Ctrl + Alt + Delete.  After a morning prayer, that is how I start everyday:  Ctrl + Alt + Delete.  Those three computer keys are hit simultaneously to unlock my computer.  There is sort of a strange mantra about it that is comforting.  Those three little keys unleash an immediate connection to all things from a word from my mom in Kansas City to the latest changes in the wildcard standings of Major League Baseball.  I’m not the most technically savvy person but I actually learned some new techie things this week that fascinated me.  I learned about the challenge of landing a “Googlewhack”.  Googlewhacking is the invention of some people that would show up on the list of people with “too much time on their hands.”  A Googlewhack is found by typing two words in the search engine that, as a phrase, only appear once in a search of over three billion Web pages.  Give it a try some time…just type two words into the Google search line and see if you can pull a single search result… one of one.  It is much harder than it sounds.  

 

I also learned about breadcrumbs.  In computer lingo, this is a reference to the data often found at the top of a Web page that follows every place you have searched that given session.  Beginning with the Homepage, then a section title, page title, subpage title, and so on.  These strings are called “breadcrumbs” because they show the user where he or she came from, and they allow the user to link on any part of it to return at any time. It’s named for the old boy scout trick of marking your way in the woods by dropping pieces of bread along the way so you can find your way back to where you started.   

 

The prophet Jeremiah must have been a boy scout (or at least a part of the Geek Squad at Best Buy) because he knows the power of a bread trail.  In this text, through Jeremiah, God is giving Israel — and us — a way to come back home, to get back to where we started. They needed it… and so do we.

 

We find our ancestors lost … preoccupied with themselves, with the latest fad, with the pursuit of wealth in a community of commerce.  Value of the sacred was not all that important so Jeremiah speaks out.  You’ve got to love Jeremiah.  He had a pretty tough go with the whole prophet gig. He often said he didn’t want to do it anymore but that God’s spirit and will continued to burn in his belly where he could not help but let God loose.  Being a prophet wasn’t the most popular position for you were often the one who had difficult news to share.  We appreciate him from our vantage point.  It is easier to hear prophecy for someone else than it is to hear it for ourselves.  Jeremiah relays God’s question, “What wrong did you find with me that you have gone so far from me? … pursuing worthless things?”  This is the point where we do not often place ourselves in the story.  We haven’t gone far from God in pursuit of worthless things.  Instead, we think of our spouse, our children, our friends, or our rivals and think, “I really wish he was here today to listen to this message….he needs it.”  Or we hear in this text about those who have strayed from their faith, who are struggling with sin, weakness, and denial and we peek across the isle to make sure Joe or Jane Geist is paying attention.    

 

But this is a prophecy for all generations and it is a call to make prophecy personal.  This is a Nathan story where Jeremiah speaks as Nathan did to King David who had got caught up in sin, “You are the man” … you are the one who has strayed from God.  It is not fun to say.  It is not fun to hear.

 

The people of Israel had settled into their existence.  Despite God’s skillful leadership and protection Israel still wanted to come up with its own design for a nation that would rival those of the Canaanites — if they were going to build a new stadium, the Israelites wanted one that was bigger, better, and had a retractable dome of course.  Our ancestors pursued a design for their community that included a monarchy and a religious life where devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was supplemented and often supplanted by the worship of regional gods like Baal.   With this plan, God was not pleased. God is not even consulted on their plan…prayer is apparently no longer needed.  “They did not say, “Where is the Lord that has led us all along?  What must God think of this?”  That was a question that never got asked and one that we can easily bypass in our decision making too. 

 

Some of us here know the story of being left at the dance.  You rent the tuxedo, purchase the finest corsage you can find at Kroger, pick up your date in your dad’s freshly polished Crown Victoria, enjoy a nice dinner at Skyline Chili, and get to the dance only to find your date dancing with everyone but you.  God got dressed up, led the people through the Red Sea, treated them with a meal of manna, protected them through many hardships, and when they arrive at the dance, the land of “plenty”, the people dance with everyone but God.  They enjoy one another, they do the tango with Baal, and the one true God is left on the dance floor alone. 

 

We can easily forget where we have been and who has carried us through the difficult times. We get tunnel vision.  We see only that which is on our agenda.  We lose our awareness of the needs of the world.  We lose our awareness of the beauty that is all around us.  We lose our awareness of God. 

 

A young man in the DC area emerged from the metro at a busy plaza where thousands of workers, mostly government employees, milled about, buying coffee, lottery tickets, and having their shoes shined.  By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. He removed a violin from a case he was carrying.  He opened the case before him on the ground and tossed in a couple of bucks and spare change as seed money and began to play.

 

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by.  As you have maybe experienced in our own city occasionally, you have some decisions to make when you pass a street performer.  You can pretend to be talking on your cell phone and hurry by, feeling somewhat guilty and somewhat irritated that someone would be so demanding of your time, money, and sidewalk space. You could toss whatever change you have in the musician’s case.  You could of course stop and listen, but time virtually never permits that kind of luxury. 

