“What are you looking for?”
“Tell me something good.”
What are you looking for?
Make me feel good. I’m tired of feeling bad.
What are you looking for?
I want to live.
What are you looking for?
I am ready to die.
What are you looking for?
My children are starving.
What are you looking for?
Why are we always fighting? I want it to stop.
What are you looking for?
He is dead. Why did they kill him?
What are you looking for?
I want a family.
What are you looking for?
I have no idea. I just seem to keep on wandering around.
What are you looking for?
Rest. I’m tired.
What are you looking for?
Safety. I want to be safe.
What are you looking for?
A job, anything to get by.
What are you looking for?
A different job. This place leaves me empty.
What are you looking for?
A good time! Lets celebrate!
What are you looking for?
Freedom.
What are you looking for?
I want to be clean. I feel dirty. I’m tired of being used. I’m tired of being a user.
A world that is all eyes, looking, reaching out for more. We want so much, we are creatures of desire, full of desire and hunger but we never really find that thing we hunger for, sometimes our appetite gets us in trouble, misplaced desire, looking for love in all the wrong places. We are all different but we are all the same, that same beautiful infinity of desire.
When we loose all desire we tend to just shrivel up and die.
Sometimes our desires consume us and all those around us.
Sometimes our desires are so well balanced and controlled and regimented that we become more robotic than human, a well oiled machine rather than living breathing creatures of unending depths, we serve up a little desire in well balanced portions in fear of that boundless desire that may possess us.
Human desire is beautiful and terrifying, it drives us, it separates us from our fellow creatures, it is our glory and our shame.
What are we looking for?
Is there a fullness that fills this boundless desire and appetite we have for everything?
The Scriptures speaks of something called the fullness of God, the fullness that is the match for that unbounded desire, the lover that we long for, someone to finally dance with.
Sometimes we speak of that fullness as quenching desire, filling an emptiness, the hand that fits the glove, the God sized hole filled up by only God, contenting us like fat pigs. Killing our desire or moderating our desire, drugging us, putting us to sleep, making us malleable and feeble.
I think the fullness of God and the unbounded desire of humanity are about something else. Something happens when our boundless appetites are turned toward God, we are not contented, rather we awaken, our appetites are healed, our desire grows and finds new directions to reach out and taste and see and know and grow, the glory of human desire is no longer a source of shame and misuse but rather it becomes the source of life, vitality and new creation. The sin of the world is taken away and anything can happen now.
The fullness of God is more than we are looking for, it troubles our settled and stuck ways and pulls us forward to greater and greater desire, greater and greater fullness.
Jesus speaks his first words in John’s Gospel, “What are you looking for?”
His fullness speaks to our emptiness.
Behold, the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.