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Everyone
enjoys finding lost things. This year, Pat and I led our
annual church hiking event in the spring instead of summer.
A group of people from here met us in southern Arizona in
April for two weeks of hikes and sightseeing. One of the
hikes was the Echo Canyon trail in the Chiracaqua National
Monument, a trail with fantastic rock formations that look
like giants were playing there with Lego blocks and left
them piled all over the place instead of putting them away.
The meal that evening was scheduled “on your own” instead of
at our trailer, and it was as we were going into a
restaurant about forty miles from where we had hiked that I
realized one of my hearing aids was missing.
A few
minutes after my discovery, Lisa Lyon and Lynwood Stanley
and their two children came into the restaurant. They had
stayed behind a while to complete a Junior Ranger badge for
their daughter, Noel. The first thing they told us was that
someone had come into the Ranger Station while they were
waiting for a ranger and turned in a hearing aid that had
been found on the trail. They had wondered if it was mine,
but had no way of verifying that. To make a much longer
story short, I finally got one of the rangers on the phone,
and she kindly agreed to take the item home with her, since
we were now at closing time for the office. The ranger gave
me directions to find her house, and we drove back and
claimed it. Amazingly, although I can show you scratches
from it being scuffed along the trail by a boot or the hoof
of a horse, it still works. I am not deaf without it, but it
is nice to hear the birds sing now and then. Finding lost
things is a cause for rejoicing.
Finding
lost things is a great theme of Scripture, too, and the
fifteenth chapter of Luke is the Bible’s greatest chapter on
the subject. One of the parables in this chapter is so well
known that it is what many of you would no doubt come up
with if I were to ask you to name a teaching of Jesus that
deals with lostness. It has been called “the Gospel within
the Gospel,” and (this is a test) Dr. Harnish referred to it
in that wonderful “home again” sermon last week. Anyone like
to try to name it? Of course. The Parable of the Prodigal
Son.
With
all of the color and imagery in that beautiful story, it is
little wonder that it overshadows the two shorter parables
on lostness with which Luke begins that same chapter. And
yet, these two brief images point to an equally vital truth
about the character of God. Hear then, the Gospel according
to Luke. (Read Luke 15:1-10)
All
three images—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost
son—are a part of Jesus’ response to the criticism that he
paid attention to people that many in his culture regarded
as sinners. These stories of lost things build upon each
other, and the common theme of each of them is the joy in
finding something that was lost. And we can all identify
with that. Perhaps as we grow older, we can identify a
little more because we lose things more often.
But the
joy of finding is not really where I want to start this
morning. We will come to that before we are finished, but I
would invite us to first think about the element that is
common to the first two stories that is missing in the
third. I would like us to think about searching.
“What
man of you, having lost a sheep….what woman, having lost a
coin…. would not search until it was found?”
The
images here are a little foreign to us. We do not know much
about shepherds searching for sheep. And for the most part,
individual coins are neither as precious nor as easily lost
as they were in Jesus’ day.
First,
a word about the woman and her coins. To begin with, the
households of the time made losing a coin rather easy. The
floors were dirt, usually covered with rushes. The lighting
was only what came through the doorway and a single small
window. So something small, like a coin, dropped on the
floor, could be very difficult to find. Emptying and
sweeping the house might literally be the only effective way
to find it.
Bible
scholar and commentator William Barclay points out that the
drachma coin was about a working man’s daily wage, and since
most people lived from day to day, losing it was at least a
minor catastrophe. Some of us can remember when stretching
paychecks from one payday to the next required very careful
planning; some of us don’t have to call upon long-term
memory to know about that reality.
The
other possibility Dr. Barclay mentions—and it is strongly
suggested with the reference to the number of coins the
woman had—is the fact that a special mark of a married woman
in Jesus’ day was a headband of ten silver coins joined by a
silver chain. It was every woman’s hope to acquire one, and
it was worn with great pride. Typically, she saved for the
coins herself. When she had it, it was so irrevocably hers
that the law decreed that it could not be taken from her
even to satisfy a debt. If the lost coin was from such a
headdress, it would be especially precious.
Next, a
word about shepherds and sheep. In a nomadic culture such as
was found in much of rural Palestine in Jesus’ day, the most
common form of wealth was a flock of sheep or goats. Note
that Jesus is talking about shepherds who were owners, not
hirelings. Jesus made the point in other sayings about that
difference in care, and the writings of Israel had long made
the image of such a shepherd the ideal image of a great king
and a symbol of providence. “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Remember? “What man of you having a hundred
sheep...,” he said. Like the woman’s coin, there was vested
interest here.
So much
for the image of the searchers that Jesus alluded to. What
is striking here is that Jesus is saying that God cares
about the lost like the owner-shepherd cares about the
sheep, like the woman cares about the special coin.
We may
take that somewhat for granted, but we shouldn’t. It is
because of such sayings that we think of God in this way.
Think about it. A God who goes looking—like some Divine
Scavenger, poking about the rubble of one of the lesser
planets, looking for and inquiring about this odd and
seemingly insignificant thing called humanity, that for some
reason he has decided that he wants to claim as his own. In
fact, he considers these objects of his search as his
own; he has only lost them for a while. What an incredible
image!
