Just a little less than a month ago, as many of you know, my wife’s father passed away very suddenly. Of course, we all hurried to get together, and then, as families do in times like that, we began to tell stories. We remembered how he used to say this or how he once did that. And one story we told came from deep down in my wife’s memory. Margaret remembers how, as a small child in Birmingham -- that’s Birmingham in England and not Birmingham in Alabama -- as a small child she spent many a night in a bomb shelter, because it was wartime, and that industrial city in the north of England was a prime target.
By the way, far any of you who may harbor certain suspicions about either Margaret’s age or mine, that was the Second, the second World War!
But once the air raid warning sounded, the whole family would have to go into the shelter until the "all clear" was sounded. Now what do you do in a bomb shelter? You might pray; you might try to sleep; you might just go into neutral and do nothing. But Margaret remembers her father, huddled over in a corner of the shelter, writing a book!
Imagine writing a book while bombs are falling outside! The concentration that would take; I don’t know about you, but I can’t write a grocery list if the TV is playing too loud! We reminisced and laughed about this wonderful scholar who could turn out a fine book of theology even though Nazi nightmares were all around him, threatening his very existence. It almost seems absurd, until you think about it a little more.
You see, maybe the shelter, maybe the hiding place, actually gave him a chance to concentrate that he couldn’t find any place else. It gave him the focus to do what he wanted to do. After all, he was the pastor of a church, and that’s demanding. He was the pastor of a Baptist church, and that’s more than demanding. You know the nursery rhyme about that, don’t you? "Mary had a little lamb; it would have been a sheep. But it became a Baptist and died far lack of sleep." Maybe this hiding place, this bomb shelter, actually gave him a kind of concentration he couldn’t get anyplace else.
And more than that, you need to know that the book that came out of the bomb shelter was called, "The Christian Understanding of History." It was all about how we can understand what God is doing when the world is being destroyed. It was an attempt to think out, "Where is God when the world is crashing down around your ears?" And so, you see, maybe the bomb shelter, maybe the place to hide from death and destruction, was even a kind of laboratory. It was a unique setting in which to learn and reflect and speak about that theme. Maybe without the hiding place there would have been no great book at all.
This morning I want you to see that we can use the hiding places in our lives to give us security. And because of that security in the middle of confusion, we can create something fine and noble.
When you live in a world which is in a mess … and we do … when you live in a world which is in a mess, you will need a hiding place. You can use the hiding place just as a place to hide and nothing else, just as a shelter and nothing more. Or you can use the hiding place as a tool to equip you for something noble and great and creative.
That is the way I think of the Christian faith. And that is also the way I think of the Christian church. Our faith and our church are, for many of us, hiding places. We need them. It’s stormy out there. And you can just rest here if you want to. Just hover behind the stained glass and sleep on the pews and burrow around in the Bible, and that’s it. Or you can use this hiding place as a moment of respite in which and through which you can become prepared for wonderful, noble things.
Let’s dig deeper into this truth. Let’s enlist the prophet Isaiah to help us. Isaiah is going to show us what kinds of things can happen if you make proper use of the hiding place. And Isaiah will teach us that even if you are a church moue, hiding in the church, you don’t just hide. You hide in order to become something special.
I’m going to ask you to follow the Biblical material very carefully. Page 575 pew Bibles. And stay with it.
I
The first thing that Isaiah teaches us is that we do need hiding places. We do need shelters. Things get tough, and you need to have a place to retreat. Isaiah puts it this way:
“Like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest … like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.” You see, we are so constructed that we cannot just go on, facing challenge after challenge, day after day, without a break. We are not machines; we cannot just keep on running and running without some rest. We need a hiding place.
For some of us it’s important to have just a time of quiet. Just a few moments to kick off the shoes and tune out the blare and be quiet. That’s a hiding place. And one of the sicknesses of our time is that we are so surrounded with sound, so bombarded by noise, that we have no quiet time.
