The Searchers

24^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

Arguably, John Wayne’s best movie ever, and the one he should have received the Oscar for, was The Searchers. He plays Ethan Edwards, a middle-aged Civil War veteran who spends five years looking for his abducted niece, accompanied by his nephew Marty. The girl, Debbie, had been kidnapped as a small child by the Comanches after they had massacred her family. The two men never give up; they doggedly slog through all sorts of inhospitable terrain in all types of weather, following up on every lead they find.

In the end, they finally find the girl in a Comanche camp. Ethan and Marty fear that after five years Debbie is more Comanche than white, and she actually runs away from them when they try to rescue her. She is afraid that they will kill her just as they had killed all the Comanches in the camp, and Marty really doesn’t know what Ethan will do to her. The most dramatic moment in the film is when Ethan catches up to her and grabs her and you don’t know what he’s going to do to her. He then wraps her in his arms and says, “Let’s go home”.

The Searchers is a modern day parable that focuses on two things: the value of the person lost and the dogged persistence of the searchers. It’s the same with today’s readings.

We can look at the two shorter parables in the gospel today and think that Jesus was just being ironic. Why would anyone go to such lengths to find something as worthless as a single sheep or a cheap coin, worth about a dime.  The Pharisees who Jesus was telling this story to also probably thought it ironic, because they were well off. Usually, Jesus told parables to the poor, the uneducated, and the simple. Those folks knew the value of a single sheep or a single dime. A single sheep was extremely important to the shepherd, not just because of all the time and effort he had to put in to raise it, but because it was his main source of income, and its progeny would insure his future. That poor woman lost ten percent of her savings, so of course she would tear apart the house looking for it. When you lose something so dear to you you become desperate to find it. And desperate people do desperate things.

Can you imagine losing something that would make you desperate to find it? We may not be able to relate to stories about sheep and dimes, but we just remembered the events that occurred on September 11, 2001 this past week. What about the men who rushed into those burning buildings searching for people trapped inside? They didn’t even know any of them personally, yet they went inside, at incredible risk to their own lives, to search for them. They saw those people as being so valuable that they were willing to die for them, and they ultimately did.

We are often reminded of the number of people who died in the towers, both rescuers and victims, yet we often forget that thousands of people were saved by those searchers in the hours prior to the towers falling. They kept going in again and again to lead people to safety. I think that is a parable we can all relate to today.

Human life has that type of value. Human souls have that type of value, too. Do you ever wonder why some people go to heroic lengths to try to convert people to their faith? Why are there 70,000 LDS missionaries going door-to-door every day all over the world? All for the hope of baptizing just a few. It takes a person with two strong convictions to be a successful missionary. A firm belief that what they have to offer is of the greatest value, and a firm belief that the people they are preaching to are worthy of receiving that gift.

True missionaries value both the message and the person receiving it. LDS missionaries believe with all their hearts that their way is the only way, that unless a person is baptized a Mormon he or she will not get to the highest heaven, and so they are desperate to baptize as many people as they can. It is their responsibility to carry that message out to the world. The most effective seeker is the desperate seeker.

The seekers in today’s gospel were desperate. The shepherd was desperate not to lose his future. The woman was desperate to recover ten percent of her savings. The father was desperate to recover his son.

Yet the lost are often desperate themselves, aren’t they? The prodigal son is desperate to eat. His life of dissipation quickly led to a life of desperation. And he was hungry, lonely, afraid, and full of regret. That is often the case with people who are lost. I try to imagine what it was like being trapped in the stairwells of the twin towers, or worse, on the floors above where the planes hit. The fact that so many of them leapt to their deaths rather than suffer what they were experiencing there is proof of the level of their desperation.

When someone is lost they feel worthless and afraid. They wonder if anyone is out there looking for them. They feel so very alone. They don’t know how to get back home and they don’t know how or if they will be accepted back if they do return. Like little Debbie in The Searchers, sometimes they run away from their rescuers because they’re afraid of what they’ll do.

Sin is like that, too. I think that when we first turn away from God, we do regret it and feel bad about it. That’s our consciences talking to us. But then, if we do not repent and return, it becomes easier and easier for us to silence that small inner voice, until we stop regretting altogether. That’s when it’s really dangerous. We cannot repent unless we first regret our actions.

If we have no regrets then we don’t think we’ve ever made mistakes and so those mistakes stay with us. Repentance means letting go of our sins. We often feel worthless when we fail, when we don’t live up to what we know to be true and good. What if we didn’t have a mechanism to repent? What if we didn’t have someone to forgive us?

A young man I know went through a stage when he was a teenager when he claimed to be a Wiccan. He was a warlock. And he was very serious about it. He read up on it and studied it. What he actually was was a naturalist. He saw the presence of the Creator in all of nature. It was a live and let live philosophy, with no real challenge to live beyond yourself.

It was no use trying to argue with him or even discuss the particulars of his beliefs versus mine, but one day I just asked him, “What do you do when you need to be forgiven?” His live and let live philosophy had no mechanism for repentance and forgiveness, because a tree cannot forgive. You cannot go to nature for help when you are in dire straits. There is no reconciliation with a faceless, impersonal “universe” that you’re just a small insignificant part of. A tree will not go searching for you. Well, unless you’re a hobbit.

Oftentimes the lost cannot return on their own. Many people never come to the realization that the prodigal son can come home. They feel so completely worthless and unwanted that they don’t think they deserve to come home. Or worse yet, they don’t realize that they’re lost at all. They have become so numbed by their sins and their rationalizations that they have ceased to feel regret.

That’s where we come in. I often wonder, why wasn’t the older brother out looking for the prodigal son? He was sitting at home with his father, doing what he was told, when what he should have been doing was desperately searching for his brother. Even his father would go out to the road to look for him, but the “good Christian” stayed in his comfortable place and did nothing. He never saw the value in his brother, only the sinfulness. I think he would be judged more harshly for his inaction than his brother would be for his sins.

And how much easier would it be to find that lost sheep if all the shepherds got together to help search? How much faster would that woman have found her dime if all her friends had come over to look with her? How many people would have been saved in the twin towers if only a single fireman had responded? We can easily sit here and think that we have it all figured out and have all the answers. We can be comfortable in our prayer and devotions, when all the while there are sheep out there to rescue. Or we suffer in silence over the son or daughter who has fallen astray, and never ask for help from our fellow searchers.

We’re all desperate in a way. We desperately need a savior and we desperately need to save. That’s why we’re all in this together. We all have value and we all have something extremely valuable to offer. But we must act together. That’s why we are Church.

Heck, even John Wayne rustled up a posse’.