What are you looking for? (John 1:35-42 & Matthew 6:33)

Here is my manuscript for the sermon that I preached on Sunday, September 5 at The Bridge service. As always, this is not exactly what I said but it is the gist.

One evening this past week, our family was about to arrive home when I remembered that we didn’t have what one of our sons needed in order to bring his lunch to school the next day. I offered to run back out. This is one of the things that I do: I go to the grocery store and I pick up dinner from restaurants. The men of yore would go out into the field, hunt, and bring their bounty back home. So in that spirit, I too venture out into the wild to track down the elusive prey that are chicken nuggets and tacos.

I dropped E.A. and the boys off at our front door and headed off to the nearest grocery store certain that this would be a quick trip. I knew what I was looking for and I even had multiple options. As long as they had microwaveable bacon or a Chicken Dunks Lunchable, I was golden. I would bring home the bounty. My kid would have his lunch for school the next day.

Yet there was a snag: our grocery store did not have either item. So I texted E.A.: “Swing and a miss on both items. Do you want me to look elsewhere or come home?” She said to try another place; again, we would like for our kid to be able to eat lunch. I drove about 15 minutes to another grocery store. A bigger grocery store. One that has not failed to have the items that are sometimes missing from the smaller store close to our house. In confidence, I strode to the refrigerated section in the back that is home to breakfast meats and pre-packaged meals for school-aged children and lazy college students.

And it was barren. There was no bacon. There were no Chicken Dunks Lunchables. It was as if there was a breaking news story in which a scientist had warned the nation that we don’t know how many pigs or chickens we have left and a panicked populace rushed the grocery stores in hopes of one last moment with pork and poultry.

Two grocery stores later, I texted E.A. again. “I’m going to try one more place.” She responded that maybe I should look for some peanut butter crackers. They weren’t our son’s favorite food, but it would get him through the day and it would be a decent enough source of protein. This was wise on her part. She knew that, despite what I texted her, I would drive to Kentucky if I had to in order to find what I was looking for. This was no longer a simple errand, it was personal. Peanut butter crackers would be a fine enough substitute. 

There were no peanut butter crackers. The grocery store P.A. system was playing a song in which Selena Gomez was singing “When you’re ready, come and get it. Na na na na. Na na na na.” And I know that song is not about bacon or peanut butter crackers, but in that moment it felt like the universe was just openly mocking me. Defeated, already knowing what I would not find, I trudged to the refrigerated section in the back of the grocery store. There was no bacon. But in the midst of the picked over remains of a once robust herd of Lunchables, there was one, two, three, four Chicken Dunks. I never knew a gaudy yellow plastic package could be so beautiful. I felt God’s presence in the back of that Kroger.

When we look for something, the quest can consume our lives. It can bring us intense frustration. Ask anyone who is trying to get out the door and is missing car keys or searching for a child’s lost shoe. There are few things that are simultaneously so simple yet so maddening. Yet if you find what you’re looking for, it can feel incredible. What was lost now is found. What seemed elusive is now within your hands.

Naturally, that longing, frustration, and joy are only amplified when those quests touch the core of our being. In the midst of our daily searching for lost car keys or Chicken Dunks, there are even more profound pursuits for meaning or what we’re supposed to do with our lives. And though they may be difficult, they are important questions to ask. Whether we know it or not, we are all searching for something deeper in this world.

John the Baptist was standing with two of his disciples and saw Jesus walk by and proclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” So the two disciples start following Jesus. This is one of those gaps where I would love more details because they were John the Baptist’s disciples. Did they hear John call Jesus the Lamb of God and mutter to each other, “Then why are we following this guy?” Did they sneak off while John wasn’t looking or say, “Oh, hey, we need to go into town for something…just coincidentally where that Lamb of God guy was going…not that it has anything to do with him”? These are the parts of story I really want to know.

Regardless, Jesus realized that he was being tailed and asked the pair a really simple yet really profound question: “What are you looking for?” He was asking them, “Why are you following me?” Yet it was not just, hey, you guys are tailing me and I’d like to know why. But why are you following me? What are you really looking for?

That question reverberates to us nearly two thousand years later. What are you looking for? You and I look for all kinds of things: love, success, relationships, wealth, happiness, enlightenment, something that will make us feel complete. We often find that quest for wholeness to be incredibly elusive. One of my favorite songs of all time is U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” partly because I think it captures something authentic about the longing that exists in each one of us. The lead singer Bono cries out “I have climbed the highest mountain / I have run through the fields only to be with / I have run, I have crawled / I have scaled these cities walls / Only to be with you / But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” And in the second verse, he sings about passion and desire, of pursuing a life of righteousness and also the times where he holds the hand of the devil. He has done it all and yet he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

There is so much that we pursue in life. What we want and need is always in flux; changing with our place and stage in life. A kid is going to be looking for something different than someone in middle age. We will search high and low and to the ends of the earth and when we finally capture whatever it is, we find that it was not everything we thought it would be. Those things that we’re looking for are, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes says, like vapor. They seem to evaporate if we can get our hands on them. Like I know a lot of people, and I have been one of them, when you ask them what they are after in life, they say, “Oh, I just want to be happy.” And happiness is wonderful. I hope all of you experience happiness today. 

But happiness is fleeting and to just want to be happy is to just want something that cannot last. Sometime after Jesus asked those two followers what they were looking for, he was preaching what we call the Sermon on the Mount. In the midst of this magnum opus vision of God’s community, Jesus speaks about all the things that we chase. He notes that all of these earthly things that we run after are temporary. The philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that every single one of us has this void within our lives and we try to fill it with all sorts of things—some good, some not as good—but that void cannot be filled because the only thing can satisfy that emptiness is God.

