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‘C’ // Pentecost 17 // 9-16-07 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian
Scriptures Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 1 Timothy 1:12-17
Psalm 14 (canted) Luke 15:1-10
Lost
Would you pray with me?
“For my people are foolish,” sayeth you – our Lord – through the prophet today.
“They do not know me;
they are stupid children,
they have no understanding.
They are skilled in doing evil,
but they do not know how to do good …
… and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins.”
And so it is with us, O Lord, in a too-far-off desert.
And so it is with us, in our cities too close by.
Whither our lost nation, O just yet merciful God?
Whither … our lost selves?
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts
be acceptable in your sight,
O God – our rock, and our redeemer. Amen.
I was stranded. And, so was he.
I had arrived – and perhaps so did he, though I do not remember – on the fast train from Paris to Geneva in the dead of a Swiss winter’s night. It was 1983, and I was part of a one-month contingent from an American college studying at the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute. Our home-away-from-home was located in Celigny, a village several kilometers outside Geneva.
I was heading home to that village that frosty evening – only to discover, to my dismay, that there were no more trains transferring from Geneva to Celigny until 7 the next morning. And my dismay morphed into horror when I also discovered the train station was closing at midnight.
It was then that I met him.
Mohammed. Age 22 – same as me. Caught in the same predicament: stranded in Geneva, with no place to lay his head.
Together, Mohammed and I struck out, into the darkness. We crossed what in the daytime must have been a busy city street – eerily quiet, now. We found what looked to be a condemned building, and entered a room on the ground floor. A small room, with one table, and a couple of empty beer bottles. One at each chair, where workers had apparently rested during the day. It was almost as if they were expecting us, as well.
The bottles may have been empty, but Mohammed was not. As if he were talking about someone else – not unusual, considering how traumatized he seemed – he poured forth his story. Racial tension, back home in Nigeria … a fight … his flight, from his native land. I listened with interest. It already promised to be a long, cold, sleepless night. Might as well be warmed by whatever fellowship we had to share – including the remains of a once-fresh baguette.
Daybreak finally came. We parted ways – I to my train, Mohammed to seek asylum in this most international of cities. Later, I reflected on our meeting in a brief verse, titled “The Refugee.”
Young man, resigned –
maligned in the blackness
of growing up too soon
midst a white history of hatred.
Babbling broken English
like water from a stone,
he munches offered bread
while dropping hints of asylum.
Fingering gloves once mine,
yet feeling no warmth.
No smile can reflect
off windowless eyes.
“Babbling broken English like water from a stone …” – In times like our own: Where are the plentiful waters of our baptisms?
“He munches offered bread, while dropping hints of asylum.” – In times like own: Where is the safety and comfort of Holy Communion?
“No smile can reflect off windowless eyes.” – In times like our own: Where, O God … Where is the hope?
Lost. Mohammed was lost. Its permanence seemed to cling to him. And, it had brushed off on merely misplaced me.
We – each of us – brush up against the permanence of being lost, as well. Every day, we do. And we need not encounter a Mohammed to feel it, and to know it. One can scarcely receive and relinquish a breath without at the same time being caught short by the anxiety registering in our arrhythmic heartbeats.
In – on the one hand – our rootless, postmodern world, where at times it seems that “anything goes” …
In – on the other hand – our rutted, primordial world, where there’s a constant ranking not only of achievement, but also of sinfulness – this ranking of sins being perhaps the rankest of all sins …
In our rootless yet rutted, postmodern yet primordial, world, where there are always more views, yet they must be heard – there is always more information, yet it must be managed – where our postmodern mind says more, more, more, yet our primordial mind says control it, control it, control it! …
In our rootless yet rutted, postmodern yet primordial, world, we find ourselves … well, we don’t. We find ourselves ... LOST.
Has it ever been any other way?
If not: What are we to do about it?
There’s not much we can do. Except, that is, to be found.
Marilynn Rosenthal found herself … found.
The lead opinion piece in The Ann Arbor News on 9/111 recapitulated for us this University of Michigan academic’s awful journey from loneliness to being along to solitude. From the inconsolable loss of her son Josh in the World Trade Center to her being found in her research out of that tragedy.
For five years of extensive research, until her death last month, Rosenthal focused on the man who piloted the plane that led to her son’s death. Research that included interviews with the pilot’s extended family in the Middle East, resulting in a yet-to-be-published book about the tragedy through two pairs of eyes: her own, and those of the pilot’s mother.
I did not know Marilynn Rosenthal. And yet, I wonder if, by looking at the tragedy through grieving eyes not only not her own, but of the one who mothered the murderer of her own, Marilynn Rosenthal – who once was lost but now was found – was blind but now could see.
I wonder. I hope. I trust.
If our scales are to fall away as well, perhaps we would do well to follow the Jesus-example of the Marilynn Rosenthals of this world. As opposed, say, to the blindness of the cowardly on Capitol Hill. As opposed, say, to the blindness of – God, forgive me if I am wrong! – the pathological down the block on Pennsylvania Avenue. We do not and we will not find the found in these places. For we do not and we will not find much joy in these places.
The joy that can only come, not from controlling the “mores”, but from losing our compulsion to be lost. The joy than can only come, not from doing the finding, but from allowing ourselves to be found.
In our rootless yet rutted, postmodern yet primitive, world, we find ourselves … LOST.
Has it ever been any other way?
If not: What – pray tell – can we do about it?
There’s not much we can do. Except, that is, to be found.
Over, and over, and over again.
And then – as with the shepherd with the sheep, and the woman with the coin – to join in on God’s joy, by celebrating the rediscovered wholeness of God’s kingdom.
Marilynn Rosenthal, it seems, had been found.
And, by the time of her death, Marilynn Rosenthal, it seems, had begun to find some joy in being found. In April 2006, after testifying for the defense in the trial of al-Qaida co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, she said this to reporters: “We do not want to get caught in a whirlpool of sadness and anger.”
May Marilynn Rosenthal’s “we” include us.
May we who would weep for the victims of 9/11, the victims of its ongoing aftermath, and the consequent public policy victims at home know the joy of being found, once again.
May we simply weep, to begin with, that we may know that joy.
Benediction …
Scripture scholar Samuel Balentine puts it well, I think: “Perhaps the greatest irony of the biblical witness, and perhaps also its most impenetrable legacy of prayer, is that when one loses faith in God, it is precisely to God that one turns.”2
Put an even simpler way: When we cannot find, we turn – in turn – to be found.
Trusting the Psalmist’s way: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Let it be. Let it be. Let it – simply – be.
1”Lessons in creating good out of evil event: Rosenthal set example after 9/11,” A10.
2Samuel E. Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), p. 294.
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