Sermon 9/16/07
Lost and Found- Luke 15:1-10
(view lectionary notes for this text)
I’ve bee on a losing streak lately. Literally. I keep losing things. I’m not usually so absent-minded, but in the midst of the move and in the midst of all this transition, I’ve apparently lost it and lost track of all my things. Twice already I have temporarily lost my keys. One set of keys – the house keys – I just set down in the restroom and forgot to take with me. I found those fairly quickly. But the other set – my church and car keys – I lost on the very night I moved in. I looked all over for them. I actually had to ask Donna to give me an extra set of church keys so that I could get into my own office. I was lucky that my mother had my extra set of car keys so I could still drive my cars. I unpacked everything that I’d brought in my own car with me. I cleaned up, looked in cupboards, and still no keys. Finally, two or three days later, I found my keys at last. They were on the roof of my car – the car that I had actually driven to Oakland and back the night before. I drove to Oakland with my keys on the roof of the car, and somehow, miraculously, they didn’t fall off! I know about losing things.
Our gospel lesson today is about losing things too. Jesus shares two parables with the scribes and the Pharisees, one about losing a sheep, one about losing a coin – two parables that are probably fairly familiar to you. Jesus describes a shepherd who has a hundred sheep, and discovers that one has gone astray. He searches for and finds the lost sheep, rejoices, and lays it on his shoulders to carry home. Arriving home, the shepherd calls friends and neighbors together so that they too can rejoice in his good news – “I have found my sheep that was lost.” In the second parable, a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. She lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully until she finds the lost coin. She, like the shepherd, Jesus says, would rejoice at her find, calling together friends and neighbors to rejoice that she has found the coin that was lost. In both of these instances, Jesus says the parables – the rejoicing that takes place by all involved in each story – are like what happens when one sinner repents and is found by God who is searching and seeking.
Even though I’ve been on a particularly frequent losing streak lately, I’m guessing at one time or another you’ve all lost something that you were anxious, frantic even, to find. You know how desperate you can be to find what you’ve lost, and you know how thoroughly you can search for something, and how much you can hope to find what you’re looking for. We can put a lot of time and effort even into finding things that are replaceable. Material things, possessions – lost keys, for example. It’s inconvenient to lose keys, but if I had never found mine, they were replaceable. It can be a struggle if you lose a significant sum of money, like the woman in the parable, but you can probably manage, and work things out. And still, when we lose these kinds of things, we search, and seek, and scour to find what we’ve lost. Jesus means for us to understand first in this parable that God will seek us out when we are lost, at least as much as we bother to seek after the things we lose, and much even beyond that, because we are irreplaceable, of uncounted value in the eyes of God who created us. We are like the pieces of the puzzle. God can have hundreds of other pieces in place – but if one is missing, it is one piece too many. If one piece is missing, things are not complete. And so God seeks us out when we are lost, when we have strayed, when we have lost sight of God, searches with desperation, with anxiety over us, with utmost concern for finding us. This is God’s gift of grace – that we are loved, sought after by God, even if we probably don’t deserve to be looked after, even if this is the fourth or fifth or fiftieth time we’ve wandered away. God seeks us out, seeks to know us, love us, and be loved by us.
I have experience losing things, but I also have some experience being lost. I’ve been lost while driving in new places before, but that doesn’t make me panic so much. But I still vividly remember a couple times getting lost when I was a child. Once I was at the mall with an older cousin – I was about 7, and she was about 14. She went to the restroom, and left me in the food court to wait for her. She was probably only gone about five minutes, but it seemed like a long time to me, and I panicked. I thought I was lost – she had left me alone. I ended up going up to the pizza place counter and asking for help, and had to be sent to the mall offices while my cousin was paged to come get me. She was of course distraught (and in trouble) by the time she got to me, but I was just happy to be safe and with my cousin again.
Have you ever been lost? Do you remember what it felt like to be lost – really lost? Jesus, in his teaching of these parables, is not only trying to get us to see how much our loving God will seek us out, but he’s also trying to show us how painful and scary and alone it can feel to feel like you are lost from God’s sight, wandering on your own path, turned away from where God wants to lead you. How many times in your faith journey have you wandered away from God? How often do you feel like you are just going through the motions of life, living each day without a particular purpose or direction? These parables are for us, to comfort us, to remind us that God never stops looking for us, and to remind us that we can, should, always seek our way home again.