Now here is the challenge that I have been wrestling with all week. When you preach a sermon at church entitled “What are you looking for?” then God is the obvious answer to that question. And yes, I believe that is true, but is also, at least in my experience, not that simple. One of the things that I do not want to do is make promises from this place that cannot be fulfilled. I do not want to say, “Follow Jesus and you are done. You will no longer need to look anywhere else.” In the third verse of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Bono sings, “I believe in the kingdom come / Then all the colors will bleed into one / But yes I’m still running / You broke the bonds / and You loosed the chains / Carried the cross of my shame / Oh, my shame / You know I believe it / But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” We can follow Jesus and feel the love of God and yet still feel like we are searching.

There are a lot of paradoxes at the heart of the Christian faith. We celebrate the Kingdom of God that is here but is still yet to arrive. We follow Jesus who is both God and human. And in following Jesus, we both find what we’re looking for and yet also will still be continually searching. Augustine of Hippo once prayed, “Thou has made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” Some days I feel a deep rest within God, but I still feel pretty darn restless many other days. There are many ways to look at this and Christians have wrestled with this question for as long as faith has existed. If following Christ is the thing that truly makes us feel complete, then why do Christians still sometimes feel like they haven’t found they are looking for?

Let’s go back to those two disciples that ditched John the Baptist. Jesus asked the pair, “What are you looking for?” and the two, like most of us, when faced with a probing existential question, didn’t answer it. Instead, they called him teacher and asked him where he was staying. I guess they did answer the question in a roundabout way. They were saying that they were looking for him. They wanted to follow him or at least see what he was up to. Jesus responded simply to their question of where he was staying: “Come and see.” It was a simple invitation to join him. And that’s what they did. They followed him that day and then decided to keep following him. One of them, Andrew, was so changed by what he found that he even got his brother Simon Peter to follow Jesus too.

The answer to “What are you looking for?” was not and is not a neat and tidy answer, which makes sense. We are not neat and tidy people. And, honestly, if God is infinite then can we expect to fully find the infinite? Are you and I not going to need to spend a lifetime, an eternity discovering the peace, love, joy, completeness, the multitudes that are contained within God? Jesus was echoing a theme we see in the prophets. In Jeremiah 29:13, God speaks through the prophet saying, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” It can take a lifetime of practice to wholly give your heart over to something. It is something that we learn and grow into. 

I also believe that the challenge of the search as we seek out God proves its value. If it came to us easy, would what we are looking for have as much value to us? Jenny reminded me earlier this week of a passage in Isaiah: “I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel who summons you by name.” When we come and see, when we search alongside Jesus, we discover these ways that heaven touches earth and they can help sustain us. They encourage us to keep going, to keep following, to keep looking.

In Matthew 6:33, after Jesus talks about how the things we look for in life are fleeting, he states, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” I was thinking about that verse a lot this week and I learned something in that verse that helped it make a little more sense to me. When Jesus says seek, the Greek word that is used is in what is called the continual present tense. This means that when Jesus is asking us to seek, he is asking to be constantly seeking. Jesus was inviting those two followers and is inviting us into an ongoing, ever evolving journey. 

If you want to know what you are looking for, if you want to find it and discover the treasures that God buries for us deep along the way then we must follow God daily. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asks. We’re looking for God, we’re looking for a peace that surpasses all understanding, we’re looking for a way to live out lives of grace, love, goodness, and justice, we’re looking to connect with our Creator and Savior. Is that here? Come and see. Seek first the Goodness of God. You can find it and yet you will always be searching for it.

About seven years ago, we were in Portland, Oregon for a conference that EA was speaking at. One day we drove about a half hour out of town to see Multnomah Falls, which is one of the most beautiful places I have been. We stood on a bridge beneath the falls, the water cascading down and its spray giving us a Pacific Northwest baptism. There was a mile trail that went to the top of the falls; with an elevation gain of about 600 feet. EA encouraged me to journey up to the top. I’m not exactly sure why. I think that she knew I was in a difficult place in my life at that time and needed some inspiration. I had just left the only job I had known with a ministry with which I thought I would spend my whole life. I had felt called in a different direction but it didn’t know where and it filled me with anxiety. I was a few months from finishing seminary and I did not know what to do next or even where I fit in.

And I remember going up those switchbacks in Oregon wondering “What am I doing? Where am I going?” and there was this knot of fear tightening inside of me because I did not know. Not only had I not found what I was looking for, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I wanted to follow Jesus. I believed that I was being called to minister to people, but didn’t know how. I kept clambering further up and it began to rain, but I was too stubborn to turn back. I was hoping that I would find something up there that would propel me into whatever was next. And I could tie a dramatic bow on this sermon and say that I had this moment where I heard God’s voice and was no longer afraid; a moment where I found what I was looking for. That didn’t happen.

Yet I made it to the top of the falls and it was a breathtaking sight. The falls rushed over the edge with a roar and plummeted to the earth. I saw people from where I had hiked hundreds of feet below. I looked out at the horizon and saw mountains bursting forth from the Columbia River. And I remember saying, “God, look at what You can do.” I breathed in the cool, moist air and thought that maybe God could still do some cool things with my life too. I remembered the times when I had found what I was looking for as I tried to follow Jesus and I began the long road down to earth hoping in faith that I would see those moments again. I would keep trying to follow. I would come and see. Even though I still had found what I was looking for, I would keep searching. And yes, I’m still running. May we all keep running after the Christ who asks us to come and see.