[Sing] I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am … IN BIG TROUBLE!

That’s pretty much the way Adam and Eve must have felt when they heard the voice of God calling to them in the garden after their sin. No syrup on their pancakes, no sugar in their coffee.

We’ve been tracking their story for the past few weeks and seeing how it is our story, too. We got off to a good start, but a garden snake in the grass chased us up a tree and we bit into a sour apple. We saw immediately that we were in trouble when we looked at each other and saw “nekedness” instead of nakedness. You know the difference, don’t you? Naked is when you have no clothes on; “neked” is when you have no clothes on and you’re up to something.

Well, Adam and Eve had been up to something, all right. They had broken faith with God and tried to live on their own terms. They had forgotten the generosity of God and had tried to live by their own ingenuity. And all at once the music changed from the warm baritone and cozy sweater of Perry Como to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” Maybe even Led Zeppelin looking for a “stairway to heaven.”

Apparently the man and the woman were used to meeting up with God for an evening stroll in the garden. Maybe the dew was still on the roses. The Hebrew language is as lush as the garden itself. They heard the “rustle of God’s step” in the cool of the evening. Nice. It once was a welcome sound. No more. This night and every night since, the man and his wife and all their progeny hide from the sound of God’s step.

Hiding is an instinct early learned. When Jillian was 4, she got angry at her big sister, Cameron. She marched into Cameron’s room and found her brand new 8x10 third-grade school picture. She grabbed some scissors and cut Cameron’s picture in two, right between the eyes. As soon as she did, her own eyes were opened, and she realized what she had done. So she hightailed it downstairs and hid under the dining room table. Guess she figured since we never go there, we’d never find her there.

We never learn, do we? We never learn that we can run but we cannot hide. And yet hiding is our first instinct. Protecting ourselves against the consequences of our actions. They hide in shadows, said President Bush of the terrorists we seek after September 11, but they can’t hide forever. No, they can’t. And neither can any of us.

We hide when we lie to cover up our behavior. I told you a few months ago about the time my parents found a Michelob in the freezer. They’d been away and I was 16. Had some friends over. BYOB, don’t you know?! Well, I thought I’d covered up, hidden well. Didn’t. When Mom held up the beer, I said it was Kenny Christiansen. Kenny wasn’t a Christian, I told her. And after my mother got through with his mother, well, he wasn’t about to become one. So I told you the story, wrote it down, posted it on our web site, and next thing I know, Kenny’s brother Gordon was doing a people search on the Internet and found a hit under my name. He read the sermon and e-mailed me. Don’t want you to feel guilty but…, he said. He asked me to pray for Kenny. He’s a New York firefighter. Lost a lot of friends. Still not a Christian.

Lying is one futile way we hide. Lying has a respectable half-brother named denial. Denial has been on display recently, publicly, eloquently, and inelegantly by politicians. Sex is always a popular cause for hiding through denial, but so are other sins. Like greed. When the heads of all the tobacco companies went before a Senate committee and all answered that they did not believe cigarette smoking causes cancer, they were hiding in broad daylight. Lying and denial are two ways of hiding from being found guilty. But others hide from fear of being found and loved. They have been hurt and so they make sure they never put themselves in position to be hurt again. They put on weight to put off potential lovers. Or they stay away from social settings, lest they give anyone the impression they are interested in friendship.

We are even more Adam and Eve-like when we try to hide from God. Something happens to us and we think God let us down, so we turn off the communications system with heaven. We quit praying, quit acknowledging that God is even there. We quit going to church and figure if we can just pretend God isn’t there, maybe …? No.

Here’s the problem. God has this thing for us. Not exactly like our obsession to find Osama bin Laden, but something like it. We hide and God seeks. God misses us and comes looking for us. Where are you? God calls out. And this is one of the most penetrating questions in all the Bible. The inquest begins. Where are you?

