SermonStudio

For those of you who may have not been here during this series
on bumper sticker religion and for others who need a reminder,
what I have been doing is using some religious

bumper stickers as a take-off point for my sermons. More
percisely I have been using these bumper stickers as a beginning
point to talk, if I could, with the persons who displayed them on
their cars. Today's bumper sticker is "I Found It." That doesn't
say a whole lot by itself. Although I am sure we can read into
it, if it's a religious bumper sticker, that it has something to
do with finding faith and with finding God.
As I thought about this bumper sticker it reminded me of
something that used to be in magazines. There was a question
above a picture that said, "What's wrong with this picture?" The
question this morning is what is wrong with this bumper sticker
"I Found It?" The question is who is looking for whom. If I
wanted to end the sermon right now, the whole gist of this sermon
is that the bumper sticker really does not have it right -- "I
Found It." The bumper sticker really ought to say, "God Found
Me."
Now since we have some more time I would like to elaborate on
that phrase "God Found Me." I would like to elaborate by asking
several questions.
The first question is, "Who Is Lost?" It is not God who is
lost according to the New Testament; it is human beings who are
lost. In the 15th chapter of Luke, Jesus talks about many ways in
which human beings get lost.
One is like the sheep that never intends to get lost but
nibbles its way blade by blade of grass until it gets away from
the rest of the flock. The shepherd then has to go out and bring
that sheep back to the flock.
Or we can get lost more like the story of the woman who loses
the coin. It is an accident; it is not anything that is planned;
it happens.
Or lostness can come like in the story of the Prodigal Son. It
can come from a very intentional decision to turn from one's
source of being. It can come from a very intentional choice to
distance oneself from one's source of life.
I think at times when we talk about lostness we forget that
there are a variety of ways of getting lost. My suspicion is that
most of us in the church get lost by one of the first ways,

by nibbling our ways from the source of our life or by some
accidents along the way that lead to our lostness. Although there
are times when some of us do make some intentional choices in
which we are not consciously aware of our underlying decision to
cut ourselves off from the locus of our life and being.
Who is lost? It reminds me of a story of a husband and wife
who had been married for 15 years and the wife is sitting buckled
in on her side of the car and the husband is sitting buckled in
on his side of the car. The wife says, "Dear, why don't we sit as
close as we used to?" The husband turns and says to her, "Well,
honey, who moved?" Why isn't God as close to us as he used to be?
The question is, "who moved?" Who is lost? The first thing we
find wrong with this bumper sticker is that what we are looking
for is not lost. God has not moved; God is not lost. We are the
ones who get lost.
The second question is, "Who does the seeking and the
finding?" As I have studied world religions and all types of
modern day efforts to find meaning in life, to find that
something more, to find that something extra that will make all
the difference in life, the one thing that I have found unique
about the Jewish and Christian traditions is that the
understanding of God is of a God who is a seeking God, a God who
is like the shepherd who goes out looking for the lost sheep, or
like the woman looking for the lost coin. Even in the story of
the prodigal son the father runs to meet the son who has realized
his lostness and is coming down the path to home.
I majored in philosophy in college. One thing I discovered was
that in an attempt to be intellectually respectable, God got
turned into an impersonal being or force. God became an "it" in
most philosophical systems. One thing that helped me more than
anything else was to understand that God is personal and is not
an "it." Such a view holds its weight intellectually because the
highest thing we know on the human level is human personality. If
that is the highest thing we know, then God can be no less than
that, God cannot be an "it." God is at least like a person. Some
have gotten around the problem

by saying God is suprapersonal. However you put it, God is
personal, God is one who feels and moves toward us in his love.
That leads to one other statement about who does the seeking and
finding.
This morning we sang "Amazing Grace." Grace expresses the
faith understanding that God's love seeks and moves toward us
even before we do any seeking or reaching out to God. Grace is
the faith understanding that even if we are unworthy, God reaches
out to us. If God waited to reach out to us until we were worthy,
or till we made the move, God might never have the opportunity to
move. The very heart of the Christian message is that God in his
fullness addresses us personally in Jesus Christ. He entered into
our life seeking to bring us the message of his love, his care.
God is a seeking, personal God; he moves toward us in grace.
That leads to one last question. "What is our role if God
moves toward us and we are lost?" I have to back up and take a
running start on this answer. There was a man by the name of
Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher back in the 19th century.
The interesting thing is that his writings did not make a real
impact on thought and religion until our century. In some of his
writings he talks about several different steps that we as human
beings take in the religious quest.
The first level he talks about is the aesthetic level. Now you
do not have to worry about the technical name. Just trust me that
the first level is called the aesthetic level. What he talks
about is that in this level people dabble in life, trying to
enjoy its pleasures. The key word of this level is pleasure
seeking.
The second level of life is the ethical level. That is when
people begin to take life seriously and the issues of life
seriously and give themselves to seeking the good.
The first level pleasure, the second level the good. The first
level casual dabbling, the second level earnest living. The third
level, he says, is divided into two and he calls them Religion
One and Religion Two. Religion One has to do with what we were
talking about in this bumper sticker where we seek the truth,
where we yearn, where we reach out to find this

something extra we know is somehow a part of life. That is
Religion One and the emphasis there is on truth. So you go
pleasure, good, truth.
But he said there is another level that we have discovered.
This level is revealed in the scriptures. This level is Religion
Two where the whole thing is turned around and the grace of God
seeks us. The word here is trust. What we can do at this level is
to respond in trust to the God who has already moved toward us.
To let go and to let God.
My younger son is trying to learn how to swim and he cannot
understand how you can float on water. The interesting thing
about floating is that it is an act of faith. That water will
hold you up if you let go and trust it to do so. If you don't,
you are going to sink. In fact, sometimes the more you thrash
around the quicker you will sink. It is much the same with the
faith in God at this second level that Kierkegaard is talking
about. Not to work so hard in seeking pleasure or the good or
truth but to let go and let the God who is seeking you in the
first place embrace you in his love. It makes all the difference
in the world.
Indeed what happens when you look back over your own seeking,
over your own yearning for God, is that one thing you will
discover is that God was a very big part of that seeking and that
yearning. If someone comes and talks to me and says, "Pastor, I
can't find God, I have this need, I want to find God but I can't
find God." I say, "You are extremely close to the kingdom because
the very yearning, the very seeking you are sharing with me is
God already at work in your life. You let go and let God pull you
up in his love and faith."