Mark 1:29-39
It seems I spend half my life searching
for things that I’ve misplaced.
Umbrellas, sunglasses, keys, mail all have a way of mysteriously
disappearing. Then sometimes, after I
have lost something, it suddenly turns up.
Several years ago I had a ring, one that I liked well enough, but not one
particularly dear or important. It was a
little loose on my finger, and one day it slipped off when I was in the living
room. I looked high and low, in every
possible corner and crevice, and could not find it, though I distinctly heard
it drop. Several years later, I opened a frequently used closet in my study—nowhere
near the living room—and there on top of a frequently used backpack, lay that
ring. How it got there I will never
know. And why there I will never know.
It is not so much about mysterious
disappearances nor about equally mysterious reappearances that I talk with you
today. It is rather the perennial
condition of searching for something. Or
more particularly, searching for someone.
This sentence leaps out to me in
today’s gospel: “everybody is searching
for you.” Yes, everybody still is searching
for you. But who is the “you” we are
looking for? Take a closer look at the
story. Jesus has appeared in the town
where he is headquartered for the time being:
Capernaum. It is the village of
Simon Peter, whose mother-in-law is ill.
Jesus heals her. Suddenly all
manner of people appear wanting their own personal miracles. Some are demon-possessed. Some are just sick. Some have one thing or another that begs to
be healed, cleansed, made whole. Little
wonder that everybody is searching for him the next day. That sort of appearance with those sorts of
effects can make one instantly popular.
And the poor people in and around Capernaum can hardly be blamed for
wanting health care. Notice, however,
that Jesus does not hang around Capernaum, great as the need there may be. He insists that he go on to other towns in
order to “proclaim the message,” for that, he said, is what he came to do.
Everybody in 2015 is looking for
something. I think that is a fair
statement. Trouble is we are not at all
agreed on what it is we are searching for.
(Nothing says that everybody either is or ought to be searching for the
same thing.) But I suggest, broadly
speaking, that we are indeed looking for two things that are fairly constant
and universal. We are looking for
solutions to problems, and we are searching for meaning. And if I am at all right about that, it is
precisely at the intersection of those two things—solutions and meaning—that we
find ourselves engaged in a search for God.
I suspect that few here would
challenge me on that. You are, in my
experience, a rather congenial audience.
You are in church today expecting to hear something about God, and you
probably aren’t surprised to hear a sermon offering you something along that
line. But I want to push us this morning
to examine a bit more closely what it is that drives this search, and where it
is that the search might lead.
It should come as no surprise that
the search we are engaged in is a part of what it means to be human. St. Augustine famously said in his Confessions, “You have made us for
yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in
you.[1]” To have a heart restless in its tossing and turning
until it find its Maker is quite a different thing from looking for a solution
to a problem. It is quite different even
from looking for a miracle—a healing, for instance. Is it possible that we could start out
searching for something that we are very sure we need, only to find out
somewhere along the pike that we actually seek something different from what we
initially had thought? That seems to be
the discovery of a huge number of people on the path to Truth. We start looking for protection or help in
specific situations or for things that we think we need (and perhaps do
need). But if we keep at it long enough,
and if we are growing in awareness, we possibly come to the place where we are
interested in things that are a little bit more removed from our immediate
desires and wants. We might even begin
to desire things that we have little to benefit from personally, but which can be
enormously important to others. So we
add to our search not just things that will make us personally whole and well
and protected from harm, but also things like justice and peace for the entire
human family. And if we search even
longer and more diligently, we might possibly begin to see the center of our
search become not just virtuous things like justice and peace, but a search for
a kind of grounding in charitable living, for example. And if we continue searching, we might begin
to see that the search is leading us to more openness to Presence all around us
and within us.
That seems to be what we notice in
Jesus, and so also in the people that were seeking him. It would have been understandable for him to
stay in Capernaum, open up his own hospital or medical practice and treat an
incessant stream of folk who truly needed his healing touch. But he didn’t. He kept moving, going to other towns so he
could bring them the message (could it have been a message about the great
Search itself?). That is why he came in
the first place.
Don’t miss the thing that bridges
the healings in Capernaum and the decision to move on. It is a big chunk of night spent in
prayer. And what is prayer, if not the
explicit search for God? Jesus engages
in his own search, one can well imagine a searching out of his own purpose and
mission. He models for us what searching
is. He invites us into the great search,
which is, ironically, not just the human search for God but the Spirit of God’s
own search of the human heart. “You have
searched me, O God, and known me. You
know my sitting down and my rising up.
You discern my thoughts from afar.
You trace my journeys and my resting-places and are acquainted with all
my ways.” So says the Psalmist, one of
the wisest of Hebrew poets.[2]
So, far down the avenues that we are
scanning with our hearts in restless gear, it begins to dawn on us that while
we are doing our searching for meaning, this untamable God is doing a kind of
searching too—searching out the human heart, looking for the return of this
creature in whom God has set a squirming restlessness. And if we are ever so lucky as to be able to
say that we have at last found anything, don’t be surprised to hear yourself
saying something like, “I walk, I find, I love, but O the whole of love is but
my answer, Lord, to thee. For thou wert
long beforehand with my soul. Always
thou lovedst me.”[3]
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015
Hymnal 1982 (NY: Church
Hymnal Corporation, 1982), hymn 689.
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