Lost & Found

Luke 15:1-10

There was a popular tv show that aired for several seasons though I myself never caught it.  It’s title came to me after reading today’s gospel lesson though.  The show was called Lost, and dealt, if I remember correctly, with a plane that went down in the middle of the ocean and the survivors who were lost to civilization on a deserted island.  From what I gathered, it was a more suspense-filled, less funny Gilligan’s Island, so to speak.

We all fear being lost.  It’s built into us from our earliest days.  I remember as a very young boy getting separated from my father in a store for just a few moments.  I still recall the fear that was brought up in that brief time for me when I thought I was lost.  Fortunately, Dad was closer than I thought and found me quickly, before there were any tears or panic.

Jesus was getting a lot of flak from the religious authorities at the start of today’s lesson.  This fact sometimes gets lost when we think about the two parables he told.  Jesus was responding to the Pharisees when he told about the lost sheep and the lost coin.  This was a pointed response to quiet them down because he was hanging out, so they thought, with the wrong people.  He was actually eating with tax collectors and prostitutes. 

We don’t need to go into the feasibility of leaving ninety-nine sheep behind while you go to search for one.  And I always wondered about the practicality of throwing a party and spending the money that you had just found.  Those details really don’t apply in this situation because we’re talking about parables; stories meant to make a point and the point was made in spite of picky details.

Too often we identify ourselves in these parables with the lost items.  We’re lost and God will come searching for us.  It’s a comforting thought.  No matter how lost we are, God will seek us out.  That is true enough.

But that’s not the only way we can fit ourselves into these stories.  We very well could be among the 99 sheep who are left behind and in many ways we are.  These, along with the coins that weren’t lost, are those religious authorities to whom Jesus is directing the parables.  We don’t like to think of ourselves in the same light as the Pharisees and scribes but in many ways we are more like them than we’d like to admit.  We, like they, think we’ve got our religious ducks in a row, if you’ll allow me to mix farmland metaphors between ducks and sheep.  We may be uncomfortable with such an identification, but we can’t avoid it.  In many ways we are similar to those 1st century religious authorities as we wonder why Jesus has left us to go out after the homeless, drug-crazed junkie.

But I’d like to challenge us today to think of ourselves as the other actor in the story:  as the one who goes seeking the lost; that caring shepherd off to bring back the 1% of his flock or the persistent woman who cleans until she finds that one important coin, a tenth of her entire savings.  We are called, I believe, to seek out the lost, to put ourselves in situations that will put us closer to the lost souls in our world.

I read an article in the New York Times this week about a woman who lives in the Bronx in New York City.  [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10muslim.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&nl&emc=aua1] She’s a single mother of three and an immigrant from the Ivory Coast.  Every 11th of September she gathers her children and they go down to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Centers once stood.  There they pray because it was there, nine years ago that Mrs. Traoré lost her husband who worked in the Windows on the World restaurant atop one of the towers.

Mrs. Traoré and her children, in their prayers, invoke the name of Allah, because they are devout Muslims.  Her husband and their father is among the lost, those 60 or so Muslims who were killed that day by the terrorists along with the thousands of others who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.  Of course, the Times printed this article about Mrs. Traoré as the flap about a building that would contain a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero reaches a fevered pitch, including the ridiculous and blasphemous burning of Korans that was supposed to happen yesterday in Florida.

There is quite a bit of religious posturing these days by so-called religious authorities, including that minister in Gainesville who initiated the Koran burnings.  If they’re paying any attention at all, they might be wondering why God would be off, seeking the lost ones such as Mrs. Traoré to comfort and console rather than joining in their bonfires.

We live in a world where it seems that the figures are much higher than 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10 who are lost.  All too often the self-proclaimed “religious authorities” are too busy keeping those ducks in their proper rows to notice that their Jesus is off gathering up the lost that they’re ignoring or, worse, reviling.

If we can find it in ourselves to extricate ourselves from the position of a religious authority to walking beside Jesus as he seeks out the lost, we are then truly living into our calling.  The lost are all around us if we only open our eyes.  They are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and of no faith.  They are of all colors and ages.  They speak all the languages of our world.  They are everywhere and we only have to seek them out to find them.

They aren’t going to find us.  We, like Jesus, have to be the actors on this occasion.  Lost items aren’t going to naturally get themselves found, nor are lost people.  It’s our effort to make and our initiative to take.  We have to break out of the crowd and find the lost to care for them and to help them back.

As I prepared for this sermon, I read another preacher’s sermon on this same passage from Luke.  In her sermon, Rev. Huey talked about a segment of a television news show that she saw.  She wrote:

This week, I watched a segment of Primetime Live in which Diane Sawyer was revisiting – eight years later – several young people she had interviewed on the streets of a city in Oregon. These kids were definitely lost children. At least two of them were gay, and one can only imagine the terrible rejection that drove them from their homes and families. One young boy was asked to describe his dream home. He answered quickly, as if he had dreamed of it often: his dream home would have a marble staircase and a big entrance hall (doesn't that sound like someone who feels the need to be welcomed?). Asked to describe his dream parents, he said "They would have their mouths taped shut so they couldn't yell at me and their hands tied so they couldn't hit me." Years later, this same young man looked back on the years he spent as a runaway; when Diane Sawyer asked him, "Is that what you wanted – for someone to come and find you?" His response: "Yes, that's what I wanted – I wanted someone to care enough to come looking for me."   [by Kathryn Matthews Huey, from sample sermon at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/september-12-2010.html]

You know, there are times when I feel very lost myself and at those times, I want to be found.   I imagine you each have felt the same.  But I think more often we are called to be the finders in the world.  We are called to care enough to go looking for the lost.  And then when we find them, we can rejoice just like the woman with the coin in the parable.