Being Found

There was a little girl whose name was TANYA. It was a gorgeous autumn day and she was biking in her neighborhood. She loved racing down the sidewalks and watching the leaves fall, sometimes almost in her face. The air was crisp, the kind of chilliness that seems to wake you up and help you feel alive. She biked faster and faster! Faster and faster and faster! She was so fast, so free. It was beautiful. She felt like she was flying.


After awhile, she got tired. Her breath was coming in gasps. She had to slow down. And it was then that she looked around.

It hit her with a cold finality. She was lost.

So the little girl turned her bike around and began to peddle frantically in the direction in which she came, but nothing looked at all familiar. She got a pain in the pit of her stomach. The more she looked around, the more lost she felt. She began to cry. Soon she stopped her bike and just wailed.

A policeman was driving by with his windows down, enjoying the cool crisp air. He stopped his car. “Are you OK?” he asked. When she told him that she was lost, he volunteered to put her bike in the back of his car and drive her around until she found her way. “Well,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, “My mom told me not to talk to strangers but that policemen were OK. So you must be OK, right?” The policeman smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I am OK.”

So they got her bike into the car and she got to ride in the backseat. He told her to look out the window and see if she recognized anything. At first, she couldn’t see anything that looked familiar and that same feeling of panic in her belly came again. But then, she saw it. Her church. She saw the brown stone and the tall bell tower. “You can stop here!” she yelled. “That is my church! I know my way from here…”

“Are you sure that you don’t want me to drive you home?” he asked.

“No.” she said. “I know my way from here.”

When Jesus died, his friends were lost in the worst kind of way. They loved him and looked to him for guidance. They ran away as he was killed and it only got worse when they saw that someone had even stolen his body from the tomb. But there was one person who never left Jesus. She was not the one that you would have thought. She was a crazy woman, a woman who had been possessed by demons that made her act crazy. When Jesus was forced to carry the cross, she followed him. She alone is present at the cross in all four of the gospels. She alone is present at his tomb. Her name was Mary Magdalene.

Mary was totally lost but she did not leave Jesus’ side. Instead she just stayed with him and cried. That is how we see her this morning, she is weeping outside of his burial site. Just crying her eyes out because she feels so lost.

All of you have felt lost at some point in your lives. You wonder why it is that you were born or what it is that you are supposed to be doing with your life. Someone that you love has died or has left you alone. And all of a sudden, you are not sure why you are alive or what any of this is all about. You sit alone in darkness.

Many people try to pretend that they are not lost. They get busy or try to forget their pain. They fill themselves up with food or drinks or stuff to make themselves forget that they are lost. But Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who run away from being lost. Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who pretend that everything is OK. Jesus shows eternal life to Mary, to the one who stays still even when things are really bad, the person who tells the truth and admits that she is lost and alone and afraid. Jesus comes to us when we sit alone in the pit of despair, that is the best place for him to come.

What is eternal life? It is nothing that can be described or understood with our brains. No one has ever described it or evaluated it. It is very simple and yet impossible to understand. Resurrection is your compass. It means that you have been found by God. And you will never be left alone again.

Gil Ott was in Vietnam. He was high on drugs, anything that he could get his hands on, he took. He smoked and he drank. Anything to try to forget the fact that he was in hell. Anything to try and forget the fact that he was killing people that he didn’t even know. He was trying to escape his own mind and he had never been more alone.

It was the middle of the night and the Viet cong had them surrounded. Everyone was shooting madly into the darkness. Gil knew that he might die at any moment. He was firing all around himself, trying to kill them before they killed him. And then, all of a sudden, the firing stopped.

There was this silence. Incredible sllence. Beyond all words. Beyond all meaning. The sun had just begun to rise and it filtered through the leaves on the trees. And Gil was there.

The fighting resumed. It was just as crazy as before. Gil returned to hell, but something inside of him had shifted.

Three years after Vietnam ended, he was lost again. Lost in drugs and alcohol, not knowing who he was or why he was in so much pain, and he wandered into a Quaker meeting. “It was that silence,” he would later tell me. “It called to me. I wanted to experience it again. It found me.”

From the day that Gil wandered into a Quaker meeting, he began his search for that silence, that stillness. He found it in Scripture, in church, in Jesus. What he had found was resurrection.

By the time that I met Gil, he was in Seminary.

How does it go, that part of the great hymn Amazing Grace? I used to sing it in the nursing home and people who seemed almost dead would come alive and sing with me…

I once was lost but now I’m found. I was blind but now I see.

You do not need to be a great theologian to understand what happened when Jesus rose from the dead. All that you need to know is that he found you. He found you in the darkest place, in your death. He found you in your death and your despair. He found you weeping by his tomb and he called your name.

And you will never be alone again.

What is church to me? It is where I find my direction in life. It is my home. When I walk into this place, I can breathe more deeply. I can see more clearly.

Resurrection doesn’t just happen this morning. It happens whenever God finds you and lets you know that he is there. It happens whenever the eternal one touches our mortal lives. It happens in glimpses of beauty. It happens when you look at the person you love and your heart is full.

There is no where that you can go where Jesus has not been. Even in the worst most frightening places of your lives, he is there, waiting for you, saying your name, holding out his hand to you.

You are not lost, he says. You have been found. You have been found.

THE QUESTION: Is God punishing me?

I call it THE QUESTION.  I give it a title because I am asked THE QUESTION a lot, at least once a week. It comes in many forms, but it is always the same question.  Whenever someone in the church falls ill or someone dies without warning, suddenly, the question is posed.

