Search and You Will Find

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on Nov. 13, 2005
Text - Matthew 7:1-12

7 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

6 “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.

7 “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 9 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? 10 Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

12 “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

I'm going to take an unusual approach today by telling you right up front the main point of today's sermon: Jesus is not only alive but walking around in our congregation right now in our own time. Jesus might be sitting right next to you, or behind you, or in front of you, right now. But now let's back up and come to this point in a particular way.

The Christian church began when the original group of Jesus' followers experienced what they called God's power, or the power of the Holy Spirit, or the power of the resurrection, or the power of the Jesus' living presence. Power is energy. It's the capacity to make difficult things happen, to overcome obstacles, and to endure.

We don't know, and we will never know exactly what the “resurrection experience” was, but we do know that something dramatic happened to Jesus' followers after his death. Most of these followers had abandoned him and run away before Jesus died. Only a few of them - the women - stayed around.

Jesus was crucified, he died, and was buried, as the Apostles creed says. The powers of the world, what we call “the system,” tried to get rid of Jesus and it looked for a while as if they had gotten rid of him. The Jesus movement might have ended right there.

But instead, something unexpected happened, something powerful brought the disciples back together and made them proclaim Jesus as not dead but alive. We can't go back inside the disciples' heads. We can't go back and interview them. But in some way they experienced divine power and accomplished something very difficult. They got the Christian movement got off the ground, based on what everyone else assumed was a dead savior.

And the church kept on experiencing that power in its ritual life - in its prayer life, in the Eucharist, in baptism, in their meditation on the scriptures, and in their love for one another in the new family they called the church. These activities made available that divine power that Jesus showed in his life. And today, all these centuries later, we still do things in the church that are associated with this power, the power of the living Christ.

There are two main ways people access this divine power that moves in the church. One is mystical, through our personal prayer and meditation. We sometimes call this the vertical dimension between God and us. Many of you know that my own religious life has a significant mystical side, and I know that some of you are the same way. Mystical experiences are experiences of intense wonder, awe and connection with the other forms of life. All of us have probably felt a powerful sense of gratitude just to be alive and to be aware of anything.

Most of the time we think of ourselves and our minds as separated from the rest of the world by a boundary or a membrane - a dividing line between you and everything that's not you. This is the way we organize reality. It's important to have that boundary. But there are moments when the membrane becomes porous, or the boundary isn't so clear, and we can cultivate that experience through the spiritual disciplines.

I'm going to tell this story and then there will be a humorous punch line that I won't be able to explain. Explaining it will ruin the effect, so you'll either get it or you won't, but we'll just have to move on. Okay?

Last spring I was walking in the afternoon around the Long Hill Estate and the Wadsworth Mansion. Right near the Wadsworth Mansion is a little pond called a vernal pool and I'd noticed in my walks many large clumps of frog eggs floating in the water.

So whenever I was out in the area, I made a point of stopping at the pond to see if the frog eggs had hatched. This went on for a couple of weeks until one sunny day, sure enough, the pond was swarming with millions of little black tadpoles. I stood there looking down into the water and I got totally absorbed in all this new life springing forth, vulnerable life (since 99% of those tadpoles weren't going to make it long enough to turn into frogs).

This was an amazing sight and it became a powerful mystical experience because I felt the boundary between that vernal pool and my own body dissolving. There were little specks of plant life in the water, and little bugs swimming on the water, and I could feel my own breathing, and my own blood pulsing through my brain. I know it sounds silly, but I felt at one with all that life in the water, all those tadpoles struggling for survival. Most of them wouldn't make it, but even the few that would “make it” wouldn't make it forever because we all die. The tadpoles die, or the frogs die, and we die.

But I could see and feel powerfully that all this vulnerable life in the venal pool is part of a bigger Life. It's all part of a big valiant struggle that looks futile on the individual level (since the individual tadpoles die) but the bigger Life goes on. In Christianity, we call this life force as a whole the “living Christ” - the dynamism of the universe.

While I was absorbed in this reverie, there were two boys (maybe about twelve years old) on the other side of the pond. They were playing around and looking into the water and obviously seeing some of the same things I was seeing. Here's the punch line. One of the boys was looking down into the water, seeing the tadpoles, and then he shouted, “It's my Dad.”

This produced in me a rather abrupt change of mood, as you can imagine. But in its own playful way, it was a very insightful exclamation. That's what we call a “vertical” experience of God's power, with a humorous twist.

Most of the time, we experience what we call the power or the presence of the living Christ in the horizontal dimension, on the level of our communion with each other. “Where two or more gather in Jesus' name, there he is present.” It's not just any gathering that evokes Jesus' presence. I think it was Marcel Proust who said, “Some people deprive us of solitude without affording company.”

Being together in Jesus' name is being together in a way that recognizes that we're all vulnerable, that we all struggle, we've all been hurt, we've all been disappointed. This is the way life is. Like the tadpoles, we're all involved in the same great Life Struggle.

We can't just sit down and start exposing our vulnerability but we can be more aware about our own and other people's vulnerability. And here we come back to that main point I started out with. Jesus is walking around in our congregation right now - disguised, incognito, sometimes in a female body, sometimes in a male body. There are people in our group right here who have endured at lot and overcome a lot. Some were life and death struggles. Some were mind-threatening struggles.

We say that Christ walks around in all of us. That's true. But Christ walks around in some people with special power. They don't think of themselves as heroic or as Christ-like. But they've learned a lot, and have a lot to teach the rest of us because of what they've been through.

If you're interested in finding this living Jesus, look around, and seek out those who have endured the most. Jesus said, “Search and you will find.” You don't need to search very far. If you look around this congregation, and get to know some of the people you wouldn't otherwise meet except in church, and find a way to hear what they've been through, you will find the living Christ. Search for that power. Search where Jesus told us to search. You will be blessed.

The mission of First Church is to engage and support people in worship, learning, fellowship, and service, so that all may find in our community the Spirit of the living Christ.  We are an Open and Affirming Church: All are welcome into the full life of our community regardless of their race, age, gender, nationality, marital status, economic situation, mental or physical ability, or sexual orientation.