“LOST”

March 5, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Mark 1:9-12

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

How many of you have watched the television show LOST?  It is a series that began September 2004.  In it a plane crash strands the surviving passengers of Oceanic flight 815 from Australia to the United States on a seemingly deserted tropical island.  The crash forces a group of otherwise strangers, the passengers, to work together to stay alive.  However, their survival is threatened by several mysteries, including the contents of a hatch buried in the ground, an unknown creature that roams the jungle, and the motives of the inhabitants known as the “Others.” 

I have to admit I am hopelessly addicted to the series.  Actually, I did not start watching it in 2004.  Gavin downloaded the wholes series on his computer and I have started watching it on the computer in  the last month or so.  I have started with episode 1 and am now on episode 15 of over 40 episodes. 

LOST has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Drama.  It is hugely popular.

Why does this series capture the imagination of so many people?  Now days being completely lost is hard to do.  We have cell phones in our pockets.  We have Global Positioning Devises.  Every road has been mapped.  The oceans have been charted.  Now days, you have to try hard to get lost.  None the less, the idea of being lost strikes something very basic in us all.  Perhaps it is a deep fear bread into us from the evolution of the species.  For hundreds of thousands of years being lost meant wandering just beyond the campfire light.  Wilderness was everywhere.  Being lost was a daily threat. 

When you are lost the big question is how am I going to survive and do I have it in me to survive?  Being lost you are stripped down to the bare essentials.  You discover who you really are, and what you are really made of.  Being lost you are put to the test.  This test is not only an external test of strength against the circumstances.  It is just as much an internal test of courage, perseverance, faith, intelligence, and more. 

For instance, there is a character in lost named Jack Shephard who is played by Matthew Fox.  He is a surgeon.  He is immediate help to the survivors of the crash as he attends to their medical needs.  He is an instant hero.  In fact, one shady character named Sawyer sarcastically refers to him as “Hero.”  “Look who Hero is rescuing now!” 

But this hero has doubts about himself.  In a flash back we find that his father was also a surgeon.  His father was cold and belittled Jack.  His father was constantly putting his son down and challenging whether he was made of the right stuff to be a doctor and to be a leader.  Lost, Jack questions himself.  He scours his mind replaying times in his life where he failed others such as his friend who was beaten up when he was a kid.  Lost, the question is will Jack live up to the challenge of leadership that others naturally put him in?  Will he falter when he is most needed?  Is he really so squeaky clean – a question Sawyer’s sarcasm keeps in play.  Who is Jack really under the professional veneer, the controlled demeanor and clean language?  What will Jack become when he is truly lost?  Jacks biggest battle is on the inside and not the outside.

In the scripture reading today we came across the “Temptation of Christ.”  All three gospels, Matthew, Luke and Mark recount that just after Jesus was baptized in the water of the Jordon river,  just after the voice from heaven declared him God’s beloved son, Jesus got lost.   Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days.   Lost Jesus battled Satan and wild beasts.  This is a New Testament, 2000 year old prequel, to the television series, if you will. 

The gospels of Matthew and Luke says that Jesus while he was in the wilderness was “tempted.” Tempted means to entice to sin.     But in the gospel of Mark the proper translation is that Jesus was not tempted in the wilderness but tested.   Tested implies overcoming obstacles. 

I prefer the idea of tested over the idea of temptation.  This is because it seems to me that the word “temptation” has been greatly trivialized.  We are temped by chocolate, and tempted not to do our homework, and tempted by sex.  Temped has the connotation of all those things that our mother would go “tut-tut” at.  Certainly we can use the worded “tempted” in more ominous ways such as tempted by greed, or by revenge.  But, still the word carries a lot of shallow baggage with it.

Furthermore, when we speak of temptation we also speak of “resisting” temptation.  The image that comes to my mind is someone pushing a dish of chocolate mousse away from them and turning their head to the side and closing their eyes.  The idea that carries through is that in order to resist temptation one must deny it, and force it back down to the depths so we never see it again.  We resist greed by denying it.

But the worst thing is that when we think about resisting temptation we think of it in terms of resisting evil.  We handle evil like we handle the chocolate mousse.  We shove it away, throw it in the basement, lock the door and throw away the key. 

But, there are two ways of understanding evil.  One way people maintain their selves and sanity, is that maintain that God is completely independent from evil.  Evil is a non-God power.  Evil/Satan is something with which God is in eternal conflict. 

