First Reading: Isaiah 49:1-7
1Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. 2He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow; in his quiver he hid me away. 3And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” 4But I said, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God.” 5And now the Lord says, he who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him; and that Israel might be gathered to him — for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength — 6he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” 7Thus says the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nation, the servant of rulers: “Kings shall see and arise; princes, and they shall prostrate themselves; because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”
Psalm 40:1-11
1I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped to me and heard my cry. 2He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure. 3He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many shall see, and stand in awe, and put their trust in the Lord. 4Happy are they who trust in the Lord! they do not resort to evil spirits or turn to false gods. 5Great things are they that you have done, O Lord my God! How great your wonders and your plans for us! there is none who can be compared with you. 6Oh, that I could make them known and tell them! but they are more than I can count. 7In sacrifice and offering you take no pleasure; you have given me ears to hear you; 8Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required, and so I said, “Behold, I come. 9In the roll of the book it is written concerning me: ‘I love to do your will, O my God; your law is deep in my heart.’” 10I proclaimed righteousness in the great congregation; behold, I did not restrain my lips; and that, O Lord, you know. 11Your righteousness have I not hidden in my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness and your deliverance; I have not concealed your love and faithfulness from the great congregation.
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
1Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes, 2To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: 3Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 4I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, 5that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge — 6even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you — 7so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Gospel: John 1:29-42a
29The next day {John} saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ 31I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ 34And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” 35The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, 36and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” 37The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. 38Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” 39He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. 40One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. 41He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). 42aHe brought him to Jesus.
In Plain Sight
Growing up, a common quest for young adults was the search for oneself. But before a person can go on this quest of self-discovery, they must ask the question, what am I looking for? And possibly, what do I expect to find at the end of my quest. These are important questions. Today the search is the same. Whether a person is searching for a place, the answer to a cosmic question, the fulfillment of a need, or for a purpose in life, people across time have been looking for something. This morning I’d like to consider the first question within the context of our New Testament reading. However, when Jesus asks, “what are you looking for”, the question becomes so much more. Actually, it becomes the question, the existential question that defines exactly who we are.
What are you looking for? What is it that you seek? For Percy Harrison Fawcett it was El Dorado. Not the city of gold, the city of myth and legend. He believed that those ancient legends may have had their genesis in some real ancient civilization that had gone extinct and been swallowed by the Amazonian jungle, and he was determined to find it. In 1925, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the real-life incarnation of both James Bond and Indiana Jones, and his exploits were the inspiration for the novel, The Lost World by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Fawcett was considered a ruggedly handsome man, that stood well over six feet tall with a lean, athletic body. His beard was neatly groomed to give him the look of an explorer and soldier of fortune. He had served as an artillery officer in World War I and as a spy for her majesty’s government in the court of the Sultan of Morocco. He was, by training, a nautical engineer who patented a ship’s hull design, a gifted artist whose pen and ink drawings continue to be on display at the Royal Academy, an accomplished archeologist, a religious non-conformist, and an enthusiastic and skilled cricketer.
By 1925 he had completed eight expeditions into Brazil in search of that ancient civilization he had named “The Lost City of Z.” The ninth expedition was a hard sell, but with the help of Hollywood, newspapers, and Nelson Rockefeller, Fawcett was able to scrape together the funding, but not enough to pay salaries, so he took only two companions with him: his 21-year-old son, Jack and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimmel, both inexperienced explorers. The 58-year-old Fawcett and his two youthful companions set out on May 29, 1925.
They paid porters to help them get to Dead Horse Camp, a base camp that Fawcett had used before. Local Indians greeted them and he talked with them about exploring further north. But the locals warned him that “fierce Indians” lived there, and such a journey would be dangerous and foolish, especially if one went unarmed as Fawcett insisted on doing. Since some of his money was coming from American newspaper publishers, Fawcett had sent dispatches about his mapping expeditions and his search for “Z” back from Dead Horse Camp with Indian runners. Then, one day, the dispatches suddenly stopped.
