Lost and Found

(Scriptures: Exodus 32:7-14 Psalm 51
I Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10)

The 1971 movie Harold and Maude – has it really been 40 years since the initial release? – tells the story of two contrasting characters: a young man obsessed with death, who attends funerals as a hobby and stages fake suicide attempts in order to annoy his mother, who strikes up an offbeat friendship with a zany 79 year-old lady – whom he met at a funeral - who lives to make the most of what time she has. At one point, Harold, the young man, gives Maude, the older woman, a coin from he’d gotten from an arcade. The coin is stamped “Harold loves Maude”. At the time, the two are standing on a bridge, and Maude throws the ring off the bridge into the water. Responding to Harold’s baffled look of shock and disappointment, Maude says, “So I’ll always know where it is.”

Today’s Gospel from Luke contains two of our most beloved parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. We’re reassured that God cares for us so much that, even when we have lost our way, God comes looking for us.

I’d like us to think about our own experiences being lost. Can you remember a time you got lost? Maybe you were walking with a family member or close friend, not paying attention to your surroundings, you get separated, and all of a sudden realize you don’t know where you are or how you got there. Maybe you were at a public event and, in the crowd, got separated from family members. Maybe you were driving someplace unfamiliar, and there weren’t enough landmarks to provide a sense of where you were. Maybe you even had one of those GPS devices, and the road indicated by the GPS turns out to be closed for construction, and, as the GPS device frantically says “recalculating” you try to find another way around. Or maybe, like an experience I had visiting church friends in Germany, you’re riding a transit system in an unfamiliar city, where the stops are being called out in a language we don’t understand – in my case, in Germany, to my untrained ears, the name of every stop sounded like some version of “gesundheit,” and as you go along, you become more and more worried that you’ve overshot our destination, or maybe you’d stepped onto the wrong bus or train to begin with.

What does it feel like, being lost? It’s unsettling! We feel disoriented, that we don’t understand or have any control over our surroundings. Maybe we panic, and our heart starts racing. We desperately want to get back to familiar territory. I don’t think most people intentionally try to get lost. Like the old saying about life, getting lost is something that happens while you were busy making other plans.

And sometimes we lose our way, not only in our travel, but in our lives. And it generally doesn’t happen intentionally – very few people set out with the purpose of making a mess of their lives, or wasting their lives, of flushing their lives down the toilet. Getting lost on our life’s journey is generally the sort of thing that happens gradually, a little every day. We set our priorities in ways that lead us further and further from the path of faith – we may not intentionally reject God, but rather we just happen to choose other things. Or maybe we avoid making any commitments – not to choose is also a choice – and in the name of leaving ourselves open to all possibilities, don’t embrace any of the options that life offers us. Life drifts along, day by day, and our choices take us further and further from the path of faith. Eventually we have a moment of insight, when we wonder “how on earth did I end up here.” This isn’t who I wanted to be when I grew up.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is hanging out with those that his society considers riff-raff. The religious authorities grumble that Jesus has crummy taste in friends, that Jesus’ friends are stinking up the place. Jesus responds with what we know as the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

When we look for something or someone that’s lost, we don’t wait for the person or object to come back to us. We take the initiative to go looking, to try to find where the person or object is. And this is what Jesus did – he didn’t wait for the so-called sinners to find him – Jesus went to them, spent time with them, ate with them, hung out with them.

As God still does today. Many of the more revivalistic churches have a time in the service when people come to the front of the church to make a personal decision for Christ. While our tradition is a little bit different in some ways, we also have moments, such as baptism, confirmation, or just plain joining the church, when we come to the front of the church and make promises – or have them made on our behalf by our parents – to follow Jesus. And these are holy moments in the life of any congregation. At the same time, it may help our perspective to remember that long before we had the least inkling of a thought of choosing to follow God, God has already long ago chosen to seek us, to look for us, to draw us to Godself. It is only because of the choice God has already made to seek us and to claim us as God’s own, that we have any inkling of a desire to seek out God.

