The Practice of Getting Lost - Genesis 12:1-5, Mark 1:9-13

There’s an old story about an archbishop who was travelling to the States in the 1950’s and his advisors warned him to be careful how he spoke to the press. “They’ll take anything you say and twist it” they said.

So when he’d come off the plane and was in his press conference, he wasn’t surprised when one of the hacks said – “So, Archbishop – will you be going to any nightclubs while you’re in New York?”. Raising an eyebrow, the Archbishop played ignorant – “Are there any nightclubs in New York?” he replied with a smile.

The next day the headline was – “Archbishop’s first question on arrival – “Are there any nightclubs in New York?” !

I tell that story because I’m slightly worried that on the basis of today’s sermon, the Ellon times will give me a write-up saying “Minister tells congregation to Get Lost!”

In truth,  it’s Barbara Taylor who – in this week’s chapter - is telling us to Get Lost. She begins by saying….

"When I first moved to the land where I live, I shared it with a herd of cows. The first thing I noticed about them was that they were pure white. The second thing I noticed was how predictable they were. With a hundred acres at their disposal, they had worn narrow paths across these acres to their favourite watering holes, shady spots and clover patches. When they wanted to get from one of those places to another, they lined up single file and followed the tracks they had made across vast expanses of pasture. Some of the tracks were no more than eight inches wide, which is about one fourth the width of a cow. Yet the cows knew exactly where to put their feet, even without looking.”

How like those cows we are! We’re all creatures of habit.

We have our routines that get us through the day, and in many ways they’re a blessing because when you’re in a routine you don’t have to think too much about it. You just get on and do it, whether it’s cooking a meal, or feeding the beasts, or driving the same journey to work each day.

There’s a comfort, or maybe better, a security in routine that’s not to be sniffed at. We need patterns in our day to make the business of living manageable.

But when a track becomes too well worn, we give it a different name. We call it a rut.

The flipside of the blessing we call our routines, is that they can end up stifling spontaneity and newness. If we let the routine make our choices for us all the time, pretty soon we forget that we have any choices to make at all. We live life on autopilot.

Take Sunday worship as an example of that.

We have a pattern here on Sundays that most of us have been living with all our lives. A combination of hymns and readings and prayers that’s sometimes disparagingly referred to as the hymn-prayer sandwich.

Now that form of worship, with which we feel comfortable, isn’t obligatory. Thy hymn-prayer sandwich isn’t commanded in the Bible. It’s our tradition. And it’s served us well over the years.

But it can also do us a disservice because, like the cow-tracks, it’s quite possible to amble along through a very familiar service like this, without thinking.

Suppose when you came in this morning, I said that today we’re abandoning our usual format. We’re going to have an open meeting. The next hour stretches before us like an empty field and we can go anywhere we like. If someone wants to bring a prayer, they can bring a prayer. If someone wants to share a reading, they can share a reading. If someone wants to say a little about what God has being doing in their lives that week, they can get up and tell us about it.

If someone wants to choose a hymn, they can choose one and tell us why they want to sing it. I’ll preach, but the rest is up to you.

Would that be terrifying or liberating? My guess is probably both.

I wonder how we’d fill the time? Would we be able to fill the time?

I don’t doubt that many of us would feel rather lost, with no cow path to follow.

But once you get past the terror of being lost, there may well be benefits for our congregation.

Would you come to worship in a different frame of mind if you had the freedom and maybe even the responsibility to shape its content?

Would you think differently about your week if you knew there would be a chance to share an insight from your living on a Sunday morning?

Would our fellowship and our spiritual maturity grow as we begin to hear one another, tentatively and humbly, sharing the stories of how this God is at work among us?

Scary? Of course it is. Getting off the beaten track and going somewhere new is always a little scary. But you see things you’ve never seen before; you have new experiences; you broaden your horizons.

Beware the comfort of over-familiarity. Though the church has a reputation for being staid and conservative, those traits are learned behaviour and they’re certainly not in our spiritual DNA.

One of the truths that comes through again and again in the Bible is that God does some of his best work with people who are prepared to leave what they know behind and get lost.

Think of Abraham and Sarah, setting off in their seventies to settle down in foreign land they’d never even seen! How would you feel about uprooting yourself and starting over again somewhere new at that age?

