This Hopeful Journey

Why would we take time out of our lives, six Wednesday nights, to enter this room in order to pursue a journey for the development of our spiritual lives?  To dive headlong into words of a Judean carpenter in a search for God?

We make this journey because we are in the midst of a search, a search for hope.

We hope that there is more to religious life than religion; more to Jesus than the lovely way he is often portrayed by artists who would rather that he looked like they did rather than how he really was.  We hope that the pursuit of a spiritual life will have impact in every area of our existence; that drawing closer to God will make life less overbearing and more bearable, that we might find meaning instead of madness, that our search of God will end well and that God will be as least as good as we have imagined.

We make the journey because we hope this story is true.  And that it has more gravitas for life than any other story we might hear, or than anyone or anything in which we might place our trust.

We hope for this because most of us, one time or another, have wondered if it could all be just some kind of cosmic charade or galactic game in which we would simply search the stars in vain for an omniscient, omnipotent anchor for our reality.  Perhaps, it formed in you as simply a nagging ache, a pestering rock in your spiritual shoe, that begged you to remove your shoe and give up the hopeful journey all together.  Or perhaps there was no living deity in your life, only a two-dimensional "flat" Jesus who was unable to reach beyond the flannel board and move into the real world.  It may have been anger or disappointment that caused a fog to enshroud your path, making travel next to impossible.

Whatever your misgivings, you've remained on this journey.  So here you are. You listen.  And you sing.  And together, you and I and the person next you, we hope, that God would search for us, too.  For surely, if this entire journey is an effort to uncover a God who prefers to remain unknown,  we are on a quest for something that will ultimately disappoint and leave us wanting and unsatisfied.

We hope for a God who searches the edges of that foggy trail, who checks the bushes and hillsides for us, knowing that we can be distracted and detoured with ease.
 
We hope that this searching Jesus is not "flat" but has three dimensions, and that one of those dimensions is the depth that can reach into our lives and claim us with his love.  That this searching Jesus can take our past hurts and our disappointments, the frailties, failings, and imperfections that have helped to define our journey, and redeem them with perfect love and acceptance.
This is the Jesus we are hoping for, and this is the Jesus who is here.
Jesus comes into your life with a promise to make all things new, to rebuild your life's brokenness, to love you with a never-failing love.  Jesus makes you this promise: he will search for you until he finds you, no matter where you wander, he will carry you home and he will rejoice because you are his forever.

This is our hopeful journey. 

In Luke 15, Jesus told them this parable: ‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”