For those of us who have been found by God and have been walking the path of faith – be it for a lifetime of many decades or for just a little while – we can take comfort in knowing that, no matter how lost or confused or drifting or treading water or at sea we may find ourselves, God is always seeking us out – like Harold’s coin that Maude tossed in the water, no matter how we wander, God always knows where we are, always knows where to find us. As our reading of Psalm 139 from last week said, “where can I go to flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you’re there. If I find myself in the depths of hell, you’re there too.” Or as Paul said in Romans 8: “I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other thing else in all creation can separate us from the love of God.”

At the same time, there are so many who feel lost – who, though God likewise knows right where they are, they have no idea where God is. The recent controversy over the food cupboard reminded me of all that challenges this community of Bridesburg faces – unemployment, alcohol and drug addiction, and, according to a neighboring pastor, a surprisingly high rate of suicide. All of which speaks to a loss of hope, a feeling of being lost, a feeling that God and life have abandoned us. Like the 99 sheep in Jesus’ parable, we at Emanuel may think, “well, we’ve been here on Fillmore Street for nearly 150 years; if they want us, they know where to find us.” But that’s not the point – Jesus is the good shepherd who persistently pursues those who are lost. As Jesus’ followers, we can do no less. Our mission here at Emanuel Church is not just to be a holy huddle, or a Sunday morning organ appreciation club. We’re not to be a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners. It’s up to us to seek those who are lost, to run the ambulance service that takes those who are hurting and in pain to the healing that many have found here.

In my short time here at Emanuel, I’ve already witnessed the kind of healing that can take place here. I’ve seen physical healing. I’ve seen peoples’ lives turn around. Small as we are, God is powerfully at work here in this place.

At the same time, our reading from I Timothy reminds us that at the very moments we may confidently assume that we’re doing God’s will, we may in fact be lost. Paul – or, as some scholars think, someone writing in Paul’s name – reminds Timothy that Paul was once a persecutor of Christians – a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. When Paul was doing these things, he did them in God’s name, thought he was doing God’s will. It took an encounter with the divine for Paul to reconsider what he was doing. For those of us who have been in the church a while, this can be a danger – we may be so accustomed to how we’ve experienced God in the past that when God does a new thing, we resist. I would liken this to the stories often told about men who, while driving in unfamiliar territory, stubbornly refuse to look at a map or ask directions, insisting that they knows exactly where they are, even though they’re far course. Perhaps this was the situation of those who questioned Jesus’ willingness to hang out with those considered undesirable. After all, when we’ve wandered off course, the shortest path back is to turn around and retrace our steps –but it takes humility to admit we’ve gone off course.

I distributed copies of a pastoral letter from our Conference Minister, the Rev. Dr. Russ Mitman, regarding the pastor in Florida who was threatening to burn copies of the Koran – I am sure that this pastor is sincere in his beliefs, that he thinks he’s doing the Lord’s will. But his is a misguided zeal, like Paul’s misguided zeal before his conversion, that uses hate and fear to try to dominate those they oppose. It has been said that once people begin burning books, they will end up burning people. We cannot hate and intimidate our neighbors into the path of faith – only love can light the way. Like those who grumbled against Jesus, the pastor in Florida and his supporters are tragically off course, even at the very moment when they feel most assured that they have found the right path.

So may we at Emanuel Church always keep our ears open to hear God’s call, especially when God wishes to lead us in new directions. As we’re surrounded with unfamiliar sights and sounds, we may become unsettled, disoriented, longing to return to familiar paths. May we keep always keep our ears open to God’s call, and our eyes on the prize of the high calling of living as disciples of Christ. Amen.
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Feeling disoriented? Come join us for worship on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. at Emanuel United Church of Christ. We're on Fillmore Street (off Thompson). www.emanuelphila.org