The Indians who lived near Dead Horse later said that the three white men ignored their warnings and insisted on heading north. Smoke from their campfires could be seen for several days and then there was nothing. They were never heard from again. Since then, several searches have been conducted in attempts to discover what became of the men. Film maker George Dyott was the first in 1928.
Mr. Dyott took a film crew with him, but emerged empty-handed. In 1933 movie star Albert de Winton, famous for his African adventure films, put together a small group and entered the Amazon region in an effort to locate Fawcett. They were never heard from again. In 1996, Brazilian millionaire James Lynch put together a multi-million-dollar expedition to discover what happened to Fawcett. He and his crew stumbled out of the jungle a few months later after having been kidnapped by Indians and bartering $30,000 worth of camping gear for their freedom.
Finally, in 2005, David Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine stumbled across a reference to Fawcett while researching another story. Intrigued, he continued to dig into the story until he felt compelled to mount his own expedition. Financed by the New Yorker, and accompanied by experienced rain forest explorers, Grann was able to locate what remains of Dead Horse Camp and the Indians who lived near there. Through an interpreter, Grann discovered that Percy Fawcett holds a high place of honor in their oral tradition. The Indians told him of Fawcett’s last trek northward and his receding and, finally, disappearing campfire smoke.
Grann tells of his exploits as well as Fawcett’s in the best seller, The Lost City of Z. In the closing chapters of the book and in subsequent interviews, Grann talks about the continuing search for El Dorado, the Lost City of Z, and that elusive evidence of an advanced civilization that supposedly inhabited the Amazon basin in ancient times. Recently, archeologists using satellite, x-ray, and computer imaging technology have discovered the remains of a labyrinth of villages laid out on a grid of parallel streets and roads. They believe that the community held about 3,000-5,000 inhabitants. At the center of the vast complex is a flat, treeless place that would later be known as Dead Horse Camp. Percy Harrison Fawcett had discovered and indeed, was sitting right in the middle of the thing he was searching for, and he never realized that he had found it. Fast forward 40 years.
In 1965, two astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were preparing to use a giant, new antenna in New Jersey to collect sounds from outer space. Specifically, they were going to point the thing at the deepest, darkest part of the Milky Way in an effort to get a “zero” reading which they could use as a baseline. But they ran into a problem. Every time they put on their earphones they kept hearing an annoying static buzz.
They tried everything they could think of to make it stop. They pointed the antenna throughout its axis. They checked and rechecked the equipment. They called nearby military installations to see if possibly they were using technology or equipment that could be causing the hum. They even went out and removed all the pigeons that had built nests in the antenna. But the static refused to go away. After a while they discovered that the static was being caused by radio waves and for days they worked to try to figure out where those radio waves were coming from. Then, suddenly, it occurred to them that the radio waves were, in fact, coming from everywhere.
No matter how they positioned the antenna, they still heard that annoying hum. The air all around them was full of radio waves, and not just the air around them. They pointed the antenna as far into deep space as it would reach and they found the same radio waves there as well. But what was their source? Radio waves, like sound waves, don’t just happen spontaneously. They happen because of something.
Something had to have made the waves happen, some kind of sound — like a “bang.” And, given the number of radio sound waves that were saturating the universe, it must have been huge. Their conclusion: Billions of years ago the universe was created from a single point and has been expanding ever since. They forwarded that the creation event must have been a huge explosion, so huge that the echoes are still bouncing around the universe in the form of radio waves. Until 1964, just about everyone in the scientific community believed that the universe was infinite and eternal, that it had always been and always would be. It was called the “steady state” theory.
Now, Wilson and Penzias, both in their twenties were challenging that theory with one of their own with the silly name of “The Big Bang Theory.” It would take fourteen years for their work to become widely accepted in the scientific community. In 1978 they received the Nobel Prize for physics. Of course, you and I know the real origin of the universe and “all that was made that is made” (John 1:3). “In the Beginning God said” (Genesis 1:1). What Wilson and Penzias heard is the continuing effects of God’s work in creation. Think about it, if there is no God, then what was here to cause an explosion? The “Big Bang”, or any other theory, simply doesn’t make sense without God.
