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Larry R. Hayward
August 8, 2004
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Searching and Finding
Luke 15:1-10

Several months ago, I was a last-minute fill-in for Adult Forum. I did a program entitled "Religious Themes in Contemporary Literature." I shared fifteen or so narrative poems I have encountered over the past few years.

The first poem I read is about searching and finding. It relates to the two parables we have just heard, parables in which a main character searches and finds. In today's sermon, I will compare this poem and these parables. In the process, I invite you to consider times searching and finding have dominated your life and how those may have led you to faith.

Let us pray: Lord, you have promised that faith comes through what is heard, and that what is heard comes through preaching. May what I preach today be heard in such a way that it becomes an occasion for bringing, enriching, strengthening faith. In the name of Christ. Amen.

The poem is entitled "Why We Went and What We Found." It is by Tony Hoagland [1]. It begins as follows:

We will find the grail.
We will gallop our horses all night
and at dawn, descend from twisted mountain roads
to the plaza of a town without a name.
At the bronze hour when the sun
melts on the horizon like an old doubloon,
we will sail our ship into the harbor,
--salt crusted in our beards, trembling from years of motion without maps or compasses;
a little daffy from the velvet sibilance of waves.

The prow will touch the stone wharf
without a sound, the nightingales
will trill, the dead oak shaft of the
No Trespassing sign will blossom morning glories.
The mute beggar by the church will launch into an aria in perfect, unaccented Italian

and we will hoist the bucket from the courtyard well
on its frayed rope
and drink the sacred water
as the horses nicker
and the almond trees
drop their white petals of applause.
If the order comes to burn the bridges,
we will burn the bridges.
If the order comes to cast ourselves into the
sea, we jump.

This first half of the poem depicts a search for holiness, a search for what the poet calls Holy Grail. Notice how intense the searchers are, what sacrifices they make:

They gallop on horses all night long
They descend from a twisted mountain road
They enter a town without a name
Salt crusts in their beards
They tremble from years at sea
They have no map or compass
They are daffy from waves
They are even willing to burn bridges and cast their bodies into the sea if it will help their search succeed.

The writer reminds us that searching for anything of significance — particularly something as important as Holy Grail — involves discipline, effort, intensity, sacrifice. Searching for the Holy is neither casual nor easy.

The two parables before us today likewise involve searching.

In one,
A man is responsible for a hundred sheep.
He tends them in the wilderness,
A dark and dangerous place.
One sheep wanders away from the fold.
Instead of staying with the other sheep,
The man leaves 99 sheep in the wilderness
To search for one lost sheep.
His search is arduous.
No search party assists him.
No specially trained dogs sniff in dark caves.
When darkness descends, the man still searches.
He doesn't call off his search after a few unfruitful hours.
Rather he searches "until he finds" the sheep [2].

Like the searcher in the poem, this man's search involves discipline, effort, intensity, sacrifice. He even endangers his own life, and the lives of 99 other sheep, to search for one sheep who is lost.

Next,
A woman loses a coin worth one day's pay.
She lights a lamp,
An expensive proposition in her culture.
She sweeps every room and corner in her house.
She does not end her search
When David Letterman comes on.
She does not end her search when her eyelids grow heavy.
She does not end her search when her arms grow tired.
Like the man searching for the lost sheep,
She searches "until she finds" the lost coin [3].

Discipline, effort, intensity, sacrifice mark her search as well.

To the extent that these parables depict Christian faith, Jesus is telling us, through them, that

Faith is more than a leisurely journey
Faith is more than a consumer choice
Faith is more than a site on the Internet, a warm feeling, an attractive preacher on television we view from
our easy chair.
Faith is more than one intellectual consideration
among others.

These parables teach us that

Faith involves intensity.
Faith involves focus.
Faith involves sacrifice.

Faith is a search we dare not abandon "until we find" that for which we are searching. Faith is a search for the Holy that is neither casual nor easy.

II.

In the parable, when searching leads to finding, celebration ensures.