In some
respects, this is even more moving than the image in the
story of the prodigal of a God who waits in loving patience.
Granted, there are times when waiting is what has to be
done. But the images of the caring shepherd and the
searching woman remind us that the God of the prodigal is
also a God who goes looking.
So we
come to the heart of the matter. If God is searching, then
something is lost. Sometimes the lostness comes like that of
sheep—from heedlessness and carelessness. Sheep are not
rebellious animals, like goats, which is why the Bible uses
these two animals as symbols of good and bad. A goat could
get lost because it was just rebelling and running away. The
prodigal son was like that.
But
when a sheep got lost, it was typically because it wasn’t
paying attention. It just had its head down, eating and
following the next mouthful of grass, not noticing where the
flock was. Later, it looked around and wondered why the
shepherd left. People get lost that way, too, you know.
Maybe you know some—maybe you are one—who didn’t really run
away so much as just wandered off. And sometimes the
lostness happens like the coin—a condition arising more from
accident or from the actions of someone else. A personal
tragedy, a sickness, the loss of a loved one, a perceived
slight or hurt—sometimes the lostness is not so much a
matter of having run away or even drifted away so much as
not really knowing where we are compared to where we ought
to be.
G.K.
Chesterton, a great Christian writer, was famous for getting
lost. He could never remember the schedule of a lecture
tour. His friends and family just learned to live with it.
Probably the most famous instance was his sending his wife
what I suppose today would be a text message: “Am at Market
Harborough. Where ought I be?” Her return message read:
“Home.” Because, she said, it was easier to get him home and
start him off again than to try to tell him how to get where
he ought to be from where he was. Sometimes being lost is
not so much a matter of not knowing where we are as it is
not knowing where we ought to be. And sometimes starting
from home again is the best way to get there.
Unlike
coins and sheep, we mask our lostness sometimes. We hide it
behind the busyness of our world. We immerse ourselves in
things, we hide behind intellect and sophistication, we
distract ourselves with sex and violence. So much of it is
to hide our lostness from ourselves, don’t you know, like
whistling on a dark and lonely night.
There
is more than lessons of kinds of lostness in these two
parables. There is the reminder that what is lost is
valuable; they tell us that what is lost is precious to the
owner. We do not go looking for something that is of no
value to us. We probably do not even know that it is lost. A
few years ago, I was walking a backwoods trail in Vermont
with some friends and found a 1911 Mercury dime. It was made
more interesting in that the friend I was walking with was a
coin collector, but that coin wasn’t really lost to me. I
had never had it. I wasn’t searching for it. Finding it was
an accident. These two parables tell us that God is
intentional in his search; they underscore the truth that
the individual is important. The fact that the ninety-nine
sheep or the other nine coins were not lost did not
lessen the importance of finding the one that was.
We are
lost, and we have a God who cares enough to come searching
for us. That is the heart of the Gospel. With the emphasis
of our age on knowledge and psychological fulfillment, we
are apt to forget that. We are more prone to talk about our
search for God, as though we, somehow, by our efforts, have
to discover God. But God is not really the one who is lost;
we are. And God is the Searcher.
We have
a Scavenger God—a God who goes looking, looking for us in
strange and unlikely and sometimes even unpleasant places.
Several years ago, Pat discovered that the setting from her
ring was gone. Believe me, we went searching for that, even
through the dust bag of the vacuum cleaner. (Yes, we finally
found it!) And I keep coming back to the fact that such a
God is even more amazing that the God who waits in love and
compassion.
Francis
Thompson was a man who lost himself in self loathing and
alcoholism. After years in such a life, he came to himself,
like the prodigal. But he does not describe his return to
his right self as though he finally got smart and went home.
Not at all. Listen to a few of his lines from a long poem he
called “The Hound of Heaven.”
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled him down the arches of the years;
I fled him down the labyrinthian ways
of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laugher...
from those strong feet that followed, followed after.
(“The Hound of Heaven,” Francis Thompson)
He
considered himself found by a God who went looking. And what
does it mean to be found of such a God? Traditionally, the
church has used words like Converted and Saved to talk about
that. If those words seem too stereotyped or “religious” for
you, try changed, altered, turned around, forgiven, focused,
made whole, loved—choose the word that says it for you. But
what it comes down to is being found of the God who went
looking for us through the life and death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ.
C.S.
Lewis described his experience in his book, Surprised By
Joy: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen,
night after night, feeling...(every moment) the steady
unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not
to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon
me...I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and
prayed.”
The joy
came later.
The
Psalmist described it long ago in what has long been one of
my favorite Psalms, the 139th:
Where
can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your
presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I
make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the
wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will
hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,” even the darkness
will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (and) When I awake, I am
still with you.
(Psalm
139:7-12, 18)
Or
perhaps you like the way the hymn writer said it:
I sought the Lord, and
afterward I knew
he moved my soul to seek
him, seeking me;
’Twas not so much that I on
Thee took hold,
as Thou, dear Lord, on me.
If God
has found you, then rejoice and remember that Jesus said
that the angels rejoice, as well. If God has not found you
yet, I invite you to let that be your experience this
morning. Come know the joy of being found by a God who
thinks you are worth searching for, and make the day for a
bunch of angels. |