This concept of evil at first is very appealing.  It is clean cut.  Easy to think about.  Evil is bad.  God is good.  Therefore, God has nothing to do with evil.  So when evil tempts you push it away.  Get rid of it! 

  None the less, this idea has a big problem.  If evil is entirely separate from God, then God is not one.  In fact, there are two Gods.  The good God and the evil God.  But, the Bible says that God is one.  God is the one core of all being toward whome everything – even evil – ultimately converges. 

This brings us to the second option about evil which is that God is somehow present even in the depths of evil.  Certainly God is less evident there and less accessible but God is there none the less.  Therefore, conquering evil is not about shoving it away from you, throwing it in closet and slamming the door.  Rather to conquer evil we must find the park of the holy in it and blow on the spark until the evil things starts to work for the good.

This second concept of evil is how we are tested when we are lost.  We must find the good in us but we also must wrestle with the evil in us.  We must wrestle with the evil until that evil turns from darkness to the light.  It is not as easy as saying “We have sinned.”  Then saying “God forgives us.”  We have eaten chocolate mousse, God forgives us.  Rather it is about redemption.   Redeeming the fallen parts, through struggle, and character and sacrifice.

Have you ever noticed that when you pray sometimes “strange thoughts” come up seemingly on their own?  Were you just praying about the poor and suddenly you started wondering what it would be like to live in Bill Gate’s mansion?  Were you just praying about peace and then find yourself thinking about gossiping to your neighbor about what another neighbor did.    An old Jewish saying from the Baal Shem Tov is:

One must believe that the whole world is filled with God’s presence and …there is no place empty of God.  All human thoughts have within them the reality of God…  when a strange or evil though arises in a person’s mind while he is engaged in prayer, it is coming to that person to be repaired and elevated. 

What do you do when a strange thought comes in the middle of prayer?  You must find the root of love in it, and transform the evil into good. 

This is what being tested by God is all about.  Take the character in the TV series LOST who goes by the name of “Sawyer” (played by Josh Holloway).  Sawyer is despicable, scoundrel, low life.  Sawyer scavenges all the valuable things on the airplane and tries to sell them to others in need.   These are things like water and medicine.  It would be easy to discount Sawyer as evil.  He was a con man who would sleep with men’s wives, and get the wives to get their husbands, to give him money for bogus investments.  One hates Sawyer until one finds out that when he was a kid his father, murdered his mother, who had been conned in a similar way.  Sawyer is a sad little boy underneath that needs to be loved.  And, Sawyer in his obnoxious way has an uncanny ability to find the shadow side of people.  He has the ability to blurt out the truth that no one else wants to blurt out.  Sawyer is a sociopath and a visionary.  Somehow, God is present even in Sawyer’s sins.  I am only on episode 14 I don’t know how Sawyer is going to turn out.  But the battle is on. 

I also don’t know how Jack is going to turn out.  Somehow Sawyer was able to get the hero to allow another character to torture Sawyer in order to extract asthma medication from him for a woman suffering a horrible asthma attack. 

Tolstoy once said that he never prays to God that he might not suffer.  Rather he prays to God that he is able to live up to his suffering.   That in the wilderness and testing of suffering the best of himself would emerge.  Even the darkest part be able to work for the good. 

When you are Lost you are nowhere.  Nowhere is has a very ironic spelling.  N-o-w-h-e-r-e.  It can spell either “nowhere”  or it can spell “now here.”  Jesus was baptized and then he was lost and tested in the wilderness.  Jesus was nowhere but as he past the test he found himself.  He went from nowhere to now here. 

That is why the T.V. series is so popular.  We see our selves in it.  Certainly we are not lost.  We know exactly where we are in terms of time and place.  But, never the less, the external circumstances of wilderness merely frame the internal reality that we all struggle with.  As did Jesus’ time in the wilderness.  We are children of God caught up in cosmic testing.  Can we find out who we really are?  Can we survive in our life and turn darkness into light?  Lost on an island in the pacific ocean the characters have no place to escape from themselves.  They cannot simply ignore the evil in them and push the temptations away.    This is so even if they sincerely mean never to do it again.  That is too easy.  We do that all the time.  The TV. series LOST flushes out the truth of all of life.  The evil inside of ourselves will come back to haunt us no matter how hard we push it away and close our eyes.  So we must learn to cherish the bad parts of themselves as well as the good as long-banished children and if we are to survive at all finally take them home again.    So it is with the characters on the TV series LOST.   So it is was with Jesus when he was tested in the wilderness.  So it is with us.