Sunday, June 22, 2025 – Isaiah 65:1-9, Psalm 22:19-28, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 8:26-39
I want to begin today with a question: Have you ever felt as though God is far away—perhaps hidden or silent just when you needed God most?
One of those childhood games that never seems to go out of fashion is hide and seek. We’ve probably all played it at one time or another. It’s funny to watch little children who “hide” by covering their own eyes. They think they’re hidden but we can see them plain as day.
I really upped my game as a young teenager when I found the perfect hiding place in my house, one where I could never be found. See, we had a dormer that converted one side of our attic to bedrooms and the other side had long storage closets that were short in height but spanned almost the entire width of the house.
In between the side of the cedar closet in my bedroom and the partial wall at the end of the hallway closet was a narrow space. And if I worked my way around that partial wall in the hall closet, I could climb into that gap. It became my secret little hideaway, a place where I would hide from my seeking friends.
In a way, it worked too well. Isn’t it true that in most games of hide and seek you really sort of want to be found? At least eventually.
So often we feel desperate to find God. So why does God seem to hide from us?
Even the prophets and psalmists felt like God was in hiding. Yet, woven throughout today’s scriptures is the powerful assurance: God also longs to be found by us and is always reaching out, seeking relationship, meeting us in our need and calling us by name.
Isaiah 65 opens with God’s declaration, “I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me.” Even when God’s people seemed distant, preoccupied, or rebellious, God’s arms remained open. Sometimes, we imagine God as aloof, too holy to approach, or disappointed in our failures. Yet, Isaiah flips that assumption on its head. God says, “Here I am, here I am!”—eager to engage with us, even when we turn away.
Psalm 22 echoes this with a profound promise: “God did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; God did not hide his face from me but heard when I cried to him.” This is not the picture of a distant deity, but of a loving presence that bends close to our suffering and is attentive to every cry.
Then why do we feel disconnected? Maybe it’s us who are in hiding.
We can hide from God behind routines, religious practices done by habit rather than heart, or the toxic belief that we’re not good enough for God to come near. But God doesn’t require perfection—just honesty and a willingness to reach out.
When we cry out, we are promised that God hears and knows us. We simply need to remember our deep connectedness to the One who made us and turn our hearts toward God. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, speaks directly to those of us who struggle with the feeling that we must earn God’s love or prove ourselves worthy through rules and rituals.
Paul discovered that some of the Galatian communities were teaching that believers still needed to observe the Mosaic Law. But Paul, with passion and clarity, reaffirms the gospel of justification by faith alone. He writes, “The law was our guardian until Christ came.” The law had a role; it was a guide, a tutor. But it was never meant to define us or be the source of our identity.
The law serves to separate, to differentiate, to mark who is acceptable by the group and who is not. But this is not how God operates. The law is not what gives us identity – our identity comes universally from God.
Our true identity, Paul reveals, is as beloved children of God. “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith… There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, all barriers fall away. Division, comparison, and the question of who is “in” or “out” melt before the radical unity of God’s love.
This theme of liberation and restoration is illustrated powerfully in Luke 8, where Jesus meets the man possessed by demons, living among the tombs—isolated, tormented, and “not in his right mind.” He was hiding because he was a danger to himself and others, and had been rejected by his community.
Many of us know what it feels like to be rejected and unmoored, to lose sight of our true selves, to be chained by forces we can’t control—be they fears, regrets, resentments, or crushing depression and anxiety. But Jesus doesn’t shy away from this demon-possessed man. No, he steps right into his hiding place of chaos and pain, confronts the demons, and restores the man to wholeness. After his encounter with Jesus, the man is “clothed and in his right mind.”
Jesus breaks every chain and reveals the person’s true identity—a beloved child of God, restored to community.
What are the “demons” in our own lives? Sometimes they’re the voices that tell us we’re unworthy, the wounds that separate us from others, or the habits that keep us stuck. Sometimes they’re the societal shadows that divide us from one another, that tell us that people in another country are our enemies when they want the same things from life that we want.
But Christ comes to each one of us, in our brokenness, in our hiddenness, and calls us back to ourselves and to God.
Friends, God is not hiding from us. God is not waiting for us to become perfect. God is calling us, even now, saying, “Here I am!” God yearns for us to come out of our hiding, to come out of the narrow places in which we’ve hidden ourselves, and to trust that we are loved beyond measure.
Let us cease our hiding and seek God with open hearts, confident that God is seeking us, too. Let us welcome Christ’s liberating love, that breaks every chain and restores us to community, to belonging, to wholeness. And let us go forth, as children of God, to share this good news with a world hungry for healing and hope.
Amen.
