Preached on September 16, 2007 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Luke 15:1-10
Dedicated to Betsy; and always to the glory of God.
Last month, when the mine in Utah collapsed on those six miners, I remember following the news day after day about the efforts to find them, about the size of the holes they were drilling deep, deep into the earth to the places where they thought the miners might be trapped, with hope that they find signs of life. As it became ten and eleven days since the collapse, they were drilling yet another hole, and I wondered what hope they could still have? But everyone wanted to keep looking. When people are lost, we want to find them.
When someone is really lost and we know it, we will go to heroic efforts to find them. When there are climbers trapped on a mountain. Maybe they weren’t prepared, maybe they shouldn’t have gone up with a storm coming in, but it doesn’t matter, we will call forth great rescuers and resources. A child missing in a small town will have crowds combing the fields, parks, and woods. We post pictures and send them out in the mail, asking if anyone has seen them.
And we hope that if we are ever lost there will be no limit to the efforts made to find us, wherever we may be. The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin tell us that when we are lost in a spiritual sense, when we are buried deep and the weight of the world is upon us, God will search and search for us, will find us, will rejoice and bring us back. That is good news, and news that we need to share, because too often the message about God gets twisted, and we hear instead that if we are lost, then we did it to ourselves, and it’s up to us to get back, not God. That’s not the story Jesus told, and not the one we should tell either.
The story Jesus told was about a shepherd who, perhaps, is bringing the sheep from the hills to the village at the end of day, only to realize that one sheep didn’t make it back. In those days, all the sheep owned in the village were herded together, and the owners would take turns to stay with the animals. As the shepherd goes back to the hills, the rest of the town waits and watches in the failing light, not knowing whose sheep is lost, but together hoping for its safe return. Finally, the shepherd’s form can be seen in the moonlight coming over a hill, the lost sheep across his shoulders. He calls out to them with triumph, and everyone rejoices, and brings out the food and drink for a late night celebration. The gospel is told in that kind of story.
Or try this one on: A woman loses one of her ten coins, called a drachma, which is each equal to the wage for one day’s labor. But a single woman in that time and place was not in a position to easily earn such a wage. She was a widow, perhaps, or never married -vulnerable in either case. Those ten coins are all her wealth. It would be like someone on a small fixed income of social security having lost a check. She laments to her neighbor, and soon word spreads. People feel awful for her loss, and what it means to her security.
The story goes that she lit a lamp and swept the house, which in those days would have had a pounded dirt floor covered by thatch. Not an easy place to spot a coin, especially by the limited glow of a lamp. But she is persistent, and does not give up the search until the coin is found. When she spots the dull glint of metal, smudged with dirt, she cries with happiness and relief, and calls to her neighbors, who come with hugs and food and drink to help her to bask in the joy of the lost being found. And so it is with God. The lost is found. God will search, and search, and search. And when we are found, what joy there is. If you finish this chapter in the gospel, you will find that Jesus completes these two parables by telling one more story, this time about a son who is lost and thought to be dead, and about the great party his father throws when his beloved child comes home.
We rejoice when the lost is found. But what about the people who are lost even while they are right in front of us? What about the people who might be in the same room, but to everyone else they are lost because of the way they look, or smell; because they are bitter and mean, those long-applied defenses; or lost because of the shameful secret about them that everyone else knows, the one that is whispered in the other corners of the room. “He’s the one.” “Do you know what she did?”
Those people are the ones that Jesus sought out – the ones who were lost in plain sight. He shared his meals and conversation with them, and showed mercy to them, trusting that these acts of generosity, of grace, would be a way for these lost people to be found.
It is good news that God finds us when we are lost, but that’s not why Jesus told these stories. He told these stories because the uptight religious people were upset again about Jesus spending time with all those sinners. Righteous people shouldn’t get near them, they thought; they should maintain their dignity! And God’s holiness surely could not be compromised by the presence of these sinners.
In response, Jesus told these stories, telling them not to the people who were lost, but to the people who were not joining the party, which is another way of being lost, I suppose. If one way of hearing these parables is identifying with the lost sheep and lost coin, the other way is for us to identify with the neighbors who are invited to join the celebration. How will we respond? Will we rejoice? Will we celebrate that God loves the lost, and loves them just because?
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, tells the story of a ten-day backpacking trip in the mountains that she and her husband took with eight strangers and a trip leader.[1] Each day they would pack up camp and hike over mountain ridges to a new place to camp for the night. They took turns in the lead, and some were fast hikers and some were slow, but eventually they always had to wait for the last person in line to catch up, and so realized that the group could cover ground only as fast as their slowest member, and that was Pat. Pat was always the slowest, partly because she spent much of her energy to maintain a running commentary of her complaints. The day was too sunny or too damp, we can’t stop for lunch here, it’s too rocky. She didn’t join in conversations, but she would listen in on them, and interrupt in order to correct someone’s grammar, geography, history, or botany. She hadn’t come with anyone, and didn’t particularly warm up to anyone.
At the end of one difficult day in which they had climbed three separate peaks, they finally arrived at their campsite with little daylight left only to find that Pat was not with them. They quickly discovered that no one had seen her since just after lunch, when she had told the person responsible for bringing up the rear of the group to just go on ahead and she would be there soon. He’d been only too happy to let her take the last spot by herself, and no one had thought of her since.
Everyone was tired and hungry, and no one could imagine going back to look for her, although they all felt a chill and horror at the thought of being lost, alone in the woods. The trip leader took a flashlight, blanket, and warm soup and went back for her, because it was his job. The rest milled about, trying to avoid the awful thoughts about what might become of her.
Hours later, very late at night, the leader emerged from the trail into the clearing, and with him was Pat. Everyone swarmed around them, giving her hugs and pressing food and hot cocoa into her hands. Everyone was genuinely, intensely glad to see her, and did not remember anymore all the ways that they had come to dislike her. She was lost and now she was found. She didn’t return the hugs very warmly, and acted as if she had never been worried or scared, but the next morning she was one of the first to roll up her tent and pack her things, and that had never happened. She no longer lingered far behind, slowing down the group, and although she never became exactly easy to get along with, the experience of being lost and found did seem to have changed her, just as it changed the attitudes of those around her.
The thing is, Pat had been lost long before the night she was physically lost. And I wonder: how can we do the same thing for each other without waiting for someone’s life to actually be in danger? We are lost, in one way or the other, and we need to find each other, to see in each other what is valuable. When the lost are found, that is what leads to the joyful celebrations, and rejoicing for the lost who are found is what God is all about.
[1] From the sermon “The Lost and Found Department” printed in The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor, 1993.
