To be lost, really lost, is a terrible
thing. It is the stuff of nightmares. Did you ever get lost
in a store or a city when you were a child? Your mother or father
was there, holding your hand firmly or being a reassuring presence in
the background, and then suddenly you realized that they were no longer
nearby? You looked around, and panic welled up in your throat as
you realized that you could not feel, hear or see them anywhere.
Did you ever experience that desperate lostness, a feeling that the
earth was disintegrating beneath you? And then, perhaps just as
suddenly, Mom was there with her reassuring voice and hug, or Dad was
there with his strong grip and his calm presence. And everything
was good again. Breath returned, and life surged through you with
warmth and joy.
Adults can also encounter this experience of getting lost. And it is
the adult experience that Jesus is referring to when he tells the
parables of four different lost ones. And in these parables we
learn of different ways to get lost, and therefore different ways to
get found. That’s the goal, isn’t it, to make sure
that we are found!
In the first two parables, a sheep and a coin get lost. The
shepherd and the housewife go to every extreme to find the lost animal
and coin. The shepherd leaves a large group of sheep to find the
one lost one – an extravagant and risky thing to do if you know
sheep – they wander off so easily. The housewife tears
apart her entire house until she finds her coin. And when the
lost one is found, the finders celebrate joyfully with all their
neighbors.
This kind of lost did not happen deliberately. The lamb wandered
away, unaware. The coin was dropped and rolled off. And
that’s how it can be with our souls. We wander away from
church; we wander away from God. In studies to discover why
membership in some mainline Protestant churches is plunging,
researchers discovered that when people move from one city to another,
they often stop attending church services. We aren’t losing
people from one denomination to another denomination; we are losing
people to a secular Sunday morning. When teens go off to
university, they often stop going to church in their new setting.
When people change neighborhoods, cities or countries, they fail to
continue the habits of worship and fellowship with their Christian
family. We all are tempted to stray off by going less and less
often to church.
This is why spiritual disciplines are so important: they develop
faith habits that keep us from wandering away. They are practices
of faith that we repeat until they are as natural as breathing.
Let’s remember some of these: attending Sunday worship;
participating in a Bible study group; joining a Christian fellowship
group; serving in one of the ministries of the church; contributing
monetarily to the church funds – all of these are practices of
faith, spiritual disciplines that strengthen our faith and keep us from
getting lost. Someone said to me this week, “I found
that I was thinking a lot about God, but I was not stopping to be with
God and to listen to God by reading God’s Word in the
scriptures.” Such a good insight! We often
think about God, but fail to do anything to really be with and listen
to God. And so little by little we drift away, until a day comes,
perhaps a day of worry or a day of crisis, and we wake up and find that
we are lost and alone. We find that we miss and need the comfort
and hope, the promise and love that God offers us in Jesus – and
we are not always sure how to find our way back.
But Jesus promises us that he will look for us and find us. He is
the shepherd that filled with grace and love and mercy, will search
every dark wood, every thorn bush, every rocky crevice until he finds
us. He is the housewife who will move every carpet, every
bookshelf, every chair and table, until she uncovers the place in which
we have become stuck. And then, he will invite everyone he knows,
all his friends on earth and in heaven to party – to rejoice
because we have been found.
Jesus uses us to find the lost sheep and the lost silver coins.
We are his Body here on earth: we are his legs and hands to go
out to search and find. And so we are to be the voice that calls
and teaches and encourages others in their faith. We are created
to be the hands that forgive and comfort; we are the visitors who
invite and welcome. That’s why we join together in
committees, teams and task forces in this church for ministries of
hospitality, and visitation, and mission. We are knit together to be a
community that guides home the lost.
The other two stories about lostness involve two sons. The
younger son deliberately gets lost. He says to his father, in
essence, “Hey you know, I sort of wish you were already gone,
because I want my money and my inheritance now. Please give it to
me and I’m ‘outta here’!” Have we ever
been like that with our Father in Heaven? “Lord, I’m
tired of all this toil, this work, this fatigue, this suffering
patiently for your kingdom to come. I’m tired of being
honest, hard working, and self-sacrificing. I want the comfort and joy
you promise now!” And so we have been tempted to find
another way to live, a way that compromises our Christian ethics.
Or we choose to center our lives solely on ourselves: our
ambitions, our work, our maximum comforts, with a minimum of giving and
sacrifice. We’ll worry about giving to God when we are
older, or more settled, or better off financially, or have more
time. And we get lost, lost in other values and other worlds,
lost from persons we can really trust, lost from people that will count
us as “brother” or “sister,” no matter
what. Most of all, we lose God’s voice in our hearts and
our minds.
