Our reading this morning is the forty -- second Psalm. It's excerpted.

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, oh God.
My soul thirsts for the living God.
But when shall I come and behold the face of God?
My tears have been my food, day and night
while people mock me saying "Where is your God?"
But I remember when I went with the throng
and led them in procession to the house of God.
I remember the glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you cast down, oh my soul
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God for I shall praise Him again,
my help and my God.

"As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you. My soul thirsts for the living God." I think that is a beautiful line of poetry. A love poem to God in which the poet speaks eloquently of his desire and longing for a relationship with the holy.

This morning I wanted to speak about this desire and longing that fuel our spiritual lives. And I wanted to use this text as our jumping off point today and so I spent some time this week studying the 42nd Psalm and discovered something very interesting. I discovered that if you look back at the King James Version of the text, the old English version of the text, that first line actually reads a little bit differently. I want to share that with you this morning because I was intrigued by this translation. It says, instead of "as a deer longs for flowing streams," the text reads, "as the deer pants after the water brooks, so pants my soul after thee, oh God."

Now I don't know about you but, for me, "pant" is an evocative verb. [Laughter] Have you ever seen an animal pant? My dog used to pant. We'd take her for long walks high up in the hills of upstate New York and, on our way up the hill, she would range far and wide; her ears were perked up, she had lots of excitement and energy. But then we'd turn and head back for home and she'd stay close at our heels, her ears pinned back to her head and she would be panting, sucking air, desperate for the water in her bowl back home. It's not a very spiritual image is it, panting? Conjuring, as it does, visions of flapping jowls and flared nostrils and saliva, even. And I thought to myself, I wonder if that's why they took it out in the retranslation. [Laughter] Maybe it was a little too earthy for them; maybe they found it unseemly to compare our love for the holy to an animal's desperate thirst for water. But that is precisely why I love the image, "as the deer pants after the water brooks, so pants my soul after thee." For me, this line captures the alpha and the omega of religion, the burning center of the spiritual life is this longing, this desire. For some it's a fervent desire to know God; for others a longing for enlightenment. For still others, a yearning to live as one with the earth and with all creation. But no matter how we name it, we cannot escape the longing and desire that are central to the spiritual life.

This morning I want to explore where this desire comes from, how it can lead us astray and how, ultimately, it can be quenched. I believe that this desire comes from a place deep inside of us. Just about every religious tradition that there is teaches this truth about what it means to be human; they teach the truth that it is the nature of human beings to be incomplete, that in and of ourselves we human beings are not quite whole. There's something missing. There's something that we can't quite put our hands on, that we don't have in and of ourselves. And this isn't just a philosophical speculation, I don't think. Doesn't our experience confirm this? We feel an absence; we feel something lacking.

Sometimes it strikes us as a vague notion that there's something more to life. Other times, we feel it acutely, like pain or privation. It's not uncommon for people to come to me in my office and to say to me, "Rob, I am missing something in my life and I am seeking desperately to find it." It's from this sense, the sense that there's something missing, that springs our desire to discover what that something more is. It's the sense that's something's missing that sets us on a lifelong search for that which will complete us, for that which will make us whole. That search is the defining journey of our lives, I believe.

Paul Tillich, one of the preeminent theologians of the last century, called the object of this search "our ultimate concern." Ultimate for two reasons. First because it is the overriding concern in our life and second, because it is a search for the ultimate or the transcendent source of value in our lives. This desire, this search, Tillich was saying, is literally what makes our world go 'round. That's why, for me, the image of the thirsty deer, panting for the cool waters of the stream, seems so appropriate. We are desperate to have our desire quenched.

This desire is a holy thing. It holds great potential for fulfillment and for joy in our lives; it can lead us out of ourselves and into relationship with our brothers and sisters, with the earth, with the holy. It was this desire for something more that forced St. Francis down on his knees, saying "Dear God, make me an instrument of your peace." It was this desire for something more that led the young Buddha out of his sheltered and privileged isolation and into compassionate connection with his fellow beings. It was this desire for something more that caused William Ellery Channing to shout out, "I am a living member of the great family of all souls." The desire leads us to love in ever -- expanding circles; it points us toward that which is of greatest value in the world, that which will complete us and make us whole. For me there's nothing more precious in this world than this desire.

