Will you pray with me?  Gracious God, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight.  Amen.

Before church today and again after it, in our “The Church in the World” educational series, we learned about the churches and the individuals of the Protestant Reformation, about their theology, history, and worship.  I want to continue with that theme and say a word about the Reformers here as well, but before we get to them, I want to tell you about another group.

You may not know it, but there are people operating in this country who have made it their business to go through the world hiding, in the most unlikely of spots, inside stone walls and behind signs and in hollow trees, under plants and in public buildings, in cities and towns and forests and parks throughout these United States, small boxes.  You have, I’m willing to bet, walked by these carefully hidden boxes yourself, never suspecting that they were there.  Those who find these boxes, either because they know where to look or because they stumble upon them accidentally, find cached inside them an array of small, odd objects, from photos to key chains to little toys to coins to business cards to.  For the most part, these objects have little to no intrinsic value, but should you ever find yourself witness to the finders of these boxes opening them, you’ll see them digging and sorting gleefully through their contents, as excited as young children rooting through their stockings on Christmas morning.  You might see them carefully choose something from the pile, then dig into a pocket, fish something out, and drop it into the box.

Then, you’d see them pull from each box a pad and a writing utensil and write something down, then glance cautiously around to make sure no one was watching, tuck the box carefully back into its hiding place under a rock or inside an electrical panel, and hurry off.

Who are these people, and what are they doing?  Well, they are not terrorists planning something horrible, or drug dealers making the drop, or embedded spies engaged in cloak-and-dagger maneuvers.  They’re actually playing a gigantic, worldwide treasure hunting game called geocaching.  It works like this: someone hides a box in a clever place somewhere.  In the box, she places a supply of tchotchkes and a logbook.  Then she uses a small, handheld computer called a Global Positioning System, or GPS, unit to connect to orbiting satellites and determine the exact latitude and longitude of the treasure cache she has just created.  She then posts the coordinates of her cache, along with clues about exactly where to look once one reaches the coordinates, on a Website, whose address is, not surprisingly, www.geocaching.com.  Sooner or later, someone else logs onto the site and sees the posting for her cache and, his own GPS unit in hand, heads out to discover its location.  Once he does, usually after much thrashing around in the bushes or sketchy skulking around public places, he opens the box, sorts through the trinkets that those before him have left behind, and leaves behind a token of his own.  He then signs and dates the logbook and replaces the cache in its hiding place, ready for the next searcher to find.  Once home, he will log back into the Website to leave comments for the “owner” of the cache and for future searchers to aid or warn them in their quests.

It may seem like a funny pastime, one that appeals to only a small and odd group of people, and that’s probably true.  But there are no fewer than 2,396 of these caches hidden in the state of Massachusetts alone; 47 of them are within 5 miles of Old South Church.  There are 82 within 7 miles.  Within a ten mile radius, there are 170 geocaches.  Think about that.  Within ten miles of this place, there are 170 treasures hidden, lying just beneath the surface of what the world sees, secret boxes waiting to be discovered.  If you’ve ever walked along Tremont Street between Park and School Streets, you’ve passed right by one.  If you’ve ever been to the Museum of Science or gone on a Duck Tour, you’ve been very near to one.  Been to the Fenway or Post Office Square?  You’ve walked right by one and didn’t even know it.  In fact, unless you were looking and had the guidance of the Web and a GPS unit, you’ve probably walked right by quite a few.

“We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth,” says Philip to Nathanael.  “The Messiah, the Anointed One is among us!”  Now, what I want to know when I hear this story, and what Nathanael seems to want to know as well, is: how did he know that Jesus was the one?  In the stories we tell, Jesus was the kind of person that one might walk right past without even noticing: Joseph’s son, a carpenter’s son, from a tiny backwater village in Galilee, a backwater province of an otherwise powerful and glorious empire.  The story doesn’t really tell us what Jesus looked like, but that in itself suggests that he probably didn’t look like much of anything special at all.  A sort of normal person of sort of normal provenance.  And yet Philip comes running, saying, “Come and see!”

