There is a stretch of road between Millen and Augusta that I have driven so many times I could not tell you a single thing about my trip down it last Sunday afternoon. It’s always the same. Same turns, same traffic, same mile markers out the window. Nothing about it registered. That is not a complaint about US HWY-25. It is a confession about me. So much of my life happens in places I have stopped taking notice of, ordinary places that have gotten so familiar I have quit expecting to see anything there at all.
That is exactly where our new sermon series begins.
This Sunday we start a three-week series called God Is Here? Note the question mark in the title. It’s not there because we are unsure whether God shows up. It’s there because of what Jacob says when he wakes up in Genesis 28: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Read that carefully. Jacob does not say God arrived. Jacob says he did not know. The problem was never God’s absence. The problem was Jacob’s attention.
And look at the shape Jacob is in. He is on the run. He has just lied to his dying father, cheated his brother Esau out of a blessing, and left home because Esau has promised to kill him. He stops at that particular spot for the least spiritual reason imaginable: the sun went down. So he puts a rock under his head and goes to sleep. And God meets him right there, with no rebuke, no probation period, no conditions. “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”
Grace shows up before Jacob has done one thing to deserve it. That is the backbone of this whole series. God shows up in the places and the situations we would never have picked, and God comes with a promise: to be with us, and to keep us wherever we go.
Here is where we are headed over these next three weeks:
September 13
The Place You Least Expect
Genesis 28:10-22
September 20
The Worst Possible Moment
Acts 16
September 27
Right In Front Of You
Luke 24
Three different settings: A stopover in the middle of nowhere. A prison cell at midnight. A dusty road walked by two people so weighed down with grief that they do not recognize the risen Christ walking beside them.
Not one of those is a sanctuary. Not one of those is a moment anybody would have chosen. And God is present in every single one of them. My hope for these three weeks is not that you will try harder to find God. It is that you will discover God has been with you the whole time, and that the noticing is the thing that changes us.
Which brings me to something else happening during this series.
On September 13, 16, and 20 our Ministry Fair will be set up in the PPEC Hallway. The displays will stay up across that whole window, so you can walk through before or after worship, or stop by during the week and take your time.
I want to be clear about why we are running it alongside this series and not on some other Sunday. Jacob marks the place with the very stone he had used as a pillow. Same ordinary rock. New purpose. That is what the Ministry Fair is asking of us. Not that you take on one more obligation, but that you look at what is already in your hands. Your ordinary Tuesday. Your skills. Your street. Your neighbors in this community. And that you consider God may already be at work right there, waiting on you to notice.
Come see. Bring somebody with you. And keep your eyes open this month for the places God has been at work all along, where we just had not realized it yet.
God bless,
Jonathan Smith
For Jesus. For People. For Community.