When the man finds the lost sheep,
He lays it over his shoulders
And he rejoices.
When he arrives back in his village,
He calls together his friends and neighbors:
"Rejoice with me," he cries out,
"For I have found my sheep that was lost."
Likewise,
When the woman finds her lost coin,
She sends her friends and neighbors
A handwritten invitation on her finest note card:
"Rejoice with me," it reads,
"For I have found my coin that was lost."

In the poem, searching leads to something even deeper than celebration. It leads to change, to transformation.

When we wake in the morning,
we will be ourselves again,
and begin our post-grail lives.
We will return to our people
who eat mud and say that it is good,
and we will eat the mud with them and say that
it is good.
But it will never taste the same to us
in our post-grail existence.
…

No one will understand…
why we press our faces
deep into the artificial flowers,
half-hoping to be stung by bees.
Why we always go astray inside the glittering maze
of the department store,
and always end up at the perfume counter, wearing
scents called Shangri-La, Obsession, Holy Night,

finding none of them quite right…

They won't understand, and we won't remember,
but we will never again be sad — never sad again! — or rather, never sad in the same way.

Once we have found the Holy, we are never the same again.

The mud we eat with our peers now tastes like mud.
We press our faces deep into artificial flowers, hoping to feel the sting of bees — any sting — once again.
We find ourselves at perfume counters wearing scents with exotic names yet that don't quite restore us to exotic places.
We are never sad in the same way again.

The writer is describing someone who, in the process of searching for the Holy, has been transported to

Another place
Another way of being
Another level of life.

Just as the man who finds the lost sheep and the woman who finds the lost coin are changed beyond recognition by their find, so also once we have found the Holy, returning to our former place, our former way of being, our former life is difficult if not impossible. Once we have found the Holy, it is difficult to live with anything less.

III.

After the presentation in Adult Forum, one person said to me: "In the poem, in order to find the Holy, the searcher goes beyond the 'No Trespassing' sign. Do you think that in order to find the Grail, we must go to forbidden places?"

The questioner had read the poem astutely and had raised an interesting theological question.

To some extent, the reason both the man and woman find the object of their search is that they are willing to trespass:

Trespass beyond those voices that say, "It is just one sheep; stay back and protect the others."
Trespass beyond those voices that say, "Dark is coming; it's dangerous out here in the wildnerness; go home and protect yourself."
Trespass beyond those voices that say, "It's just one coin; just a few bucks; is it really worth tearing apart your whole house for one measly coin?"

"In order to find the Holy, must we go beyond the 'No Trespassing' sign?"

Sometimes we must. It is in the nature of the Holy that it often eludes us in places that are safe and familiar. We sometimes have to trespass in order to find the grail.

IV.

Throughout this sermon I have used the word "Holy" to describe the object of our search. But notice that these searches do not take place in the church. In the poem, the search for the Holy involves a voyage on high seas. Notice also that in the parable, the search involves working as a shepherd and a cleaning person. There is nothing "churchly" about these searches. They occur at sea, in the field, in the home. They do not occur at the altar of God.

What this says to me is that our most intense, disciplined, sacrificial searches are likely to lead us to find the Holy, whether our search is overtly religious or not. It is

The act of searching
The act of finding
The act of celebrating
The act of being transformed

That makes what we find Holy.

Such holiness is available to every human being.

It transcends the worship of the church.
It is deeper than what we are able to learn in Sunday School or DISCIPLE class.
It is more nourishing than pot-luck dinners in Fellowship Hall, as nourishing as those are.

Like the sailor, the shepherd, the cleaning woman

When we search with depth and intensity
When our search leads us to finding
When we celebrate what we have found
And when we recognize that our lives will never be the same again

We will find a gift — from God — that renders us blessed among women and men of the earth.

"Why We Went and What We Found."

Amen.

1 "Why We Went and What We Found," in Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998), 45-46. go back
2 Luke 15:3-7. go back
3 Luke 15:8-9. go back

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Phone: 319-364-6148
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