Texts: Isaiah 60: 1-22; Matthew 2: 1-12

Last weekend was New Year’s and, as usual, I spent my day trying to put together all the stuff that needs to get organized. The problem was, of course, I needed to find the stuff. Many of us have a junk room; you know, the room where we put stuff that we don’t need immediately and that we’ll get to later. But if any of you are like me, we forget what we put where and spend time looking for things that we need, or at least think we need to get organized. I was feeling pretty good by 10:30 since I had gotten up at 5 and started with my busy bee New Year’s Day organizing. But the best laid plans…. Well, they get waylaid when you can’t find certain items you need.

The night before, while much of the rest of the world was either partying or watching the ball fall I was working on my paper from the semester and could not, for the life of me, find this one particular book that I knew I had to cite in the paper. One thing led to another and the next thing I knew I was re-organizing my books, realizing that I had just been double stacking them in bookcases and even piling them up on the floor. I kept looking, and then, I thought, what was it I was looking for in the first place? I did finally find what I had begun looking for in the first place, not to mention those other useful books that I had forgotten that I had purchased over the years.

I don’t think that my experience of looking, looking for something and getting waylaid is unusual. In fact, I would say that it’s unfortunately quite normal. Over the snowy Christmas weekend, travelers’ plans were waylaid by getting stuck in airports. But that’s not the kind of waylaid I want us to think about this morning. It’s more about how we have trouble finding what we are looking for -- in fact, it’s about defining what we are really looking for, searching for, in the first place.

In his book written in light of his experiences in Auschwitz, Victor Frankl looked at our search for meaning in our lives. Sometimes an event will seize us in such a way that we can only find meaning through that event; the event does not have to be as world changing and cataclysmic as was Auschwitz. The event could be the death of a spouse, the loss of a job, or the breakup of a marriage. Sometimes the event is health related; we ask, “Why me?” These events make us confront the question of meaning in our lives.

That is, of course, what we ultimately search for: meaning. We like to think that we define the circumstances of meaning, but, in truth, events around us catapult us into a search that can shake our foundations. On July 23, 2007, in a peaceful town where my son and his family live, Cheshire, Connecticut, a horrible event occurred when two men sexually assaulted a mother and her two daughters, beat the father, a noted doctor in the community, into unconsciousness, tied him to a pole in the basement, set the house on fire and left them all for dead. The girls and their mother, tied down to their beds, died of smoke inhalation. The two men, local petty criminals, were arrested and the first one has just been convicted and was sentenced to death. The second faces trial this spring.

The father, William Petit, describes his life as empty and joyless, said that he had even considered suicide; the family was active in the local Methodist church. The man who has already been convicted and sentenced, Steven Hayes, stood facing Petit and those assembled, and said that death would be a welcome relief for the damage that he had done to the family. There is a mandatory review of the death sentence by the State Supreme Court. I wonder if after the mandatory review Hayes will tell his lawyers who are appointed special public defenders to give it up. Will he find meaning only in his own death? And will his death bring any meaning to Petit and the community? I have to admit that when I first saw the story, I shuddered. The Petits only lived two miles from my own family there; my granddaughter Kellie is now 11, the age at which young Michaela was raped and murdered. The story has consumed this small community and the church that Petit still attends. I can’t help but wonder what the pastor has said or, more importantly, how he has listened, to Petit. As a pastor, I wonder what I would do. What would my response be? How would I find meaning in such an event?

We all shudder at the thought of such a horrific event in our community, of course, but trying to remove thoughts of this “thing” -- there is no other word for it -- from our minds is really difficult. Right now, our church is going to start a caregiving group for caregivers of wounded veterans. I have no idea how many will show up on Thursday night. We’ve put it on our church page, on Meetup.org and I’ve even managed to do something on Facebook. I really am trying to use the new social media. The people who will come are broken as well and search for meaning in their lives and the lives of the people they are caring for.

About a year ago there was a New York Times Magazine article about a mother caring for her son who had been almost destroyed by an IED. He is almost totally paralyzed and can barely talk three years after the attack; the photographs were heartbreaking. I had to wonder if he ever wished he had died rather than continued to live in such a condition. The mother kept talking about the hope of recovery. I could barely make it through the article without crying. God, where is the meaning in this?

We search for meaning in suffering but like Job, find none. The pious platitudes that there is a reason for everything pales in the light of the destruction -- not just murders but destruction -- of the Petit family or the injuries of soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. Dr. Petit has given up his practice and now dedicates himself to the Petit Family Foundation dedicated to raising money for scholarships to the schools where his daughters attended, nursing programs where his wife had trained, and caregiver education for families caring for persons with MS.

Another approach was taken by Laura Blumenfeld, whose father was shot by a terrorist in a random attack while on a trip to Israel. She decides to search for her father’s attacker to get revenge and that becomes her life’s work, her meaning. She wants to know why, why did this young Palestinian shoot her father? He was not a soldier; he was just casually walking down the street. So she searches for an answer; she talks to his family, learns about the hopelessness in his family, talks to her own family about the search. It consumes her. And it’s only when she meets the shooter face to face and the shooter himself comes to appreciate the damage he has done, that there is a form of reconciliation between shooter and victim. The victim, David Blumenfeld, was able to look the shooting as a casualty of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, but he didn’t die. Laura’s book Revenge: A Story of Hope details her coming full circle to reconciliation.

And now, we come full circle back to Frankl. His answer to the senseless suffering at Auschwitz was a realization that even when everything else was stripped from a person, that person could still have dignity. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote, “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

We all search for meaning in our lives. The question for us is how we continue our search in the face of the vicissitudes of daily life with its tragedies, its sometime horrors, and find both love and forgiveness in our search. None of us has an ultimate answer to the meaning of suffering, illness, natural events, or other catastrophes. But we can, as a community of faith, find hope in our common search for meaning, a hope that comes from the love we have for one another knowing that even if we do not find what are commonly called “answers” that our search has a meaning of its own.

Let us pray: Inscrutable and holy God, we are so often torn by our search for answers to so many questions in our lives. May we find comfort in our shared search, may we be open to each other as we wrestle with the events that frame our lives, and may we always love as you have loved us. Amen.