“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…” These words from U2 have had a profound impact on my understanding of the life of faith. For years I heard these words as a song expressing a lack of faith. As Augustine famously said, “My heart is restless until it rests in thee.” I would hear and sing “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” as a song about the restlessness before the rest we find in God. But in my arrogance, I assumed that I had “advanced” past such a stage. I have faith. I have God. I rest in God. Thus, I have found what I am looking for…so I thought.

But two things shifted for me. First, I actually listened to what the song says. Bono sings about searching for…something. We might call this “something” love, purpose, heaven, God. However we want to phrase it, we understand his search because we are all searches and seekers. Bono searches by climbing the highest mountain. He searches thorough love and sensuality. He searches in spiritual experiences. “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” But Bono does not neglect religion in his search. He searches in belief and faith: “I believe in kingdom come/Then all the colors will bleed into one/Bleed into one/But yes I’m still running.” Belief, for Bono, is not a destination but something that carries him further on the journey. It encourages him to keep “running.” The song continues in words of prayer: “You broke the bonds/And you loosed the chains/Carried the cross/Of my shame/Oh my shame/You know I believe it.” Bono affirms Christ. He affirms the cross. He affirms salvation. And yet he does not end the song, as Christian radio would probably prefer, by singing, “I finally found what I’m looking for.” Such a conclusion to the song would be sentimental and cheap. It would be a lie. So Bono sings one more time that despite his faith in God, the Kingdom, and the cross, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

The second thing that shifted my understanding of this song was the wise counsel of Pastor Karl Barth. Barth corrected my flawed and arrogant understanding of faith. This past year I have been steeped in the writings and thought of Barth. Particularly in his Epistle to the Romans, Barth speaks much of the “arrogance of religion”. As people of faith, we often assume that we have found it – we have found what we are looking for, we have found God. Such arrogant claims place us under the judgment of God. For though we may have reached the pinnacle of human achievement in religious thought and practice, we are not God. We are not salvation. We are merely John the Baptist standing to the side and pointing to Jesus, as in Grunewald’s painting. Whenever we think we have God figured out, there is good reason to believe we have constructed an idol of ourselves and our own understanding.

Jesus says to the Pharisees, “I have come into the world to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind.” The Pharisees respond, “Surely we aren’t blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind, you wouldn’t have any sin, but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”¹

To be blind and ignorant is to be ready for grace, healing, and revelation. But to claim to accurately see and understand life and God and love, places us in sin and under the judgment of God.

I have learned that everything we call religion is, at its best, a signpost pointing us to Jesus. It carries us further along on the journey to the one we are looking for. But at its worst, all that we call religion keeps us from continuing the journey. When we think that our knowledge of the Bible, our church attendance, our articles of faith, our participation in the sacraments, and all the practices of religion mean that we have found what we are looking for, then we have stopped short of Jesus. Church and scripture and sacraments are not ends in and of themselves. There is no life and salvation in them. Yet God has given us these things, not as grace, but as means of grace. They direct and point us to Jesus. But we do not stop at these things for they are merely signposts. We have not yet “arrived”. We do not yet “see”. And so we continue to sing along with Bono: “I believe…but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

1. John 9:39-41 ↩︎