This is part of what our faith gives us. And it is part of what worship gives us, part of what the church gives us. God in His infinite wisdom prescribed that we work six days and then get a Sabbath, a rest.
At least one hour in the week when we can focus, we can be relatively quiet, we can hide. And it’s all right. It’s something we need. “A hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest … like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.”
II
But then, watch. Isaiah begins to teach us what this hiding place can mean. What are the benefits of crouching in the hiding place? What do you get when you worship and what is offered you by being a part of the hiding place called church?
Isaiah says that what you get is good preventive maintenance! You get to make a good thing even better. Your abilities, your capacities, are kept in tune if you stop in at the hiding place. Look at it:
Catch it? The eyes of those who already have sight will not be closed; you can keep on functioning. The ears of those who have hearing will listen; when you use the hiding place, the skills you already have, the human and spiritual skills you’ve already developed, these will be maintained.
The opposite side of the coin is burnout. Spiritual burnout. If you do not worship regularly; if you do not pray consistently; if you do not share in reflection and in fellowship frequently …in other words, if you do not hide from time to time in the hiding place, you will burn out. You will labor under the delusion that you can face all the turmoil in the streets and all the stress on your job alone, and you cannot. You cannot. If you do not run … not walk, but run … to the people of God for your support, then you will be reamed out inside like some hollow tree. You might look good, but let a storm cane along and you will crash. No inner support.
We’ve been in the presence of that old enemy death a lot in the last few weeks. Several families in this church have been touched by its cold hand. And in every instance I’ve found myself wondering, ’’What in the world do people do if they have no faith, no prayer life, no church friends?" How do they cope at all? It must be miserable.
But hear the word of the prophet. If you repair to the hiding place, if you employ your faith and engage your church, "then the eyes of those who have sight will not be closed, and the ears of those who have hearing will listen." You’ll find you can maintain yourself. You can keep going. You simply need a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest … the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
III
But now, watch again, because Isaiah takes us a step farther. He promises more than the maintenance of your spiritual skills. He tells you you can have even more than good preventive maintenance. He also tells you that in the hiding place you can fix what is broken, you can repair what is running down. And the way Isaiah puts it is unforgettable:
Count on the Bible to tell the unvarnished truth. Trust the Scriptures to tell it the way it is! A whole lot of us fit into the categories he is naming: we are rash, making poor decisions. We are stammerers, not knowing our own minds. We are, in a word, fools and villains, trying to pretend to be philosophers and saints!
And Isaiah, bless his truth-telling hide, says, "Do you know what? You get in that hiding place, you get in that safe place, that caring place called the church, and they are going to fix you.”
First, they are going to help you, rash and impetuous as you are … they are going to help you learn how to make good decisions. They are going to teach you the Bible, they are going to confront you face to face and tell you what they think. And because it IS a hiding place, a secure place, you aren’t going to have to worry about messing up; they are going to pick you up when you stumble. But if you are in the hiding place, "the minds of the rash will have good judgment, and tongues of stammerers will speak readily and distinctly.”
In the bomb shelter, you’re going to learn what you should think and how to communicate it. You may not write a book of theology, but you will learn to live good theology in the hiding place.
And, what is more … and I really like this … in the hiding place they are going to know you for exactly who you are. And they’re going to love you anyway.
In the hiding place, says Isaiah, "A fool will no longer be called noble, nor a villain said to be honorable." Wow! No more game-playing. We put on poses for the world, but they get exposed in the church. You hang out around here for a while; you get involved in a few things; you do some work for the church; and I will guarantee you that the real you will cane out. There’ll be no more mask-wearing. The prancing, preening posturing won’t work. In the church, we learn to know the truth about each other. "A fool will no longer be called noble, nor a villain said to be honorable."
But guess what? We know the truth and love each other anyway. We love each other in spite of what we know. To be candid, sane of you know enough about me and the quirks in my personality to run me out of the country. And while you sit there and grin knowingly, I know enough about some of you to put you into the intensive care unit! A lot of folks in this church have been together enough that "a fool will no longer be called noble, nor a villain said to be honorable."
