Lost and Found
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
I don’t know how it is in your house, but in my house, I seem to be the one always losing things. My glasses, my keys, the cardigan I planned to wear, the spoon that I had just been using to stir the soup. At the odd moment, I’ll find a half eaten biscuit or a cup with just an inch of cold tea in it that I put down in a distracted moment and forgot to finish. Getting ready to go some mornings, I’ll be dashing about looking for my mobile, my keys, my gloves or any number the things that must be in my possession before I walk out the door. Other times, I can spend nearly half an hour looking for my glasses, only to discover that I set them on an unlikely window sill.
Most of these moments are part of my own distractedness. One of my friends once talking about her need for an electric kettle rather than the sort that you put on the hob admitted that she’d burned through more kettles than she could count. She noted that she was easily distracted, and would completely forget the kettle until the house was filling with smoke after the water had all boiled away and the metal on the bottom was beginning to buckle. ‘Oooh, shiny!’ she would exclaim as her attention was called away to something other than the cup of tea that she planned to make.
Like her, I find myself called away from those mundane matters like where objects are or whether the kettle has boiled.
I hasten to add that it isn’t all me. Being the untidy one of the family, the one who strews things around our living areas, sometimes I go to pick up something that I left right there, and it has mysteriously been moved to an unimaginable place. Shoes disappear from under the kitchen table to the shoe rack. A jumper that I tossed onto the floor next to the bed when I changed into my jammies at night somehow gets folded and put on top of my dresser. The spoon that I was using to stir the soup sometimes finds its way into the dishwasher before I am done with it. Sometimes that can happen multiple times as I get a second or third spoon as people (who will go un-named, but who are my husband) try to keep the kitchen from dissolving into utter chaos as I cook supper.
I lose things. All the time. In fact, somewhere in this church is a pair of reading glasses that went missing in November. I’m certain that they will turn up some time. I’ll turn and they will be there and I’ll wonder why it was that I didn’t see them there all the time.
You see, though I lose things, I find things, too. I do manage to get out of the house in the mornings with most -- if not all -- of what I need. Keys turn up on the peg near the door, spoons reappear when I have wondered aloud where they have gone, gloves come out of my bag (where they had been all along), and even when it seems unlikely that I’ll have shoes on my feet for the walk to school with Claire in the mornings, I still leave the house shod.
Lose and find, find and lose. That’s the story of my life, or so it seems some weeks.
But losing isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it calls all the cleverness you have out into action. Sometimes losing one thing allows you to find something else.
Like Monet, in Lisel Mueller’s poem. Losing his sight – something that would evoke fear in most of us – wasn’t the sort of tragedy that he felt needing fixing. The gentling of the lines, and the mesh of the colours, the way all of the world merges into one beauty of light and form and brightness. I don’t know if the story told there is true, if Monet did lose his sight, if a doctor offered to fix it so he would see ‘properly’ whatever that might mean. Losing the crisp edges of objects, he found some sort of unity. Losing the words on the page of a book, he found himself in a world that needed to be recorded in expanses of blue and green.
Lose and find. Find and lose. I don’t think any of us can avoid it. It’s a part of the way the world is constructed. Thomas John Carlisle notes this for us in his poem ‘Our Jeopardy’:
It is good to use the best china
treasured dishes
the most genuine goblets
or the oldest lace tablecloth
there is a risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or movement
or a fragile cup of revelation
but not to touch not to
handle not to employ the available
artifacts of being a human being
that is the quiet crash the deadly catastrophe
where nothing is ever
enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended
where nothing is ever
lived
loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost or
found
It is losing fear, isn’t it? Losing our fear that we might lose something: an heirloom that matters, the first piece of art that we bought, the lace stained with the good gravy, oily spots that never come out. It is taking the risk to use all that’s given to us, to risk loving, to risk really living, to be ready to weep, ready to have your heart broken, ready to be surprised by delight and to laugh a real laugh from deep in your belly. It is living in the fullness of our hearts.
Lose our fear -- step toward it – and we might discover that it is something so small. Losing our fear, what might we find?
You know, when I think about this – just ponder it, not do it – I find I get tight in my chest and my stomach turns a little flip flop around. If I lose my fear, what might be there? Do you find that same thing to be true, I wonder, that to lose your fear is in itself a fearful thought?
Fear does keep us safe. I’m not ever, I don’t think, going to lose my fear of London drivers as they speed up approaching a zebra crossing. I’ll continue to be respectful of sharp knives, and won’t run with scissors, at least not often. Being watchful and careful, keeps us alive in so many ways, and is bred into us. We survive because of our fear.
But we survive also because of our strength, because of our tenacity. We survive because of our ability to learn. And these, I would argue, are more important than fear. It is trusting in these that makes the difference. Trusting that we are strong enough to bear what will come, trusting that we have the capacity to endure what we must, trusting that a way will be found.
It isn’t trusting that everything will be all right. Sometimes things simply are not all right: beloved ones die, the sureness of their presence in our lives, the presence of their warmth and smile and love fails eventually. Illnesses press upon us, life is changed forever. There are injuries of the soul and spirit and body that sometimes cannot heal, no matter our trust and our strength and cleverness.
The trust is that a way will be found to discover what treasures lie in this new land we have found. The trust is that the love that we have known is stronger than death, trusting that the love will live on in our hearts beyond whatever loss may come. The trust is that when we step beyond our fear of losing, when we open ourselves to each other, and to the beauty and agony of this life that the riches we gain are worth more than we could count up in all the days we live. It is why Frederick Beuchner’s license plate is such a treasured holy relic. With the single word ‘trust’ it reminds him, and us if we will listen, that life is ever a gift in its meanness no less than its glory and to live in fear is to miss the gift completely. That would be the real tragedy.
Lose and find, find and lose. The world turns on and on, and we are given the choice in each day and in each moment.
The choice
to step fully into all the chaotic mess can be our lives, hearts open to all that will be found there;
to be open to what treasure can be found where we are;
to trust that no love will ever be lost, that love lives on beyond loss, beyond trials, beyond death.
It is likely, nearly certain that I will always be distracted and leave the odd partly eaten biscuit sitting on the counter. I can verily guarantee to you that my keys will go walkabout at least three times this week. But in the midst of losing and finding, I pray that I will never lose sight of letting go of my fear, and day by day, moment by moment, seek to walk forward in trust.
Find and lose. Lose and find.
May it be that we lose our fear, and find life, glorious and abundant, world without end. Amen.