“Is God punishing me?”

There is a deep, primal part of the human being that believes that life should be easy and smooth.  And when we suffer, be it from illness or job loss or tragedy, we always ask THE QUESTION.  It stems from the belief that God punishes.  It is an Old Testament notion.  In the Old Testament, the Hebrew people believed that God punished, that God was disappointed and angry with humanity and that it was for this reason that we suffer.

The Old Testament understanding of God would lead us to believe that Japan had sinned in some way as a country and it was for this reason that the Japanese suffered such a massive natural disaster.  Similarly, those with cancer would be said to be paying for the sins of our culture, which pollutes and profanes the earth.  This reasoning is very easy to understand and quite natural to assume when something bad happens.  It seems to make sense because suffering does not seem natura. It is just wrong, and there must be a reason for it.  It must be a punishment for SOMETHING. But THE QUESTION was exactly what Jesus came to refute.  Jesus came to show us that God does not punish us with suffering.

In the gospel of John, Jesus is walking along and he comes to a man who has been blind from birth.  THE QUESTION is asked of Jesus.

“Rabbi,” his disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus’ words echo across the centuries.  I want you to hear them.  Let them sink into your hearts so you can pull them out when you doubt or question God’s love.  Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned;

he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.

That means that suffering is not a punishment.  It is an opportunity, an opportunity for God’s works to be revealed.

When you suffer, you can wonder about whether you are loved by God, or you can rise to see your suffering as a chance to manifest God’s love in the world.

Years ago, a woman in my parish became pregnant.  She and her husband had two girls and at the age of 40, she became pregnant with a third daughter.  But an amniocentesis revealed that the child had Down Syndrome and a hole in her heart.  The woman’s marriage fell apart.  So this 40-year-old woman, with two small girls, came to my office unsure of what to do.

“I am afraid that this little girl will die before her first birthday,” she said.  “She will have no value in society…And what will I tell my daughters if she dies?”

We sat there together in silence.  She cried.  We prayed.  We thought of what it would be like to give birth to a child who died before the age of one.  We thought about what it would be like to give birth to a child who could never read or have a career, a normal job.  And she asked THE QUESTION.

“Why has this happened to me?  What did I do wrong?”

But then we began to think about this child as a gift.  Yes, she might die.  Yes, she would not be like other children.  But what if her life was a gift?  What if God was bringing her into the world so that his works might be revealed?

The woman decided to have this little girl and to try to raise her for as long as she lived.  Her name is Savannah.  She’s had to have three heart surgeries.  But she survived.  And that Christmas, I asked that Savannah play the role of the Christ child in the Christmas pageant.  I don’t think that there was a dry eye in the place.

In her, God’s love is revealed.

When the blind man is given his sight, his life becomes much more complicated.  Not only does he see color and shape, but he sees the cowardice of his parents who will not speak up for him and the crookedness of the Pharisees, who try to frame Jesus as a criminal.  And the more that the blind man sees, the more he seems to realize that the world is broken.  And the more he realizes that the world is broken, the more he wants to be near Jesus. Just when he is most alone, rejected by his parents and the Jewish leaders, Jesus comes back to him.  “Do you believe in me?” Jesus asks.  And the man says that he does believe.

Suffering produces a crisis in the human mind.  It brings us to a crossroads.  We have to choose.  Will we despair and wallow in THE QUESTION or will we use the suffering as a chance for God’s works to be revealed in us?

What will you do?  You can be assured that you will not escape this life without suffering.  It is part of the brokenness of our world.  How will you choose to respond?  That is the true Question.

Do you know that it is not your body or your success that matters to God?  God cares about only one thing, your heart.  God makes that clear to us in the Old Testament passage for today…

The prophet Samuel is trying to find a king.  God has left Saul and found another, and it is the job of the prophet to find this young man and anoint him as God’s chosen one, the true King of Israel.  God tells Samuel to invite Jesse and his sons to a sacrifice.  “I will choose a king from among Jesse’s sons,” God says.

So, one by one, the boys of Jesse parade before Samuel the prophet.  And one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, Samuel rejects them.  And Samuel begins to doubt.  “Why isn’t Eliab, the oldest, the king?” he asks God, “He is big and strong and handsome.”  But God answers with words that speak to the heart of our relationship with God.  God says to Samuel,

The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

God does not see or value looks, how your body appears, how you present yourself, your career, your prospects.  God sees inside.  God sees the love that a person bears for others and that is how God knows who you are.

God’s perspective is totally different from ours.  The core question that God will ask us when we come face to face upon our death will not be, “What have you accomplished?”    It will be this question: How have you loved?

Suffering produces one of the greatest opportunities to love.  Like Shannon Miller, the famous gymnast and a beloved member of this church who is undergoing chemotherapy.  Did you see her on television recently?  In an interview, she wanted to help all other women who suffer from cancer so she took off her wig, right there on the news.  “Look at me,” she said.  “Let my suffering be a gift to you.  I am in pain but my heart is pure.  Fight with me.  Celebrate life with me.”

How do you love?  That is The QUESTION.  Not all this punishment stuff.  We will never understand why suffering happens in our world.  It is part of the fabric of our fallen world, that is all that the Scripture tells us.  But God came to join us in suffering and to rise again.  To love us even in the midst of the greatest pain that can be imagined.  Jesus suffered on the cross and continued to love.  Can you?