St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, February 21, 2010

Lent 1

Lost and Found with Jesus – Rev. David Mundy

Psalm 91 Luke 4:1-13

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Have you ever been lost? Kind of lost, temporarily lost, totally, frighteningly lost? It would be really interesting to take the time to share our experiences because it’s hard to imagine that anyone here hasn’t been lost at some time. Whether it’s the “where’s my mom?” lost in the grocery store, or the “I may die out here” lost of the wilderness, we all end up lost along life’s journey.

A few years ago one of our members who is an excellent storyteller came back from a European trip with a great “lost!” story. Her husband had gone over before her for a fascinating adventure of his own, and she was flying to meet him at the end of his journey. She decided that she needed her own unique experience, so she decided on an organized bicycle trip through France. While she didn’t know any of the other participants, it was an opportunity to make new friends. She trained diligently in advance, riding her bike many kilometres, getting as fit as possible.

The first alarm bells went off when she arrived to discover that all the other participants were couples. And all of them were a few years younger – okay some were a few decades younger!

On the first day of riding the others took off as though they were on the Tour de France and she was struggling to keep them in sight. She had been assured that she couldn’t get lost because a van would shepherd any stragglers, making sure that no one was left behind. Except that a couple of days in, as she was cycling all by her lonesome, she came to a fork in the road and had no idea which way to go. She waited for the van to show up and offer guidance but it simply didn’t arrive. So she made her own decision and forged ahead.

She ended up in a small village, probably cursing herself for not working harder at high school French and perhaps cursing the van driver who was supposed to be her guardian angel. Perhaps she was offering up a few prayers as well. It was not where she was supposed to be.

It is a great story, and it was told with humour, but I couldn’t recall how the situation was resolved. Since she is here this morning, the story did have a satisfactory, if not happy ending, but I couldn’t remember the next part. So I emailed her and asked how it turned out. Her answer was brief and to the point, just two words: “I cried!”

It is a terrible feeling to be disoriented, displaced, unsure of whether to go back or forward. It’s even worse when the situation is dangerous. There is a reason the expression “get lost!” is rarely interpreted in a positive way.

This morning we begin the Sundays of Lent, although we began the forty-day season last Wednesday, which was Ash Wednesday. We listened to Jesus’ “get lost” story, the story found in three of the four gospels where Jesus goes out into the wilderness for forty days before his ministry and his ultimate arrival in the Jerusalem of both the crucifixion and the resurrection. You might say that he hardly got lost because it says right in Luke’s version that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. That sounds rather gentle, as though the Holy Spirit was a sort of GPS, or a tour guide. But in Mark it says that the Holy Spirit drove or pushed Jesus out into the wild, more like an unholy bouncer tossing Jesus into unfamiliar territory. There is nothing hospitable about the desert wilderness of Judea, with scorching hot days and shockingly cold nights. The artist Stanley Spencer offers us an image of Jesus with one of the scorpions which inhabit the same places a human might choose to escape the heat or the cold.

We often speak of God’s willingness to experience everything we experience in the person of Jesus the Christ, but do we really think of getting lost as part of the deal. It is the vulnerability of lostness that Jesus is tempted by a powerful negative force described here as the devil, a force of evil which invites him to grasp on to power and fame. But alone, in the wilderness, Jesus knows that this would be the wrong direction and he responds each time with words from the psalms and a renewed commitment to serve God. The sense is that Jesus needs to be lost before he finds his way, his mission.

Again, have you ever been lost? You might immediately think of being physically lost, which can certainly be scary, but there are times in life when we don’t have a clue about which direction to go because of what has happened emotionally and spiritually.

It is the nature of my work that I have many sobering conversations with people who are dealing with difficult medical diagnoses. People often tell me that after the doctor delivers the tough news they are so disoriented they can hardly find their way back to the car. Suddenly the familiar world is tossed about by an emotional earthquake.

We can feel lost when what we will assume are the normal experiences and progressions of life don’t work for out us. When I was at my conference in Victoria one of my colleagues received a “tweet,” a twitter message on his Blackberry from a member of his congregation. It was a woman who wanted very much to have a child and she was on her way to a gathering of friends where all the other couples would be there with their children. She admitted that she didn’t want to go, but knew she had to be there. She asked her pastor to pray that she have the strength to seem happy.

We may be unsure of our way forward either at the beginning of our work life or at the end. So many young people wonder if they have chosen the correct program in university or college. What if this isn’t it, what if this career path is actually a dead end. For those who are retiring there is often a sense of bewilderment – what am I supposed to do now? What will give my life meaning and purpose? I had never really thought about the origins of the word bewildered before this week, but is it be-wild-ered, the way wilderness is wild-erness? Bewildered means to have no clear path, to lose our bearings.

We don’t want to be bewildered, and I don’t know about you but the older I get the less I like it! So the temptation is to make everything secure and predictable and plannable, even though the evidence is all around us that life involves getting lost fairly often on the journey.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book last year, her second after she chose not to be an episcopalian parish priest anymore, and to step away from that form of church leadership. She has not given up on her faith, but she needed the opportunity to find her way again. An Altar in the World followed another book called Leaving Church and it is her way of considering how to be a person of faith in her changing landscape. One of the chapters is The Practice of Getting Lost: Wilderness, in which she suggest that “lostness” can be a spiritual discipline.

Brown Taylor starts out by describing the hundred-acre farm where she lives, and the discovery, when she moved there, that while the cows on the farm had lots of room to roam around they were really predictable. They had paths, only a few inches wide, which mostly led from point A to point B, and they walked them single file. She found that when she was walking the land she tended to use their paths as well, but then she realized that she was literally in a rut. Here she was attempting to explore new options and opportunities in life, but there she was, following the safest and most predictable paths when she was out pondering them!

It’s really hard to accept that God can speak to us and even strengthen us in our lostness.

And that brings us to the church, the community of Christ’s people. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the path is unclear for what used to be the established churches in our society. In our area several United Churches are considering amalgamating with other congregations, or even closing. These are difficult decisions and sad times for folk who are part of them. We could feel lost and disoriented as congregations, not sure of which way to turn. The constant temptation is to remember another day, a day when we saw ourselves as more powerful, more influential.

Or we can choose to follow Christ’s model, to renew our relationship with the God of life so that we might live out our mission to the community in whatever fresh and meaningful ways God has in store for us.

Often at the beginning of Lent we are encouraged to give something up as part of our spiritual discipline and in recent years we are invited to take something on.

Perhaps we can “give up” security during Lent, the need for predictable paths. For those of us who are older that may be difficult because we have a template in mind for the way the church should be, but that has already changed, if we are honest. Our openness is essential.

We can “take on” the willingness to risk entering the wilderness, if that wild place is exploring new possibilities about how we can share the gospel with others. Those of you who are younger need to step up into places of leadership within this Christian community, to demonstrate your commitment. We will do this because it is the place where Christ can be found. I’ll conclude today with this encouragement from Barbara Brown Taylor:

Getting lost can happen anywhere, in all kinds of ways . . . You can get lost looking for love. You can get lost between jobs. You can get lost looking for God. However it happens, take heart. Others before you have found a way in the wilderness, where there are as may angels as there are wild beasts, and plenty of other lost people too. All it takes is one of them to find you. All it takes is for you to find one of them. However it happens you could do worse than to kneel down and ask for a blessing . . .

So our encouragement today is to “get lost!” with Jesus and trust that we will find our way. The Holy Spirit will lead us and Christ will be our companion.