Although I grew up in a region of the United States where country music was popular, it was not part of the musical atmosphere of my home. At home we listened to popular music, classical music and musical theatre. This is not to say that I never heard country music. I heard it coming from neighbours’ homes, from the cars of my friends and others, even from the in-store music where we shopped. But, given a choice, I would not have chosen a country music station or bought a country music recording. I probably even yielded to the temptation to look down on those who did.
In the late summer of 1980 I was on the road from my home in Colorado to my theological college in southern Wisconsin. I had just crossed the state line into Nebraska and, for the next four hours, was in an area where the only radio stations were either broadcasting agricultural information or country music. Since I wasn’t interested in soy futures or pork bellies, I chose the strongest country music station.
About an hour into Nebraska I heard a song that I’ve always thought to be a song about the good news of God in Jesus. In truth the song is about a man who after many failed relationships and false starts has finally found his one true love. But for me, a theology student on his way to begin his final year of studies before ordination, I heard a slightly different message. The song was Johnny Lee’s ‘Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places,’ a song that appears in the soundtrack of the movie Urban Cowboy.
With few exceptions, most of us have experience of looking for love in all the wrong places. Perhaps we’ve sought love in material possessions. But we soon discover that possessions really aren’t interested in a mutually life-giving relationship with us. We even feel from time to time that they own us rather than the other way round. Perhaps we’ve sought love by seeking the approval of others. We reach our goal of gaining the approval of a particular person only to discover that our hunger for approval still gnaws at us. So we strike out in search of the approval of someone else to satisfy our need. The wrong places where we look for love are almost endless.
Even when we find love in the right place, we are aware of how fragile that love can be. It requires tending. It goes through dry places. It can be a roller-coaster ride of joys and disappointments.
For those of us who have chosen to be disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, we know that in following him we are looking for love in the right place. Unlike material possessions, Jesus does not try to rope us into maintaining them. Unlike the yearning for the approval of others, there is nothing you or I have to do or to be in order to know that we already have what we are seeking – the unconditional love of God made flesh in Jesus and breathed into us through the Holy Spirit.
But having found love in the right place, we cannot pretend that it’s easy to nurture this life-giving and life-affirming relationship. We are human beings, made in God’s image which is the ability to love and to be loved, yet still seeking to live in God’s likeness which is loving knowing that the more we love the more love there is.
Sometimes we even look for Christ in the wrong places and cannot see him where he already is. The people with whom Jesus had grown up and lived could not believe that this carpenter’s son could be the promised messiah. Surely the messiah would come from a princely family or be a mighty warrior or be able to summon heavenly hosts to drive out the Romans and their collaborators. They could not see the messiah in their midst, so they could not experience any ‘miracles’, any signs that God’s promised reign was already among them bringing life and hope.
Even when Jesus sent his disciples out to share the good news that the kingdom of God was at hand, he warned them that they would not be welcomed everywhere they went. After all, if it’s hard to believe that the son of a carpenter is the messiah, it’s not likely very easy to believe that a motley crew of fisherfolk, tax-collectors, rebellious zealots and a few women of no particular social standing are messengers of a new way of living in relationship with God.
But that’s exactly where Christ is to be found. Christ is found wherever two or three are gathered in his name to be his friends in the world. Even more importantly, Christ’s friends aren’t supposed to just hang around together; they’re to go out into the community to speak and to act in Christ’s name. Just as he sent out his disciples two thousand years ago, two by two, with only what they could easily carry, so he sends us out with the only supplies we need – our selves, our souls and bodies, reasonable and holy offerings for the work before us.
God in Christ and through the Spirit has given every disciple of Jesus authority over what Mark calls ‘the unclean spirits’. Whatever Mark meant by ‘unclean’ spirits, I know what I believe to be the ‘unclean’ spirits of our own times – any of the ‘isms’ that perpetrate evil or deny justice or foster violence or disregard the dignity of every human being or shatters the integrity of God’s creation. While we must ‘think globally’, what God desires of us is ‘to act locally’ using the resources, knowledge, skills and experiences we possess to free God’s children. The great lie is that we do not have such authority; the great truth is that we do and that we have a responsibility to act on that authority.
There will be those who are not interested in what we have to say nor in what we do. There will be those who suggest that such a motley crew such as the disciples of Jesus in today’s world are hardly capable of confronting the ills of our world. There will be those who believe that our failures of the past disqualify us from being agents of God’s present work and future vision. They are looking for Christ in other places. Perhaps God will surprise them there; I cannot deny God’s freedom to act where God chooses.
But I do know where there is a right place to find love and to find Christ. It’s here in this community and the many other communities like it throughout the world. People are looking for this love and we have opportunities to invite them to come. They may say ‘no’. They may say ‘perhaps later’. They may say ‘yes’. All we can do is to say, ‘Come. Look here where we have found love – and where Love has found us.’
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