think about it, God is at work here. If we think about what we know of God – that God is a God of love, that God desires justice and mercy, that God takes the small and broken and insignificant things and makes them great and wondrous and whole – then we can begin to perceive the presence of God in the story of Esther. In the hope of Mordecai, who had belief in the good that could come from Esther, we can see God at work. In the courage of Esther as she navigates the politics and machinations of court life, we can see God at work. In the steadfast faith of the Jewish people even as they are commanded by the Powers of the world to abandon God, to give themselves over fully to exile, we see God at work. God may not be acting directly. But God is certainly acting, through the hands and feet and faith of those who still are able to hold tight to the promise of God that a better world is possible, if we each do our part – no matter how small or insignificant – to help make it happen.

This is what we try to think about together each Sunday morning in the youth room: what are called to do today, this week, at school, with our friends, with our families, to help make the world a little bit of a better place, and in the process, to do the work of God in the world. How do we fit into the story of God? What is our place in this church? How can we recognize – and seize- our Esther moment?

In short, we ask. Where is God? 

I’ll end this sermon, and respond to – put not try to answer- that question, by quoting my favorite passage in the whole Bible, Genesis 28:16, where Jacob proclaims, 

“Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it!” 

That’s the message of Esther, as well. Surely God is in this place, in this story, with us, even if we don’t know it, if we don’t feel it, if we don’t believe it today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. What better news can we imagine than that? Amen.

Excerpt #37: the freedom to forget

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion, in ways and degrees these arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding. The generosity to the generality of people that gave us most of our best institutions would be considered by many pious people now to be socialistic, though the motives behind the creation of many of them, for example, these fine colleges, was utterly and explicitly Christian. If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, that is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums. 1

  1. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, page 27 ↩︎

Mathoms and commonplace books

As is almost always the case, I find Alan Jacobs’ reflections on the blog as Mathom-house a wonderful short reflection, and helpful in thinking about what I want this space to be. If you are subscribed to my Substack (and if you aren’t, why not?), you know that I’ve taken to writing longer essays over there that post on Fridays, along with a podcast episode. But I still have this space, and while I’m not active here right now, I keep thinking about the proper role for it. I like this idea from Jacobs:

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain. 

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings.

I think that’s what this site is going to become, for now. I read a lot of articles and essays that strike me as important, but I don’t necessarily have something to say about now, or at least not enough to essay about. So, I’ll share the relevant passage here, similar to the series of Excerpts I’ve long posted here, sometimes with a few thoughts, and call it good.