So how does he know?  Well, in the part of the story just before what we read today, John the Baptizer tells a gathered crowd that he is the one of whom the ancient Jewish scriptures spoke when they referred to the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “make straight the way of the Lord.”  Later, moved by the Spirit when he sees Jesus walk by, he calls Jesus the “Lamb of God”, the very scriptural symbol of God’s deliverance.  And Andrew and Peter, the first disciples, hear him, and are convinced.  And then in today’s story, Jesus finds Philip, and Philip goes to Nathanael with these words: “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus.”  He, like John, points to the writings of his people as the means by which to understand what he is experiencing.

John, moved by the Spirit and informed by the Scriptures, looks at the Jesus everyone else has just walked past, and knows him for treasure.  And likewise Andrew, and Peter, and Philip and Nathanael, moved by the same Spirit and informed by those same Scriptures, come to see the treasure hidden beneath the surface of the peasant from Nazareth.

The Spirit and the scriptures are the tools these ones use.  For centuries, the wise and the foolish among their people had worked, and prayed, and preached, and worshiped, and down through those long ages, always had the Spirit of God been with them, inspiring them to leave behind a record of their experiences with God, making them careful to tell the tales of what they had seen and heard, and to point to the places in life and in humanity and in the world where God’s treasure is to be found.  Each had learned and grown and taken from what had come before, and each had left behind his or her own pointers for those who would come later.  And ever had the Spirit been with those who came after, guiding their reading and their retelling of the old, old stories, opening hearts and minds and communities to be transformed and redirected to the unexpectedly sacred places where God was to be found.

I believe that among the many theological and practical gifts the Protestant Reformation gave us, there are two that are more important than any of the others:
• The first is the notion that our Scriptures—the same Scriptures that John and Philip and Jesus used, plus our Christian Scriptures, our stories of Jesus and of the early churches—the notion that they are primary guides for us on our journeys through the world, that they are the means by which we are taught where to search for the treasure hidden here and there throughout the creation, the posts left behind by those who have passed this way before to help us not walk all unknowing past God’s grace.
• The second is the notion of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that all people, you and me and everyone, have equal access to God and to the workings of the Spirit.  It is the notion that God touches, and guides, and speaks hope to each of us individually, that God cherishes each individual of God’s creation so deeply that God is pleased to be on intimate terms with each of us, and that when in community we name and share and discern the truths we believe have learned from God as individuals, that God herself shines forth in our midst.

The Reformers, and I, believed that when we let these two, Spirit and Scripture, come together, we begin to see God everywhere we look, especially in the most mundane places, the kinds of places we walk past every day.

Those of us who are into Geocaching are into it for any number of reasons: because we’ll take any excuse to be spending time outside, because we like space-age gadgets and the idea of being connected to satellites, because we like learning of others’ favorite spots.  But for most of us, what it comes down to is this: there is no feeling in the world quite as wonderful as discovering treasure hidden right under your nose.

But while we geocachers entertain ourselves hiding and seeking fake treasures, the witness of the Reformers, and of the stories we tell, is that there is treasure—real treasure—everywhere around us, and the tools we need to find it are not the Web and GPS units, but the record of the faith set down by those who went before us, and an openness to the working of the Spirit in our lives together in community.  With these tools, we who follow Jesus are learning to see God everywhere we look:

-in bread and cup, the riches of the earth
-in the ones to our right and left and the ones far beyond our walls, and even in our enemies, who bear the treasure of their souls, the images of God
-in water and rebirth, in which are the riches of life
-in state torture devices made empty of victims and transformed into symbols of hope, in which lie hidden our resurrection,
-in the outstretched hands and open arms of brothers and sisters, which are the power for redemption
-in the nearness and the overwhelming love of the God who created us, in which lies the treasure of our salvation

 

By Spirit and scripture did Jesus reveal himself to Nathanael.  By Spirit and scripture did John, and Andrew and Philip know him for God’s chosen one.  By Spirit and Scripture, so may we.  Amen.