But we have something going for us that you don’t have in the workplace. You don’t have it on the streets. We care for each other. We love each other. We are huddled together in the hiding place called church, and we’ve learned the truth about each other, but we’ve also learned that every last one of us is a sinner saved by grace. No more game-playing!
In the hiding place, in the church there is enough security, there is enough safety, that you can be confronted with who you really are, but you can grow from it instead of being destroyed by it. It just takes being in the hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest … the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
IV
Now, stay with me, and we’ll finish this off. We’ll move right along to the bottom line. Isaiah has taught us that in a stormy world we are going to need a hiding place, a quiet place, a community of respite. And then Isaiah taught us that when you have that hiding place, you can get good preventive spiritual maintenance done, you can avoid spiritual burnout. Next this great prophet showed us that the security of a hiding place, the safety of a community of people who know the truth about each other and love each other anyway – that security helps us grow up.
Now, finally, Isaiah will teach us that when you’ve let the hiding place do its work for you, you will be changed, you will be transformed, and you will become creative for the Kingdom. There is something the hiding place is preparing you for, and that something is to be on mission for the Kingdom. But you must have the experience of the hiding place first.
"Those who are noble plan noble things." A minute ago Isaiah said that in the church we aren’t going to let fools pass themselves off as noble and wise. Yes, but now he speaks of noble people, good and fine people. I think Isaiah is telling us that people get changed in the hiding place. People get transformed in the church. And when they do, they do the most astounding and wonderful things.
You see, they say you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Well, maybe you can’t, but God can, and Gods church can. They say that the leopard will not change his spots. Well, maybe he won’t, by himself. But God can wipe out his spots and God’s people can turn spots and stains into rainbows. And when that happens, when fools become nobles, the most astounding things are done for the Kingdom.
A number of years ago I met and heard Jim Vaus. Jim Vaus had been a criminal. He had been involved in organized crime. He had run numbers for the old Mickey Cohen gang in Florida and in New York. He had been at least accessory to murder if not the actual triggerman. And Jim Vaus had gone to prison.
But in prison there were some folks who kept coming back, kept coming back. They visited, they shared the Scriptures, they talked with Jim about his life. Obviously they knew everything there was to know about Jim Vaus. They knew he had stolen, they realized he had seen to the deaths of some people, they were aware of his sordid past. But they just loved him. They made him feel that there in that hot, uncomfortable, hopeless prison, there was a secure place for him. There was somebody who just cared about Jim.
One day Jim Vaus met the Lord. He came to know Christ as his savior. And when his term was up and he got out of prison, Jim Vaus, once, as Isaiah put it, a fool practicing ungodliness, organized a Christian ministry to the street gangs in a part of New York City aptly named Hell’s Kitchen. The fool practicing ungodliness has become a noble planning noble things.
All it took was a hiding place. All it took was a community of the people of God who knew the importance of quiet and of prayer and of worship and of love in their own lives. All it took was a man, however flawed and however dishonorable, given just a safe place, a place where he could be accepted.
All it took was trust. Trust in the one who more than any other is able to provide a hiding place for us. For if you understand the cross of our Christ, you understand that He hung naked and lost before the world, so that we might be saved. If you know the Cross of our Christ, you know that there He was stretched out and exposed to the storm, so that we might have shelter. If you have seen the Cross of our Christ, you have seen that there He was defenseless before all the powers of evil, so that we might be defended against everything that can destroy. If you have heard the old, old story of the Cross of our Christ, you have heard how they called him "fool" so that we might today be called noble sons and daughters of the Most High.
He is our hiding place. And "Beneath the Cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand, the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land; a home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way, from the burning of the noontide heat and the burden of the day."
“Thank you, Lord, for saving my soul. Thank you, Lord, for making me whole. Thank you, Lord, for giving to me Thy great salvation so rich and free."
In the hiding place, those who have become noble can plan noble things.