 

What many would only find out later was that this man was planted as an experiment to see if people could appreciate beauty anymore or if people are so self-consumed that they miss greatness that is within their own reach.  The violinist was none other than world renowned musician, Joshua Bell.  I learned this week that Bell is actually linked by marriage to someone who frequents our church and he hails from Bloomington, Indiana so in a sense, he is one of our own.  In this common space, Bell played the most vigorous and difficult pieces ever written for the violin on his handcrafted, 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius made in the year 1713.  The Post feared that this experiment could cause chaos … many would recognize him, crowds would gather, a mob scene would break out.  And yet that was hardly the case.

 

Three minutes went by before Bell even received a glance in his direction.  Those standing in line for lottery tickets with nothing to do but wait, didn’t even gaze in his direction as they waited their turn.  A few tossed in change to which someone later gasped after finding out it was Bell as though they had tossed pennies at God.  All in all, Bell raked in about $32 in an hour including his own seed money.  He laughed at himself, “At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cell phone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.  Bell continued, “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible.  Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”[1]

In the days of Jeremiah, God was saying the same thing and he is saying it again today.  “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible… because, you know what?  I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”  God was not on the radar screen and Jeremiah’s task was to get God back on it.  “Look even at the other nations,” Jeremiah writes, “even they have not changed their gods, even though their gods are no gods at all”.  “But you have traded in the glory of the Almighty God for something that does not profit.”  It is as if God is invisible. 

 

Is God invisible to you?  to our nation?  We can reason God out of a job.  We can rely fully on ourselves to create a nation, and a god, that suits our needs to the point where we can not see the true God at all.  On the two year anniversary of hurricane Katrina this week, we go and wave to the people there saying “all looks well”.  Genocide in Darfur takes a backseat because it is “over there” and we don’t really know what’s happening there anyway.  IPS school children in our own city cannot even afford the clothing necessary to meet the new uniform codes.  We can’t see it.  We can’t see God.  And mostly it is because God is not waving in New Orleans or caught up in his own schedule … God is holding the hand of the child in New Orleans who has no home and no school to attend; God is in Darfur with a mother giving up her child to strangers in hopes they will not be killed senselessly; God is in the midst of need, weaving the beautiful amidst the horrific to say hope and grace and love still abound.  But like our ancestors, have we found ourselves far from God?  Out of touch with the beauty and need that is all around?

 

Our children are watching us.  It’s a case of the old Harry Chapin song, “Cat’s in the Cradle” … a case where we are too busy to be with our children, to show them love, laughter … to show them God, and suddenly there is no more time.  The Post writer of the Joshua Bell story said that “every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.”  Our children, having been most recently close to God, seem to have a keen sense about where God is in the world.  Yet, thinking we know better, we scoot them along because God becomes invisible to us.  In so doing, our kids learn to live as we live and they lose the wonder and ability to see God too.

 

“Be appalled, O heavens, at this … be shocked”.  It is a dark scripture for us to consider.  One where we have forsaken God, the fountain of living water and dug out cisterns of our own that have the capacity to hold nothing.  It is a dark thing to think about…especially on a holiday weekend when we really just need a break.  But it is a moment for us to be honest for a while about the places in our lives where we have pursued our own gods and found ourselves lost.  We have turned from the very Best to pursue the inferior rest.  It is an opportunity to look for a trail back to God, the source from whom we came. 

 

This is why forgiveness is necessary and why it is an extraordinary gift.  Jeremiah offers us a chance to see what our lives are like, acknowledge God’s accusation as accurately applying to us, and then turn back to God.  We have a Christ that broke bread, and left a trail of crumbs to the cross so that we might find him again.  Jeremiah writes in the following chapter, “Return, faithless Israel, says the Lord.  I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, I will not be angry forever.  I will take you in… I will give you shepherds for guidance … I’ll give you knowledge and understanding … I’ll give you a home to come back to.” (Jeremiah 3: 12-18)

 

A woman spent years raising her daughter the best she knew how. Her husband abandoned her years ago when her baby girl was still in the womb. The road was long, tough, and not without numerous heartaches. At seventeen, the daughter believed a better life could be made outside of the home her mother had tried to maintain, and she left. A mother, knowing well the trials and evil of the world, sought after her. This mother posted pictures of herself everywhere she was allowed. She wrote messages on the pictures that would let her only daughter know how much she loved her and that she could come home again. After months and months of doing this, the mother was exasperated and found herself at home weary and alone. In the meantime, the daughter did get caught up in doing whatever had to be done to have money for food and survival. Though she thought life would be great on her own -- she found that she was miserable. One day, she noticed a picture on a telephone pole of her mother. She was astonished. She pulled the photo from the pole, turned it over and read the message her mother had written ... “No matter what you’ve done, no matter who you've become, please come home. She did and her mother embraced her. [2]

God invites us to remember the mercies and grace of God, to look back at “breadcrumbs,” and if we will follow those mercies, those stories, those events, those words, we will find our way back to God.  We worship a Googlewhack God… a one of a kind… a one of one.  Look around you… see God.  When a child is slowing you down, perhaps they have slowed because God has captured their imagination.  See what they see.  Hear what they hear.  And when you have gone wayward and locked God out of your life, hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete and unlock your life to a beautiful Grace only God can offer.  God is busy posting pictures anywhere you might see it…on street corners, in offices, in homes, on soccer fields, on friends, on children.  Find one, turn it over, and read those words of welcome written for you … “No matter what you’ve done, no matter who you’ve become, please come home.”  

 

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