Think of Israel, trekking through the desert for years on their way to the promised land. It took them 40 years to get there, 40 years of grumbling and struggle, but get there they did.

Think of the prophet Elijah, running away from the wrath of Queen Jezebel and losing himself among the caves and mountains of Palestine; and yet it’s in his lostness that the still, small voice of God comes to him most clearly, when he most needs it.

Think of Israel, overrun by Babylon and lost in exile for a second time. Having to learn all over again that they could be the people of God without land and without temple.

Or think of Jesus in today’s reading. Taking himself off to a place where, for a while at least, he was lost to everything familiar - home and family and friends and even food. But he was there for a purpose – to experience the kind of temptations that would come his way most fully in Gethsemane and Calvary – two other desolate, lonely places.

Most of us, quite naturally, do everything in our power not to get lost; and yet it seems to me that’s exactly what God wants for us now and again.

Who sends Abraham and Sarah off to a new beginning in a new country? God

Who compels Jesus to go and spend 40 days in the wilderness? The Spirit.

This season of Lent, this purple pulpit fall, these Bible markers, remind us that there are things we learn in our lostness that we don’t learn anywhere else

So. Every once in a while, Get lost.

Get off the beaten track.

Sit in a different pew. Talk to someone you don’t know. Try something you feel is beyond you. Every now and again, make choices that aren’t the easy ones – the ones that leave you feeling comfortable. It’ll help make you a stronger person.

Many of you will remember the TV programme Tomorrow’s World which introduced the groundbreaking science and technology that would become commonplace a year or two later.

I always remember one episode where they were looking at the effects of shock on the body.

They had two guys in the studio, the same height and build, but one of whom took a freezing cold swim in a lake every day. They stuck them in shower in their swimming trunks, kitted out with electrodes to measure their heartrate, and switched on the cold water. As you’d expect, the guy who was the swimmer coped far better with the shock. His heartrate didn’t go so high, and it came back down much more quickly. He was ready for it.

Choosing lostness in little ways trains us to cope with the feeling of panic we experience when we’re out of our comfort zones. Practice teaches us to bring that panic under control; to take stock of our resources; to dare ask what potential there might be in this situation. It helps us develop the muscles we’ll need on those painful occasions when we don’t choose lostness, but it chooses us.

I’ve said many times before, I don’t believe that everything that comes our way in life comes from God. If everything that happens is God’s will, why do we pray ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?’

But I do know that every single one of us will have spells in life when we feel utterly lost.

When that person we loved and trusted implicitly lets us down in ways we’d never have thought possible.

When that partner we’d built our lives around leaves us, or passes on, and we find ourselves on our own again, not knowing how on earth we can face the future.

When some terrible circumstance enters our lives – an illness, a development in our work, a secret that comes to light – and we feel lost in the middle of a sea of worries.

When we reach the significant age of 60 or 65, and the well-worn path that led us to our work, day in and day out for decades, suddenly ends. Ahead of us there’s an open field. And rather than finding that liberating, we find it terrifying.

Some lostness we choose. Still more is thrust upon us in ways that we would never choose.

And yet, even then, we are not without hope. For time and again, the testimony of God’s people is that when our resources are nil, and our capabilities are exhausted, it’s often then that God is closest to us.

And though we wouldn’t ever choose to be in those places, they can be the making of us.

If I took a straw poll this morning and asked you to pinpoint a time in your life when you felt you had grown as a person, I’m pretty certain a good number of them would have been wilderness times.

Times when something or someone we thought we needed for living was taken away from us, and the pain was so bad for a while we thought we couldn’t go on. But we did. We came through it tired, but stronger.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you this morning, it will. Sometimes lostness chooses us, and in those times the wisest course is to accept it for what it is, and allow God to nurture its strange fruit within us.

Barbara Taylor ends her chapter with these words:

“Getting lost can happen anywhere, in all kinds of ways. You can get lost on your way home. You can get lost looking for love. You can get lost in between jobs. You can get lost looking for God. However it happens, take heart. Others before you have found a way in the wilderness, where there are as many angels as there are wild beasts, and plenty of other lost people too. All it takes is one of them to find you. All it takes is you to find one of them. However it happens, you could do worse than to kneel down and ask a blessing in your lostness, remembering how many others have passed this way before you.”