But beyond knowing that God always seeks for us, beyond knowing that we can be found by God even when we feel completely lost, Jesus tells this parable for another reason – the most important reason. We have go back to the text and remember why Jesus is telling these parables in the first place. What made him tell these stories? When he sets the scene to tell these parables, Jesus is responding to the grumbling of the Pharisee and scribes. They’re upset with Jesus, because everywhere Jesus goes tax collectors and sinners seem to surround Jesus. And not only do these sorts follow Jesus, but Jesus even sits and eats with them – he welcomes them, makes them feel important. In Jesus’ day, the act of sharing a meal with someone was a personal, intimate event. You wouldn’t eat with just anyone, and the scribes and Pharisees, religious leaders in the community, certainly wouldn’t want to be seen eating with tax collectors and other known sinners.
So often when we read scripture passages, we see ourselves as the main characters, and so when we hear these parables, we think of ourselves as the ones who are lost. But Jesus is asking us to move ourselves out of the center of this text. So Jesus uses one of his favorite tactics in the teaching of this lesson. When he describes the woman and her lost coin, the shepherd and the lost sheep, he begins with a tone that says, “who would not do it this way? Who would not react like this?” “Which one of you would not,” he begins. He sets us up to feel that if we don’t react like he has indicated, that we’re not acting as a normal person would respond. In this situation, Jesus says: who wouldn’t go out and have a search party for a lost sheep? Who would let the poor sheep wander lost and alone? Who wouldn’t rejoice at this sheep being found, and call up friends and family to let them in on the good news? Well, the answer is: we wouldn’t, his audience wouldn’t have, shepherds probably wouldn’t have! What shepherd would have left the 99 sheep open to attack just to seek out one stray? He says, “who wouldn’t call together friends and neighbors to rejoice over a coin that was lost but is now found?” The answer is: we wouldn’t! We wouldn’t be so excited, we wouldn’t bother our neighbors with this kind of news. But Jesus challenges us to set a new norm. The old norm is to reject people when they stray or when they behave differently than the rest of the fold. The new norm is to seek out those who are lost and alone, and to welcome them back with open arms, with celebration. But still, we tend to see ourselves as the lost victim at the center of all these stories – it always us that God is seeking after.
In actuality, by Jesus directing his story at the Pharisees and scribes, he is talking to people who already consider themselves faithful, who already see themselves at the center of the fold. If he was telling the parable today, he’d be talking to us – the church regulars, the people who have already been ‘found’ or who never strayed from the fold to begin with. He’s not talking to the lost sheep – it is the very people the scribes and Pharisees look down on that are the lost ones Jesus seeks after. Our presence here today, for most of us, signifies that we are more like part of the 99 sheep than like the lost one. So the question for us must shift – the question asked of us is not how do we find our way back to God when we’ve been lost, but how we welcome others into the fold whom God leads into our midst. As a community of faith, Jesus asks us to reorient ourselves, to focus our purpose in a different direction. Our purpose, our mission as a church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. We’re always working at our discipleship – being better students, better followers of Jesus. But there’s another part of our purpose, another piece to our discipleship – and that is to go with God to seek out those who are lost and alone, those who feel rejected by God and by the church. We’re meant to search for them with as much concern as God will search for them, and we’re meant to rejoice when they are found as God rejoices.
The real question Jesus wants to push on in these parables is not a question of why or how we stray from God, but of how we respond when others find themselves outside of the sheepfold. September is Open House month in the United Methodist Church, because it is a time of year when many people seem to be thinking about checking out a church, thinking about letting God find them, beginning to believe that they are never really lost to God. Our slogan as a denomination is “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” But before we claim this motto, we have to ask ourselves, are we really open? Have we opened our hearts and our minds? Have we opened our doors? Are we really looking for some lost sheep to make a home right in our midst? Are we ready to receive those who might not look like us, or think like us, or live as we live? This is the challenge that Jesus issues to us – it is God’s way, Jesus says, to rejoice over the lost who are found – can we make it our way as well? Let us open our hearts and open our minds as we prepare to open the doors to our homes, our church, and our lives. Rejoice – the one who was lost has been found. The one who was alone is at home in God’s arms, and at home in this community of faith. Amen.