In Dante’s epic poem about Hell, the Inferno, the agonies and
torments of Hell are experienced by sinners who have done just that:
they have left behind the kingdom of the Father to pursue pleasure or
politics solely for their own gain. Whether it is through lust or
covetousness or greed for food or power, these dead souls had chosen to
worship an idol; and the idol was their own self. In life, they
had not really worshiped God or followed Christ. They had only
used their belief in God as a tool to promote themselves. And so
it could be with us: if we base our life only on our own self-interest,
we are then worshiping our own self. And that is what it is to be
truly lost. For then we are worshiping what is moral and finite,
limited in love and peace, instead of what is immortal, infinite, and
the source of all love and peace.
With this kind of lost, it takes more to be found; it requires movement
in two directions: the Father running out to us, and us running
to the Father. It takes a conscious decision of the lost son to
return. In today’s parable, the son had to recognize that
he was truly lost: he, a Jew, actually had longed to eat with the pigs,
the lowest of animals for the Jewish people! That’s lost!
In our time, we know that some people have had to hit real lows before
they could recognize their need for the Father – for example
alcoholics and drug addicts whose bodies and lives are in pieces before
they finally turn to God, the Higher Power. For others it has
been financial ruin or a life-threatening illness which caused them to
realize how little they had rested in the love of the Father. For
others, it has been an eye-opening prayer or sermon, or a passage of
scripture, or a piece of music, or perhaps the counsel of an elder,
that helped them to recognizing the need to return home to God our
loving Parent. At different times in our lives, many of us have
recognized that we have abandoned Christ and the values of his kingdom,
Christ’s values of justice, compassion, forgiveness, grace, and
peace, and that we need to repent, to turn around, and to return
home. At the same time, God has run out down the road, arms wide
in welcome, to greet us, drape our shivering soul in a warm robe of
forgiveness. God, in the form of a sister or brother in Christ,
such as a choir member, a study group participant, a welcome table host
or a coffee hour attendee, has offered us a joyful welcome.
Do we need to stop and take a look at our lives and then return to the
Father again this Lenten season? In what ways are we getting
lost, walking away from Christ’s values and God’s
scriptures? In what ways are we focusing only on our own lives,
worshipping the idol of Self, and leaving God out of the
picture? Jesus, with this story, invites us to turn around
and return. And he is waiting, he is running toward us, arms
outstretched in love and forgiveness to help us start all over again.
There is one more lost person in these parables of Jesus. The
second son is also lost, lost in a dark place of self-righteousness and
judgmentalism. He does not want to forgive his younger brother
and he is indignant that his father had welcomed him back so
extravagantly. Perhaps his father should let his brother return,
he might admit, but only as a humble servant. Look how much of
his father’s wealth he squandered! Look at his despicable
behavior with prostitutes! He was not present to hear his
brother’s apology and probably thinks that he has not repented
sufficiently. He judges that his brother should pay for all the
hurt he has caused, and that his father is an old fool who forgives too
easily. And so he stays outside, sulking and angry, refusing to join in
the joyful party.
This is the story most like our own situation, and it is a difficult
one for us. This son is already part of the kingdom. He
shares in its beauty and in the challenges to it. Yet he has
failed to understand the wealth and grace available to him. He
has failed to grasp and hold onto the central values of this
inheritance: mercy and grace, forgiveness and new life. His
self-righteousness and spirit of condemnation keeps him first from
realizing that he too is lost, and second, from joining in the joy of
forgiveness.
This could be our temptation also. For we, the churchgoers, are
the older son. We have stayed home, while others have gone out
and, in our opinion perhaps, squandered their inheritance. Some
have returned, and after all they have done to hurt others (in our
opinion), they are still welcomed home with joy by God the
Father. But we may want more evidence of repentance and we
may be sulking on the sideline, hindered by self-righteousness.
We fail to reach out to each other with compassion, forgiveness and
love. Others of us fail to realize that we are gifted with all
the grace and mercy of God’s kingdom. Why are we afraid and
anxious about our personal future, or about the church’s
future? Let’s claim our inheritance of hope and power!
Let’s not turn our backs on the joy of our faith! Let’s
live what we truly are: responsible and joyful heirs of the
kingdom of God, stewards of his power and mercy, dispensers of his
abundant forgiveness and love!
In all of these stories, to be lost means to be separated from the One
who cares for us: the shepherd, the housewife, the father.
To be lost is to not be able to find one’s way home.
That’s what the pain of Dante’s sinners in Hell represents,
not torments for individual sins, but an eternal lostness, an eternal
separation from God who is our Home, the loving source of all goodness,
all truth, all beauty.
The good news, however, the Gospel news of Jesus Christ, is that we are
precious and loved and sought after – and when we stray, when get
lost, we, God’s precious children, will be found and brought
home, once lost, but now found. Amen.
