“Facing Life’s Most Basic Question”

Religion in Daily Life C By the Rev. Edward Chinn, D.Min. Rector, All Saints’ Church 9601 Frankford Ave. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19114 (215) 637-5225 Written 14 January 2002 http://www.allsaintstorresdale.org <http://www.allsaintstorresdale.org/>

“What are you looking for?” (John 1:38, TEV). Jesus of Nazareth asked this of two men who started to follow him. How would you answer that basic question? Is it really possible to boil down the countless human activities and find a common denominator of what people are looking for?

The Search: First, people are looking for life. Maybe they’re going after health, or excitement, or security, but deep down they’re trying to hold on to life. Yet, health declines, excitements become boring, security can collapse like a house of cards. We may want life, but we find it mixed with decline and death. Second, people are looking for truth. We’ve all heard little children asking, “Why?” Kids tear apart their toys to find out what makes them go. Adults take the world apart by mental analysis. Yet, despite our hunger for truth, we have to admit with St. Paul, “All that I know now is partial and incomplete” (1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT). Third, people are looking for love. A baby bonds with its mother. Later, we want someone with whom we can bond and share life’s good times and bad. Yet, we know how fragile is human love, for all too often the other person can slip away in indifference or disappear in disease.

The Source: Of course, we know that life, truth, and love are real, not illusions. Where do they come from? Suppose you were looking for the source of light in a sunny field. You wouldn’t look for the light source in the shadows. Instead, you’d look to a source beyond the shadows, a source in the sun. Likewise, followers of Jesus of Nazareth reach out in thought to a life without its shadow, death. Christians believe that beyond the changing human approximations of the truth is a reality on which real truth depends. They go out in their thinking to a divine love that sang the universe into being. Most people call the source of life, truth, and love by the inadequate term “God”. Sometimes, people speak of God as “up”. They don’t mean astronomically, but as a “higher” reality. At other times, people identify God with depth. Below the superficial reading of life, God is the reality deep “down.”

In answer to Jesus’ question about what they were looking for, the two men replied, “Where do you live, Rabbi?” (John 1:38). They saw something in Jesus’ central peace that they wanted for themselves. What kind of emotional atmosphere do you habitually live in? Maybe that will show you what you really are looking for.