Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Hide and Seek
An Intergenerational Service

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
April 16, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Part I
Hide and Seek

Now, this is just pretend … but imagine someone told you there was a treasure hidden somewhere in this room. They didn’t tell you where it was … they didn’t tell you what it was … they just told you they thought you’d really like it. They said it was something that would make you very happy. Would you just sit here quietly, or would you get up and start looking everywhere? (“Start looking!”)

I’m glad to hear it!

Today we celebrate two holidays. Do you know what they are? (Easter and Passover) Do you know what religions they come from? (Christianity and Judaism) That’s right, and we come from those religions too, and these two holidays are very important to us.

They have a lot in common. For one thing, although they move around a bit because they’re on different kinds of calendars, they often happen at the same time. And the year Jesus died, the year of the very first Easter, they happened at exactly the same time.

I’m going to tell the story of each of those holidays in a little while. But first I want to talk about something else they have in common. On both of these holidays, we play a hide-and-seek game. We hide something special and then we go looking for it.

We’re all searchers and seekers. When we come into the world as tiny babies, like the baby we dedicated this morning, we don’t have much. We don’t have all the stuff we’ll get as we get older, or the ideas we’ll have in our minds, or the friends we’ll know. Nothing has happened to us yet. We don’t even have any clothes. We don’t have anything except our own bodies, our own minds and hearts, and, we hope, people who love us.

At first, our parents give us things: clothes and food. But from the very beginning, before we can even crawl, when we’re just babies, we begin searching for the things we want. Babies love to look around. When they hear sounds nearby, they get excited and want to find out where they’re coming from. As soon as they can move their heads, they’ll turn to look, and as soon as they can crawl, they’ll head toward whatever interests them just as quick as they can.

We are born searchers.

A funny thing about that is that we don’t know what we are looking for. We come into this world with a lot of curiosity, but without knowing exactly what exciting things might be hidden here. It’s like we’re playing hide-and-seek, but we not only don’t know where our friend is hiding, we don’t know who is hiding. It’s like we’re on an Easter egg hunt, but we don’t even know that it’s eggs that are hidden. It could be something completely different.

We don’t even know for sure that there’s a treasure hidden anywhere. All we know is that whenever we seek, we find interesting things, so we keep seeking. But from all my years of seeking, I’ll tell you: I’m sure there is something very special, a real treasure, even better than chocolate eggs. I’m sure of this because everyone who searches finds wonderful things: friendship, and love, and neat ideas, and beautiful music. And the very wisest people who have ever lived tell us that if we keep seeking, we will find even more wonderful things.

Part II
Looking for Freedom: the Passover Story

Remember how I said there is a hide-and-seek game for both of the holidays we’re celebrating today? On Passover, we hide a piece of matzah called the Afikomen, and kids go looking for it, and whoever finds it wins a prize. We did that here in this hall last night.

The ushers have baskets of matzah for us. Please pass the baskets along your row and then forward so that everyone can get a piece of matzah, and hold onto them for just a moment until it’s time to eat them.

The story of Passover is all about a search … a search for freedom. You see, the people of Israel, the Israelites, were living in Egypt. Their word for Egypt was Mitzrayim, which means a narrow place. Because they were stuck there! They were trapped. They were not free — they could not leave — and they wanted to leave, because in Egypt, they were slaves. Pharoah, the king of Egypt, made them work very hard building his cities.

It is hot in Egypt. They had to dig up mud from the banks of the Nile River, and mix it together with straw, and form it into enormous bricks, and bake them in the sun. And while they did all this, they baked and sweated too. Then they had to lift up the bricks and climb up to the tops of the walls.

From the walls and towers of the new cities, they could see lands far from this narrow place where they were trapped. It seemed to them that they could see freedom out there, but it looked so far away and impossible to reach.

And then a new leader grew up among the Israelites, named Moses. And Moses talked to God, and God told him his people were looking for freedom and he was going to help them find it.

It took many miracles to make it happen, but finally the night came when the people could escape from Egypt and into freedom. The night they left, they were in such a hurry getting everything ready and getting away from Pharoah’s army that they could not even wait for their bread dough to rise, so they had to bake it flat. [holding up matzah] This is what bread looks like when the dough hasn’t been allowed to rise. You get matzah.

Well, there they were, outside the walls of Egypt, heading out into the desert. And this is what they had to eat! Let’s all eat our matzah. [everyone eats]

And they said, “This is freedom? This is what freedom tastes like? YUCK! It’s boring and dry and hard to chew. It’s the bread of affliction — of suffering and unhappiness!” They forgot how hard slavery had been. They complained to their leader, Moses, “In Egypt, we might not have been free, but at least we ate well! There was lots of meat and the bread was real bread!”

