How do you feel when something goes missing in your house?
You’ve put something in a safe place but you can’t remember where it is.
Searching for something takes time and energy and if we need the thing right
now, we get frazzled and cross. I can be terrible doing this frantic search for
things especially when I am disorganised. Three things used to go missing
regularly until I sorted myself with a box, a filing system and an envelope – I
now have a box for all my keys because I used to just fling keys down; I now
have an envelope in my desk draw for clerical collars because I used to finish
work and throw them somewhere; and I have an old box lid on my desk with
important papers in it I need this week. Some ministers have studies that have
to be seen to be believed and they wonder why they can’t find anything.
The
thing I do keep having to look for are bic biros – why is it you buy a packet
of bic biros and within a week or so they have all gone missing? And then there
is socks – why is it you put all your socks in the washing machine and then the
washing machine seems to eat some of them so there are always one or two where
they don’t match or you have one left feet than right? Or is that just me? (Oh alright then!)
Searching for a solution, or for contentment is a real
issue around us. Premiership football fans jeer at an unsuccessful manager
until he is sacked or walks away. In Liverpool the Kop are already looking to
Jurgen Klopp to provide the hope Liverpool FC want. We have looked at the party
conferences and listened to arguments about how our politicians are searching
to build a better society for us. We look for peace and relief from the
stresses and strains of the daily grind. It is no surprise that 14 million
people sat down to relax on Wednesday evening to watch three people bake and
care about the outcome of it and hail the winner who was lovely some sort of
national heroine for being nice.
What does it say that we watch people baking on television
and find that therapeutic? Are we all searching for something to help us escape
sometimes? There is another sermon there about the spirituality of the Bake Off
to be written sometime.
And what about coming to encounter in worship? Do we
come into church to search, to search for Jesus, to meet him, to
find something we are longing to have right now? I think so. We come to find
relationship. In the words of the great prayer of Saint Augustine: “you have
made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in
you.”
I search all the time. I search for rest and space in my day. It is so easy to cram so much in. Today I have been good. I joined a choir today which sings stuff for fun once a month on a Sunday afternoon and it was lovely to be at something just for me - and on a Sunday! Then I had a long cup of coffee on the sea front and then a walk before evening service. Lovely.
What are we searching for? We need to be as impatient at
finding contentment in God as we are when we lose our keys and need to go out.
There is a story told of a rabbi who was asked, ‘Where is
God?’ The rabbi replied,
‘Wherever He is let in.’
