Sermon for March 10, 2019 
This year as we journey through Lent, I want to look at different spiritual practices we can develop in our everyday lives. While most people would like to deepen their faith, growing closer to God, they don’t usually know where to start. Beyond prayer, most people have no idea what spiritual practices might be.
I want to talk about practices that are part of our daily living. The whole reason for a spiritual practice is to remind ourselves of our connection to God and to deepen that relationship. Making these practices things that we can do every day and not just for special occasions, brings God into our everyday lives as well.
Now, not all of these spiritual practices happen when life is good. In fact, we often find ourselves closer to God in the more difficult times than the more comfortable ones. This week I want to talk about getting lost.
Getting lost sounds more like a mistake than some sort of spiritual practice. And yet, if you look at our Scripture reading for this morning, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the code word in the Bible for being utterly alone and lost. It’s the Spirit that brings Jesus to this place, and he’s not the only one.
Faith involves following the Spirit into uncertain places. We see it in Abraham, who left his homeland not knowing where he was going; in the Hebrews, liberated from the routines of Egypt for the wilderness; and in the early church, commanded by Jesus to give up family ties and go to Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth spreading the good news. Faith, by definition, is a journey into unknown territory, a pilgrimage into ministry and mystery. Getting lost is not necessarily an escape, but a willingness to be displaced, vulnerable, and exposed, open to prayer and personal transformation.
Think back to the last time you got lost driving somewhere. Maybe you were trying to find an address and the map took you somewhere outside of your experience. What was the first thing you did? For most people, the answer is turn down the radio. We take out the extra sound because we need to pay attention to every detail of where we are, in the hopes of running across something familiar.
Getting lost means becoming aware of every step you take, becoming aware of where you are and what is around you. Among other things, it is a spiritual practice in becoming aware of the present, of the world around you and the people in it.
Getting lost forces us into a position of vulnerability. It forces us to reach out to other people for help, to ask for directions or a guide back to the right path. Getting lost helps us to find trust in others, realizing that more of them are willing to help than not.
When we are lost, it also helps us set priorities. Being lost scrapes us down to the bare bones of what matters in our lives. After Jesus was lost in the wilderness for 40 days, he was faced with offers for the primal needs in life: food, safety and power. But his priority remained the same as it always was, following the path that God set before him.
Now, I’ve been talking about being literally lost so far, but there are so many other ways to be lost, aren’t there? We find ourselves lost when they plans that we made for our lives fall apart. When the job we had built our sense of self around is gone. When the healthy body we had taken for granted isn’t so healthy any more. When the relationship that we had counted on falls apart. These are times when we our lost in our lives, finding ourselves in unfamiliar territory.
Everyone comes to places in their lives when they are lost. When they are alone in the wilderness looking around them and wondering how they got there. And in these times, we find the same things happen when we are literally lost: we become aware of what is around us, we find ourselves vulnerable and in need of asking others for help, and we find that our priorities are clear.
In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor speaks of her own experiences getting lost in her life: moving away from places she never thought she’d leave, getting a divorce from the person she thought she’d spend her life with, leaving parish ministry. She says, "While none of these displacements was pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back. I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path."
We have to remember that God does some of God’s best work with people who are lost. Abraham and Sarah, the Israelites, Elijah, Jesus himself. All of them go through these times when they are lost that lead them closer to where God is calling them. There are spiritual fruits in failure.
I bet that if we pinpoint the times in our lives that changed us for the better, a lot of those times are wilderness times. It’s certainly true in my life. Now, I’m not saying that you should seek out ways to make your life fall apart. I’m saying that in our lives, like it or not, things will go wrong and we will find ourselves lost. The practice of getting lost has nothing to do with wanting to go there. It is something that happens, like it or not
The spiritual practice part is recognizing when you are there and taking those steps. Pay attention, be vulnerable, and sort out what really matters to you.
And you can find ways to practice this discipline in small ways in your daily lives. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it like this: "I keep my eyes open for opportunities to get slightly lost, so that I can gradually build the muscles necessary for radical trust . . . If you do not start choosing to get lost in some fairly low-risk ways, then how will you ever manage when one of life’s big winds knocks you clean off your course? I am not speaking literally here, although literal lostness is a good place to begin since the skills are the same: managing your panic, marshalling your resources, taking a good lookin around to see where you are and what this unexpected development might have to offer you."
So, try taking a different route than the one you have taken a thousand times before. Turn left instead of right and see where you find yourself. Go visit a town you have never been too and wander around for awhile. Go for a hike down unfamiliar trails. Or even visit a restaurant you have never been too. Seek out the unfamiliar in your life, and see where you might find God in the wilderness. Get a little lost this week, and pay attention to what happens when you do.
