Lost and Found

Scriptures:       Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28           Psalm 14

                        I Timothy 1:12-17                    Luke 15:1-10

One of the “joys” of growing older – the word “joys” very much in quotes – is that it seems that I lose stuff more and more often.  A ring of keys.  My SEPTA pass.  My ATM card.   A piece of mail that I threw into a pile a week ago and has now seemingly gotten sucked into a black hole, never to return.  I know that part of the problem is that I’m not the most organized person in the world – when it comes to filing papers and organizing books, my motto is, “A place for everything, and everything all over the place.”  And more than once, when I couldn’t find something like a key ring at home, I’ve driven around and stopped back at every place I’d been that day – the dry cleaner, the drug store, the post office, my job….and asked, “Hi, I was here earlier today…..Did anyone happen to find in a key ring?”  Or, if I can’t find my SEPTA pass, I’ve called the SEPTA lost and found number and asked if they’d happened to find a SEPTA pass that may have been left on the Manayunk/Norristown line.  And what a relief, after all that searching and driving around and phone calling, to finally put my hands on that missing key ring or SEPTA pass.  And, more than once, what a disappointment when the lost item never turned up.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus continues to draw crowds with his teaching. Remember that in last week’s Gospel reading, Jesus was telling the crowds some really difficult things, about having to put Jesus before their families, before their possessions, before their own lives – and he ended with the words, “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.”  And amazingly, after all that, the crowds were still listening, and wanted to hear more! Unfortunately, according to the religious leaders in his community, the crowds he’s drawing, the people who are listening, are made up of, as Luke puts it, “tax collectors or sinners” – or, as we might say today, “riff-raff” – people who are embarrassing to be around, people with whom we don’t necessarily want to be seen, people who might be considered by some to be the “scum of the earth”.  Luke tells us, “the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’  After all, doesn’t Jesus care about his reputation?  The religious leaders who criticized Jesus surely cared about theirs.

Jesus overhears the grumbling, and responds with a couple of stories:  a shepherd with a hundred sheep notices that one of them has gotten separated from the flock, and leaves the rest behind to search for the one that is lost – and a woman who has lost a coin, and turns up the lights and goes over the floor inch by inch until she finds it.  And at the end of both of these stories, there’s celebration:  “Rejoice with me, for I have found the sheep or the coin that was lost!” Jesus is asking his critics, the Pharisees and scribes, to put themselves in the place of the shepherd and in the place of the woman – which would have been a challenge to the religious leaders, because the religious leaders looked down on shepherds, and Jewish males thanked God every day in prayer for not being created as women. But Jesus asked the religious leaders to put themselves in the place of the shepherd and the woman in search of what they’d lost.  And so Jesus is telling his critics that his welcome of sinners isn’t just a matter of being weak or permissive, or saying that anything goes.  Instead he’s being very purposeful, as purposeful as someone looking for a lost sheep or a lost coin – he’s trying to find lost people and restore them to the community of faith.  And Jesus attracted people.  It’s striking that even after Jesus talked about how costly it might be to follow him, people stuck around – likely because even after Jesus told them about the costs of following him, they felt they had nothing to lose.

In our reading from Paul’s letter to Timothy, he gives his testimony, telling of how before his encounter with the risen Christ, he had been a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.  But before his conversion, he wouldn’t have thought of himself that way.  Remember that before his conversion, Paul –then known as Saul - thought he was a good guy.  Saul thought he was serving God by persecuting the church.  He thought he was doing the right thing.    Saul was very diligent and very motivated to seek out those he considered sinners – but he went after sinners, not to welcome them, but to arrest them and even to have them killed.  If we think of groups like ISIL hunting down those they considered infidels and beheading them – before his conversion, Saul was like that, though he would have had people killed by stoning them rather than beheading them.  But, differences in technology aside, Saul before his conversion was like ISIL – basically a religious terrorist - he thought he knew what God wanted, and when he encountered people who didn’t live up to that, he had them arrested or killed. [If that sounds like an extreme description, here’s Acts 9:1-2:  “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.”] And so if you can imagine a leader of ISIL becoming a Christian and breaking away from his group to preach the Gospel and to speak against what ISIL is doing – that’s what Saul did when he converted and took on the name of Paul.  Saul before and Paul after his conversion went in search of sinners – before his conversion to arrest and kill them, after his conversion to preach the good news of Jesus to them.  The difference – that made all the difference – is grace.

God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, is a funny thing.  It feels great when we receive it!  And it can feel annoying when others receive it.  After all, going back to Jesus’ parable about the shepherd leaving the 99 sheep to go in search of the one that’s lost – the thought of Jesus going out in search of us, bringing us back on his shoulders like a lost sheep, makes us feel all warm inside.  And it’s absolutely true – that’s how much God loves each of us, that if we get lost by the wayside, God will go out in search of us.   But what if you’re one of the 99, and Jesus is leaving you to search for the one that got separated?  You might be tempted to ask, “Hey, what am I, chopped liver?“ It’s a challenge to be able to remember that sense of joy, that sense of relief, that sense of laying down our burden of guilt, that we feel when we experience God’s grace – and feel just as joyful and relieved when somebody else experiences the same thing.  And yet that’s what Jesus was calling on the religious leaders to do in our Gospel reading – and for those of us who have been around the church for a while, what God asks of us as well – to remember the joy and relief we felt, and to want that same joy and relief for others.

Jesus used examples of searching for a lost sheep and a lost coin – but I wonder if that makes the stakes high enough.  After all, for many of us, if we drop a nickel and it rolls under a vending machine…..oh, well, it’s annoying, but maybe no big deal, unless it leaves us 5 cents short of enough to buy a soda.  But maybe we can think of the stories we’ve been hearing so often of pets or even babies and small children being left in overheated automobiles….the parents or pet owners have their minds on other things and walk off, and the child or the pet dog is left behind, and threatened with suffocation.  If we saw a baby or a pet in an overheated car, would we just pass by?  Or would we try to find the parents, or maybe a rescue worker, or maybe we’d try to force the window open ourselves, to get some fresh air into the car?   And I think that’s the same sense of urgency that Jesus is asking us to bring to reaching out to those who find themselves lost, the same sense of urgency that Paul had in bringing the good news of Jesus to his listeners, like fresh air in a suffocating overheated car.  But again, with that urgency comes God’s grace – we’re reaching out, not to club people over the head with our righteousness, but to welcome them to God’s grace.

Jesus said, “There is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents.”  May we remember the joy we felt when we came to Jesus, and may we speak and act and welcome in such a way that our neighbors come to experience that same joy.  Amen.