Then Moses knew that the people had more searching to do before they really found freedom. They had left the land of Egypt, but in their minds they were still stuck there, thinking like slaves instead of like free people.

That’s why we eat matzah every year, to remind us of this story, because freedom is like that. It isn’t comfortable … it isn’t familiar … it is sometimes scary. And even when we get out of a bad situation where we aren’t free, we might take those feelings along with us so that we still don’t feel free. It isn’t a matter of just getting out of a bad place. We have to keep looking for freedom and find it inside ourselves.

We belong to this church because we know we will always be looking for more freedom, traveling out of the narrow ways of thinking and feeling where we get stuck, and then traveling out again into more and more freedom. We sing songs of freedom that remind us that the journey out of the narrow place isn’t always comfortable, but it’s good to be on the way. So let’s sing together, “I’m on My Way.”

Part III
Looking for the Holy: the Easter Story

The hide-and-seek game of Passover is the afikomen, the special matzah. The hide-and-seek game of Easter is that we hide real eggs and chocolate eggs and if you’re a kid, you get to go look for them, the way we’re going to do today after the service. Then you get to eat whatever delicious things you find.

Why do we play hide and seek at Easter? The original Easter story is all about things being hidden and then, if we look for them, found. What we are looking for on Easter is God — the holy — something sacred that is not always visible to us. But it is all around us and inside us. This is the story: On a Passover evening almost two thousand years ago, the night of the Seder, Jesus sat down to supper with his students, his followers. They celebrated their Seder, their special Passover meal, but Jesus was very sad, because he knew that terrible things were about to happen. He was right. That night, in the middle of the night, one of his students betrayed him, he was arrested, and the government declared him guilty and put him to death on the cross the next day.

Then his body was put into a tomb.

On Sunday two days later, when one of his followers, Mary Magdalene, and his mother, also named Mary, came to his tomb, they found it empty. Where did Jesus go?

One of the versions of the story says that an angel was there who said to them, “I know who you are looking for: Jesus. He is not here — he has risen. He has been reborn.” And as they ran off to tell the rest of his followers, they saw Jesus himself, alive again. Because they were looking for him, they found him. (Matt. 28:5-9)

That is the gospel written by Matthew, and in that gospel, Jesus is God himself. So this story is about losing God and searching for God again.

I know another story about searching for God. It is called “Hide-and-Seek with God,”¹ and it has a very funny idea. Its idea is that God calls together God’s friends and says, “Let’s play hide and seek. I’ll hide, you come look for me.” One of them looks on the earth and finds grass growing, all tender and new, and says, “I found God. God is growing, like grass!” One of them looks among people and sees how they are taking care of each other, and says, “I found God. God is love and sharing. God is in people who care for others!” Two of them look in the mirror and see their own reflections and say, “We found God. God is in us!” And God says, “Weren’t those all good hiding places?”

We can find holiness in all of those things, but we have to be looking. We have to at least be open to finding something unexpected. Otherwise we will probably just see grass. Ho hum, what’s so special about grass? Well … if you look at it with the right attitude, you see how special it is. It grows so fast, making water and dirt and sunlight into a soft beautiful carpet that covers the ground — and growing and beauty are holy. And there are so many other holy things. What’s so special about an egg? What’s inside an egg? (a chick, life) It contains new life — and new life is holy. What’s so special about a rock? It has formed in the earth for thousands upon thousands of years — it is made of elements as old as the universe and has changed slowly over an incredibly long time — and time and change are holy. These things may be very ordinary, but they are holy. That is one of the most important beliefs of our religion: that very ordinary things are holy, if you just look at them right.

Jesus said this in a slightly different way. He said that if we look in the right way, we will find God everywhere. “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a rock, and you will see me.” (Gospel of Thomas, verse 77) Have you ever looked under a rock? What did you see under there? (ants, worms, salamanders). Ants! Worms! And Jesus says, that’s God you’re seeing.

Some people say that God is some kind of super-powerful person who lives in some particular place, like the sky. But Jesus said this was silly, because “If God lives in the sky, then the birds will get there before you!” (Thomas 3) God is not in any one place. Instead, every place is holy, if we just look in the right way. That’s because, as Jesus also said, “the [realm of God] is within you and it is outside of you” (Thomas 3). It is everywhere, but it is hidden.

As another story, The Little Prince, says, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” When we go playing hide-and-seek with the holy, we have to look with our hearts. Then we will find it everywhere.

---