Theme: Looking for love in the right and wrong places.
Image metaphor:  Searching with a telescope, binoculars, magnifying glass.

Ever search for something in the wrong place? Ever misplace your keys?

“My wife got a little testy with me this past week. An incident occurred which has happened more than once in our relationship. I borrowed her car the other night, getting permission from her of course. The next day, I received a somewhat hostile telephone call from her that her car keys were missing and where did I put them?

From my point of view, I kindly explained to her that I borrowed her car but not her car keys. Did she look for her keys in her black purse? “Yes,” she replied. “How about the red purse?” “I’ll look.” She soon was back onto the telephone and said, “I found them. I have to go now.”

This story illustrates that we often look for things in the wrong place. The reason we don’t find what we are looking for is not that the keys are not there, but we are looking for them in the wrong place. By the way, my wife mentioned that I could share that story with you only if I told you that I have misplaced the tape measure, the flash light, the duct tape and many other things that I have momentarily lost around the house. We don’t find them because we are looking in the wrong places.”

If you are an avid fisherman, shrimper or crabber, chances are that you a “charter.” That is, many good fishermen chart their fishing habits for salmon, shrimp or crab. They chart the date, the tides, the time, the depth. One day, a good shrimper from our parish was going for shrimp out in Hood Canal. He wasn’t catching any or several days. He could have concluded: There are no shrimp here in this canal at this time, but he was smarter than that. So the fisherman from our parish went to an old salt, who charted his habits on Hood Canal, and asked where the shrimp were. The reply: “Four miles north and in eighty feet of water.” Sure enough, there were all kinds of shrimp to be found there.

Sometimes, a person can conclude, “There are no shrimp here,” but the problem is that the fisherman is looking in the wrong place. If you are looking in the wrong place, you will not find what you are looking for.

Very often in life, we don’t find what we are looking for because we are looking in the wrong places. For example, for every man and woman who is married, all of them are looking for a deep, intimate, loving, caring, long term relationship with their spouse. That’s the way it is with marriage: you want to find that marriage relationship with a person that is deep, intimate, loving, caring and long term. But sometimes this quality of relationship is not found? Why? Often because the man and woman are looking in the wrong place.

Too often in marriage, a couple loses focus and gradually begins to think that the quality of their relationship is to be found in the accumulation of things. It happens so slowly you don’t even notice. A couple moves into their first one bedroom apartment and soon they need a two bedroom apartment which soon is filled with things and then a small two bedroom house and then a three bedroom house. The years go by and this couple puts time and energy into accumulating more things, and one day they sit across the kitchen table from each other and discover that they don’t like each other any more. They have drifted in different directions. … ever so slowly with no one saying anything about it.

Maybe the couple focuses on their respective careers. He climbs the ladder a step and she climbs a step; he the second step; she the second step. Both higher and higher on their respective career ladders, and one day while sitting across the kitchen table they discover that they don’t love each other any more. They ask, “what happened to us?”

Or ever so slowly, their focus of attention is on the kids. First one child, then two, maybe three, maybe four. But their primary focus becomes on the children and before you know it, the kids have grown and left the house and the couple looks across the kitchen table and says, “When did we fall out of love?”

If a couple is searching for a deep, intimate, loving, caring, long term relationship, they often can look in the wrong places and not find it.

The same kind of logic applies to our relationship with God and Christ. We, too, want a deep, intimate, loving, caring and long term relationship with God. We wouldn’t be here today if we did not want that. But sometimes we do not find that deep, intimate, loving, caring, long term relationship with Christ because we look in the wrong places.

Where is the wrong place to look for a deep, intimate, loving caring, long term relationship with God?

1. Programs of the Church
2. Charismatic, compassionate pastor

The gospel story for today gives us clues about where we are to find that deep, intimate, loving, caring, long term relationship with Jesus Christ.”

For the rest of the sermon by Rev. Edward Markquart: http://www.sermonsfromseattle.com/series_a_looking_in_the_wrong_places.htm