As if God doesn’t know! But this is the nature of God—relentless pursuer, seeker of our soul, Hound of Heaven, as the poet Francis Thompson put it. We hide from God because we fear God, but what we find is that our only hope is in letting ourselves get caught. We cannot live apart from God— even in our guilt—because we cannot live without love. As Thompson says at the end of his poem: Halts by me that footfall:/ Is my gloom, after all,/ Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? After running and hiding from God in every conceivable way, it occurs to him that maybe the cause of his sadness is God, who makes him aware of his need for love. In the end, God says: “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,/ I am He Whom thou seekest!/ Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.” Push God away and all you do is push love away.

But when we have disobeyed, rebelled, sinned in any way, our first impulse is not to think of God as a loving friend we can’t live without. We think of God as an enemy we can’t live with.

In my father’s house, the weapon of choice for punishment was one of my dad’s leather belts. To this day I hear it, as if in Dolby Surround Sound, the sound of his closet door opening. A wooden door on rails. Small steel wheels grinding against dry steel rails. The crash of the wood door against the jamb. The jingle of the metal buckles as he selected just the right strap. I ran for the living room, for a chair I hid behind to protect my behind. He always found me, pulled me out of hiding, turned me around in more ways than one.

I wonder what would happen if he hadn’t loved me enough to pursue me like that, to hold me accountable. What would my life have been if I had successfully hid from my father forever? Lonely. Self-absorbed. Not good. I needed to be found, and I needed to answer for my crimes.

I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Yeah, I am Adam. And so are you. But listen again. I heard…I was afraid…I was naked…I hid. I, I, I, I. Our will to independence from God leads to a preoccupation with ourselves. We fall from being at home with God and others to a world where we can only see ourselves when we look out of our eyes. The eyes that should be our windows to the world become instead mirrors reflecting our own insecurity.

God stays on the offensive. Not only does God know where Adam is and yet asks, Where are you?, God knows what he has done and yet asks, What have you done? God doesn’t come looking for us in order to make us feel guilty. We are already hardwired for that. God comes looking for us in order to give us a chance to do something with our guilt. God asks us first; God doesn’t convict before we can confess.

I asked my family about this story at dinner the other night. Why does God ask when God already knows? Omniscient high school senior, Cameron, got right to it: Confession is not for God; it’s for us, she said. We need to confess so that we can feel forgiveness. Why didn’t I think of that? Frederick Buechner agrees with Cameron: To confess your sins to God is not to tell him anything he doesn’t already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the bridge. [Wishful Thinking, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 15]

Crossing that bridge is the last thing we want to do, though. Crossing the confession bridge means walking away from the very thing we ran to. We’ve got to admit we were wrong and that we dug a canyon deep and wide between us and God. We’d rather hang out on the other side and blame others for our sin.

The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, and I ate. So it’s God’s fault for giving the woman to the man who couldn’t stand to be alone. And it’s the woman’s fault for misleading the man. Poor fellow. Everyone conspiring against him.

Some years ago Metropolitan Life Insurance Company published a list of actual auto accident claims. Some of my favorites: An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished. Right. I backed into my neighbor’s parked car. It wasn’t my fault; he was supposed to be at work. Okay. I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment. Then, The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end. [“Metlines,” as cited in Proclaim (July-Sept 1988): 34]

Adam blames God and the woman, thus deepening his own loneliness, intensifying his preoccupation with self. Adam and Eve’s solidarity in sin leads to separation from God and each other, which is what always happens. Eve, for her part, keeps the blame game going. God asks her what she has done. The serpent tricked me, and I ate. So now the circle is complete. The humans are the only innocent ones. God above and the serpent below: they are the problem. Heaven has conspired to make our lives miserable. Animal instincts are at fault. If only we didn’t have these drives. It’s not the real us at fault; it’s the beast in us that’s to blame.

We come out of hiding when we take responsibility before God. What we find when we are found is that the hiding was cutting us off from the one thing we could not live without—the love of God. God does God’s part. God keeps coming after us, calling to us, looking for us with a fierce and painful love. Do you want to be found?

[Sing] Come out, come out, wherever you are!