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Title: What are you looking for?
Date: January 20, 2008
Texts: Psalm 40:1-11; Isaiah 49:1-7; I Cor 1:1-9; John 1:29-42.

Jesus turns mid-step, and sees two guys trailing him. Maybe they only wanted to watch from a distance, safely from the margins. But Jesus fixes his eyes on them, and puts them on center stage with a question, “What are you looking for?” (Jn.1:38). They didn’t see this coming. They’re shocked. Dumbfounded. They can’t answer. It’s a simple question, but they don’t have an answer. The two followers dodge the question with a question of their own.

“What are you looking for?” It’s left unanswered. And that’s why it’s a question that comes back again and again. “What are you looking for?” The two followers in the story dodged it, and so it comes to us, also followers, and the question invites us to attempt an answer. “What are you looking for?”

It’s a tough question to sit with. Believe me, I’ve been sitting with it for the past two weeks. It’s one of those questions that makes you take an inventory of your life—what you’ve done, what you have, what gets you through the week. “What are you looking for?”

I’ve never been good at setting goals for the distant future. I’ve never been able to envision my life in 10 years. Most of the time, three years is as far as I can imagine my way into the future. I don’t know what the point of all that is anyway, since life changes so quickly it’s hard to predict how the roads will bend and turn. And so far, for me anyhow, the most interesting stuff comes when I least expect it. For example, being a pastor wasn’t ever one of those goals I made for myself. It wasn’t even on my horizon 5 years ago.

“What are you looking for?” Jesus’ question reminds me of Matt’s comment during our discussion time last Sunday. He said that he takes some comfort in the way Jesus finds himself in the wilderness after his baptism, because that’s just how our lives feel—most of the time life feels like a wilderness, wandering in the wilderness, lost most of the time.

We don’t exactly know where we’re going, what’s going to happen tomorrow, or next year. This so-called postmodern age is a time of disruptions, constant transitions, dislocations, permanent movement, social instability, wandering in the wilderness.

And in our wandering, Jesus turns to us and asks, “What are you looking for?”

Psalm 40 is the prayer of a wanderer like us. It’s about waiting and crying: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry” (v1). It’s about being in the pits, being lost and lonely: “He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure” (v2). It’s about running in all directions, wandering frantically, after idols: “Happy are those who make the Lord their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods” (v4).

But ultimately, it’s a Psalm about being found by God. It is God who finds him in the pit. It is God who bends down to the ground and listens for our cry. Psalm 40 is about a God who finds us, even while we wander. It’s about “the miracle of being heard,” as one commentator puts it. It’s about a God who turns toward us, like Jesus turns toward those two wandering followers, and asks them a question that stops them in their tracks: “What are you looking for?”

The Psalmist helps us begin to put together an answer to that question—we find the pieces of an answer in the last few sentences, those repeated phrases: “your faithfulness,” “your salvation,” “your steadfast love.”

In a world of infidelities, of lies and deceits, where we are given new reasons everyday for skepticism and suspicion, the Psalmist tells us that God is a sure foundation, that God is faithful: God “set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure” (v2). It’s not about finding our own way, finding our direction in the wilderness. It’s about being found by God.

When I get lost, I have this irrational tendency to start driving faster. I get desperate, and somehow I think that the faster I go the better chances I have of finding my destination. Of course, I get myself even more lost and frustrated.

And that’s our temptation when we are in the wilderness. We think that if we simply find more things to do—a different career, another form of entertainment, a humanitarian hobby, one more book to read—if we run faster, then maybe we’ll find a way out of the mess we’re in.

The Psalmist points us in another direction: He says, don’t run, stop driving faster… “wait patiently,” he says in the first verse, and maybe even cry louder. Why? Because our God is a God who finds us, who runs after us, who descends into our lonely places, and finds us while we desperately wander. It’s about God’s faithfulness to us, God’s persistent mercy, God’s stubborn love for us, for you.

It’s hard to believe, right? It seems like exaggeration. There has to be a catch. It’s like those letters we get in the mail that say we won $500,000; all we need to do is reply with a signature. Too good to be true. We’re legitimately suspicious. It’s a suspicion that many people share.

And if there is anybody people should be suspicious of, it’s Christians. Because, sadly, we are part of a long history of Christian terrorism—many who kill and terrorize while claiming to worship our same God. The crusades are a famous example. And there’s the medieval anti-Semitism of Christian Europe, and 20th century Nazi appeal to Christian writings to justify Jewish concentration camps. Or the Catholic and Reformed terrorist plots to eradicate the Anabaptists and Mennonites, among others. Also, there’s the racist regime of South African apartheid, with their Dutch Reformed theology to back up their violence. And of course, closer to home, the slave trade, and Native American genocide—the building blocks of the American way of life, all with Christian justification.