What Wilson and Penzias believed they found wasn’t what they were looking for, but they were smart enough to know that what they found was important. Percy Harrison Fawcett found what he was looking for but never realized that he had found it. This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the question Jesus asked Andrew and the other unnamed disciple of John in this morning’s gospel lesson: “What are you looking for?”
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow published an article entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychology Review. In that article he outlined a hierarchy of needs that all humans have from the very basic to the uniquely human. As each type of need is met, the next need comes into play. These are the things, said Maslow, that every person is looking for. At the very bottom of the list are our most primal needs, the needs that we share with all other animal life forms. At the top of the list are the most human of all needs, self-actualization. Maslow identified these as morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, tolerance, acceptance of facts, and the like.
Abraham Maslow would have answered Jesus’ question with his now famous pyramid of needs. At first, we’re all looking for things which fill our physiological needs — food, water, shelter and so on. Once those needs are met, we move on up the pyramid until we begin fulfilling the needs of self-actualization. For Dr. Maslow, the answer to the question, “What are you looking for?” would always be, “It depends.” It depends on where you are on the hierarchy of needs.
Victor Frankl was a neurologist, a psychiatrist, and a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he recounted his experience in the concentration camps and said that it taught him that our paramount and most important need isn’t for food or water or shelter or any of the things on Maslow’s list. For Frankl, our most important need is for a sense of meaning.
We can live through deprivation and cruelty, through sickness and even torture, if we believe that our experience has some meaning, that something will be achieved because of it, that, in the end, it will result in some good. The paramount existential stress, he said, doesn’t come from lack of things or even lack of activities, but from a lack of meaning, the feeling that the things we’re doing have no point and, because of this pointlessness, we come to feel bored and cynical.
This lack of meaning in our lives, Frankl believed, comes from freedom without responsibility. When the measure of our freedom is matched by an equal measure of responsibility, then and only then, do our lives have a sense of meaning. “What are you looking for?” Victor Frankl would answer that we’re all looking for the same thing, meaning, a sense that our lives, our activities, and the things in which we have invested ourselves, will extend beyond their immediate place in time and space, that they will continue to impact others after we’re gone. We are looking for something for which we can be responsible. In other words, we want a legacy.
John the Baptist, believed that he had found that which would give our lives meaning. He said as much twice to his own followers — “Look! Here is the Lamb of God.” Jesus wasn’t hidden. He wasn’t a mystery yet to be solved, nor was He a secret to be kept. Jesus, the promised Messiah, was standing right there in broad daylight, plain as the nose on our faces. Taking John’s advice and following Jesus, Andrew and the other, unnamed disciple, believed that they had found it too. In fact, Andrew was so sure, he went to tell his brother, Simon, because he knew that Simon was searching for the same thing, the same thing we’re all searching for.
Like Andrew and Simon, we’re all searching for that same sense of meaning and direction and purpose. We all seek that which will reassure us that there is more to life than day after day of endless work and toil. We’re all searching for that saving knowledge that will give our work and our play, our joy and our sorrow, our life and our love, our pain and our pleasure, some meaning beyond the mundane, day-to-day experience of it. We are, in other words, searching for the Messiah, the anointed one of God, the Savior who will save us from our boredom, our cynicism, our insecurity, our emptiness, our lack of aim and direction, and touch our hearts and our minds with meaning and purpose. In truth, we’re all searching for Jesus. And God the Father, in His infinite love and wisdom, has given Him to us freely.
Jesus isn’t lost or hidden like the city of “Z.” He is, like the radio waves that Wilson and Penzias discovered, present all around us. And this is the Good News you and I are called to proclaim. This is the information people need to hear. This is the information people need to give meaning and purpose to their lives. It’s the answer to the question Jesus asked, what are you looking for?” The answer is right in front of us. Jesus is the answer, and Jesus is the solution to what we need most.
Amen