But there's a shadow side here. One of the great tragedies of human living is that this desire for wholeness and completion, this desire that can lead us to life's greatest fulfillment, can also lead us terribly astray. How shall I put this? Sometimes we make bad decisions about what it is that is worthy of our ultimate concern. If you're anything like me, you've made a lot of mistakes and misjudgments along the way and spent a lot of time trying to recover from them and make up for them. Must we really name all of the spiritual dead ends that we have gotten ourselves into, all the things that we mistakenly set forward as our ultimate concern? The pursuit of wealth. Of power. Of self -- promotion. Our desire to be loved. Our desire for pleasure for pleasure's sake.

We've all followed these paths, and we still do. Sometimes, when our need is more desperate, we even follow other paths. Our desire to feel whole and complete leads us to drugs or to alcohol, to salve the pain that we feel inside of us. What we've done in these situations is taken our ultimate concern, this desire that can only be satisfied by things ultimate, and we've tried to satisfy them with things partial. What happens is, the partial thing doesn't suffice, and so we want more of it, and we want more of it, and more of it, and it still doesn't suffice. That is my theological definition of addiction, really. Our addiction is our connection to those partial things that never quite satisfy the ultimate concern inside of us.

Now all of these things -- fame, money, wealth, power -- none of these things in and of themselves are horrible things. What makes them wrong is when we put them forth as our ultimate concern, when we make that mistake. Emerson was a perceptive student of human desire. He said this: "Make no mistake about it. Everyone is religious, in the sense that everyone will worship something," he said. Don't fool yourself thinking that you don't worship anything. Everyone will worship something; everyone has an ultimate concern. And therefore, he gave this warning: "Be careful what you worship, for what you worship you will become. What you praise, you will grow into." From time to time it's a good idea for us to reflect on our lives and to ask ourselves, "What is it that we worship? What is it that we've set before ourselves as our ultimate concern?" And to ask ourselves, "Is that thing, is that object, worthy of our desire?"

I'm guessing that each of us has done this kind of soul searching at some point in our past and that that's one of the reasons we first came to church, having run into one spiritual dead end and then another, we came to church one day saying, "Help put me back on the right path again; help me focus my concern again. Let's do this together," we say to one another. "Let's together discern what it is that's an appropriate object of our desire. I think that our services each week give us the answer to this question. They give us the answer to the question "What is it that is worthy of my ultimate concern?"

You know, we've been taking these surveys as we've been moving toward two services and we've asked people, "What is the thing that you cannot do without in our services?" And, much to my chagrin, the sermon wasn't the answer [Laughter]. No, people loved the music and the sermon, but people said "The thing I cannot do without is 'Spirit of Life.'" To sing, week after week, "Spirit of Life." They said in the survey, Rob, if your sermon doesn't quite, you know, make it that week, if the choir's a little off -- tune, as long as I can sing "Spirit of Life," I have gotten what I need to go back into the world and redirect my spirit toward this ultimate concern. Listen to those words again: "Spirit of Life, come unto me; sing in my heart ... move through my hands ... give my life the shape of justice." I think the reason this is so important to us is that in those very words are the worthy objects of our ultimate concern, our connection with the holy, our relationship with our brothers and sisters, our sense of oneness with the earth and with all of creation.

Let me close with a quick story from the Buddhist tradition. One day, a hermit was meditating by the river's edge when a young man interrupted him, saying "Master, I wish to become your disciple." "Why?" replied the hermit, not used to company. The young man thought for a moment, "Because I want to find enlightenment." At that, the master jumped up, grabbed the man by the scruff of his neck, dragged him into the river and plunged his head under water, holding him there while the man kicked and struggled to free himself. Finally, when it seemed the young man could endure no longer, the hermit pulled his head back up out of the water again, and the young man coughed up water, gasping for air. When he eventually quieted down, he said to the master, "What did you do that for?" The master replied with a question of his own: "tell me, what did you want most of all when you were under water?" "Air," answered the man. "Very well," said the master, "go home and come back to me when you want enlightenment as much as you just wanted air.

Friends, in my mind, this is what religion is all about. Religion is for people who love as desperately as a drowning man desires air. Religion is for people who love like a deer pants for a flowing stream, knowing instinctively that her own life depends upon it, that that is what will make her whole. Religion is not for the cynical. It is not for the tepid, nor for the faint of heart. Religion is for lovers, plain and simple: lovers of life, lovers of justice, lovers of creation, lovers of God. That we might count ourselves among that number is my fervent prayer.

Amen.