Why do I make us remember these parts of our story? It’s not because I like to be negative, or a pessimist. I would rather not have Christian terrorism as part of our story. But it’s there. And the reason why we have to remember is because God remembers. God listens to the cries of the dead. God inclines his ear to the desolate pit, as our Psalmist puts it.

Psalm 40 is not just speaking about us, living people, who live in lonely pits; it’s also about the way God listens to dead people, to their cries. As one commentator puts it, God inclines his ear to “the subterranean, chaotic abode of the dead” (Kraus, Psalms 1-59, p. 425).

It reminds us of the first violence in the bible, the first killing. Cain kills his brother, Abel. And what does God say to Cain? Genesis 4:10, “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” Killing someone doesn’t silence their cries for God. God bears the weight of the miracle of hearing—he hears the cries of injustice from the grave, that desolate pit.

And when God hears the Psalmist, when God hears us, he also hears those silenced voices from the ground—the earth, the soil, is a storehouse, echoing with voices like Abel’s. They don’t go away. “Listen,” God says, “your brother, your sister, is crying out to me from the ground.”

That’s what it means to believe that “God is faithful”—that’s the constant refrain of all our passages. The end of Isaiah 49, verse 7, talks about “the Lord who is faithful.” And it’s all over Psalm 40, “your steadfast love and your faithfulness.” And I Corinthians 1, towards the end, verse 9, “God is faithful.”

Of course this makes life difficult for Christians wherever we live. We worship a God who we know listens to us, because this is the same God who listens to the cries from the grave. God is faithful to both. That’s what it means to confess that “God is faithful.” And this makes life difficult for us because it means we learn to listen how God listens. That means we remind people of what they want to forget as they are consumed with the future—which typically happens during election years… “the future will be different when I’m in office.”

We become strangers, and maybe even estranged, because we incline our ears to the ground, like God does, when most people pontificate about the possibilities for a glorious future. But this ground, this earth, forever speaks of a murderous past—and helps us to hear the reality of our murderous present. We remember what everyone wants to forget; because that’s what our God does—and that goes to the heart of our faith, that God is faithful, and that God hears us, that God hears you.

There’s at least one thing we can be sure of, that God hears voices that sound like Jesus’, who said from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” God inclines his ears to the forsaken, the forgotten—to Abel, to Jesus, to the African-American slaves, to the Native Americans buried under your feet, to the prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, and even to you.

Church happens when we learn to remember a different story—the story of a God who is faithful. Church happens when we learn to listen to the forsaken voices—because that’s how Jesus speaks, with accents of forsakenness. Or, as our passage from Isaiah 49 puts it in verse 7, “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave.”

Church happens when we remember the story of the God who remembers, the God who inclines his ear to the desolate pit, who turns to us because he hears us, and calls to us while we wander, like those two wandering followers of Jesus. Jesus turns and asks, “What are you looking for?”

We are looking for a God who is faithful, a God who won’t forget us as we wander around, confused, lost… driving as fast as we can because we don’t know where we are going. And we’re looking not just for a God who is faithful to us, but the God whose faithfulness “will reach the ends of the earth,” as Isaiah says (49:6)—and that not only means across the globe, it also means down into the ground, where God says, “Listen; your brother, your sister, cries out to me.”

We are looking for a God who is faithful. It’s hard to believe sometimes, that God is faithful—I’ll admit it. And that’s why it’s our job to show and prove to one another that God remembers, that God is faithful, that God won’t forget about us, that God inclines his ear to our desolate pits. We are all ministers of this gospel of God’s faithfulness. We all have the gifts of the Holy Spirit—poured out from God, through you, for each other.

We show each other that God is faithful by making a phone call, sending an email, by inviting people over to dinner for fellowship. And this is also how we proclaim God’s faithfulness to the world, to our neighbors and strangers. We fellowship with them—we show, with our lives, that God hasn’t forgotten them.

Let me read part of the story from John again, 1:36-39:

John the Baptist exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said them, “What are you looking for?” They said to Jesus, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.

“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks. If you are like me, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re looking for most of the time. Jesus doesn’t give us a clear answer, he doesn’t give us a vision of life in ten years, or important goals to use as a compass to guide our lives. Instead, Jesus offers an invitation, one that he will repeat throughout John’s gospel, “Come and see.”

Church is the name we give to that group of people who want to come and see. Church is the place Paul tells us about in I Corinthians, where we “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus. For God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son.”

Church is the people who hear Jesus’ invitation to “come and see,” and then wait, as Paul says, for “the revealing of our Lord.” We are people who wait, and look, and listen.

I will close where Psalm 40 begins: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, and out of the miry bog.”