It is the job of spiritual leaders to help people hone their spiritual radar. The leper today had very good spiritual radar, as he confronts Jesus as he is passing by. “If you choose, you can make me clean,” he tells him, for the leper’s skin disease is not contagious, but he is unable to enter the synagogue because the Jews believed he pollutes it with his terrible affliction.
The leper challenged Jesus to cross the barrier of pollution and uncleanness to touch him, and Jesus does. But it is the leper’s confrontation that stops the action, stops Jesus in his business of spreading the gospel, and Jesus has pity.
Why does the leper have this radar about Jesus, know where God is amongst the throngs clamoring for Jesus’s time? Had he heard ahead of time about him and lay waiting along the path he thought Jesus would be taking? Did he see in Jesus the eyes of compassion? Was he led there by a friend? Would we have been able to act so boldly on our own behalf to ask a Jewish teacher to touch us, one who would certainly see us as unclean, untouchable?
How do we find our spiritual radar, so that we know where God is?
First, the fact that you are here in this place of worship means you care about the answer to this question. You care enough to bring yourself, with all your own foibles, thanksgivings as well as challenges, to this altar for transformation. For if we do not seek transformation, we will not want to find God. God transforms our challenges into thanksgivings, transforms our foibles through forgiveness. Part of having spiritual radar is being willing to enter into this transformation. The poet W. H. Auden wrote that we would rather be ruined than changed. Often this is a just a stubborn unwillingness to hear the other side of the story. Sometimes we refuse to change out of the sense of comfort of where we are. But there can be no relationship with God if we are not open to the transformation that will come from being close to the will of the Creator who made us and sustains us.
So finding God with our spiritual radar can be about finding the places in ourselves that live outside the barrier, whether in self-imposed exile or from events that sweep us along in their path. Those are the places that God is most present to us—where we ache the most in our hurt, where we are the most bored and dispirited, where we are most mean and rejecting, either of ourselves or others, and where we are the most apt to find it nearly impossible to forgive ourselves or others.
But God’s presence may be hard to hear. Maybe we are too loud. God’s presence may be hard to see. Maybe we are looking in another place for another sign. God visits us through other people, through their compassionate, unconditional love of us, and we may be rejecting their love.
I believe that God comes to us when we least expect it and when we most need it but may not welcome it. Because we are human, we may want to cling to what is comfortable even when it is hurtful. So we sometimes put away our spiritual radar, make it stand down so we are not confronted by our own uncleanness.
Honing spiritual radar takes courage, therefore. In order to seek God’s presence, we may need to change our daily routine. For me prayer is the most important way to hone my radar. So taking time for at least a few quiet moments is crucial. Some may need to take those moments in the car on the way somewhere, or at breakfast or lunch or dinner. Or before going to sleep at night, or in the dead of night when sleep eludes you. Look at your prayer habits first.
Second, look at your habits of seeing and hearing others, for God is often all around us in our acquaintances, friends, and loved ones, but God can also visit us through total strangers. I have told the story of having my car totaled by a semi truck on I-65 and being attended to by total strangers in the middle of the highway. Maybe you have had a similar encounter where the hand of God reaches to comfort you. Make it a habit of looking for God’s presence in encounters with others, whether face to face, over even over cyber space.
Third, hone your spiritual radar by being here at worship. Here you are given space to pray, to confess those actions, words or lack of actions and words that need God’s healing. You have contact with other Christians who bolster your faith, give you courage for the week ahead, and are your personal cheerleaders in the faith. You are given the sustenance of the wine and bread, the body and blood of Christ. You take in the very essence of the divine nature of Christ. You embody God’s word living in the world. You receive the blessing to send you into the world to continue the work of Christ. In all these things your worship time builds up the strength of your spiritual life, makes your radar tuned and ready to hear God during the next week.
Lastly, hone your spiritual radar by using it. Keep your ear to the ground of God’s being. On Monday, I was part of a jury selection process. When it came time for me to answer questions, I told them I was in the business of forgiveness. I felt God’s presence in that secular courtroom that day, in the dignity with which each person was treated. God is where you may least expect to see a divine presence. Get your spiritual radar out and you will find God.
