Lost and Found (Luke 15)

        Have you ever lost something? 

         It can be an aggravating experience.  You reach for something on a shelf and it’s not there.  Why isn’t it there?  It was just there the other day! 

        So the hunt begins. You start looking around this room.  No luck!  You move around the house, at first just sort of looking casually.  But still no luck!  You move things around, moving papers and knickknacks, then as exasperation kicks in, you start going through the house, and then you find…it’s not what you’re looking for, but it’s something else that you haven’t seen in awhile.  (In my case, it’s usually a book, so I wind up stopping the search to read, until of course, the irritation that I was experiencing creeps back in….You start looking around again, this time you’re not just moving this sofa cushions.  You’re picking the sofa up to look underneath.  You’re taking drawers out of the cabinet to see if that thing somehow got way in the back. 

        Pretty soon, your house looks like a warzone, as you’ve been digging and digging.  Now entering hour three of the great search, you’re beginning to think this missing item is thoroughly lost.  

Then you look up, and on that shelf where this whole mess started, you see that the item you were looking for was there all along….on a lower shelf.

Does this sound familiar?

It’s the middle of March, and a package arrives from home.  The package is addressed to you, by what looks like your mother’s handwriting.  Inside is a sweater, an odd thing to receive when winter’s nearly over.  The note inside explains, “Dear son:  I bought you this back in November. Just found it last week.  Merry Christmas!”

Does this sound familiar?

Jesus gives three parables, of lost things:  sheep, coin and son.  You heard the first two this morning, and the one not read is the most remembered of the parables: the story of the “prodigal”. 

Just like the prodigal, the stories of a lost coin and a lost sheep are fraught with drama.  The woman searches her home, so desperate to find this coin.  She turns the household upside down, trying to find it.  A shepherd has a missing sheep, so he takes a gamble, leaving the other 99 sheep, and searching out over hill and dale for one sheep.   A father stands out at the end of the driveway every night, just staring at the horizon, wondering if the lost son will appear on the horizon.

Jesus tells us God’s just like that.

    Does this sound familiar?

         These parables revolve around characters that just won’t say “no” or give up when others think it’s not worth it.  Their friends shake their heads, and say,

“Sheila, forget the coin. It ain’t worth tearing your house apart!” 

“Charlie, just give it up and take a loss on the sheep. It’s just ‘one’ sheep.” 

“Roger, you should just forget it.  Write off that son.  He wrote you off.”

  They don’t listen.  They keep seeking. They keep looking everywhere. They hold fast to a hope that the lost will be found.  In other words, no matter what happens, God doesn’t forget you, and most assuredly, no one is ever “written off” by God.   

            Unfortunately, the Pharisees never got the memo on this.  They see Jesus spending time with, heavens, even eating with people who the Pharisees know to be “sinners”.  They stand there aghast at how (yet again!) Jesus befriends those who ought to be kept at arm’s length.

            A lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son: each of them might seem fruitless to search for, yet the woman, the shepherd, and the father never give up.  The Pharisees are told these stories as they see Jesus sitting among people they have considered “lost”.  To Jesus, these folks may be conflicted, may be rough around the edges, but as far as Jesus is concerned, they are “found”.  These people are not “those people”, that infamous phrase oft-heard when one group thinks another group inferior, suspect, or of little worth.   The parables point to this dinner crowd not as “undesirable riffraff” but beloved children of God.

         At the start of Luke 15, before the parables start rolling, one after the other, the Pharisees are off in the corner, grumbling.  The Greek text uses a word that harkens back to the days when Israel wandered in the wilderness and did not like much of their life, not least Moses’ leadership or the manna provided by God.  The Pharisees are not only grumbling to themselves, they are grumbling hopefully in the earshot of any passersby. 

        Ironically, their chief grumble (“This person welcomes sinners and eats with them”) is exactly what Jesus wishes to be caught doing:  welcoming.  You see, the Greek word for “welcoming” or “to welcome” (prosdechomai) appears elsewhere in Luke’s writings when people are looking forward to God’s own visitation, when they are yearning to see God bring about comfort, hope, and an end to the woes of life.  The Pharisees see Jesus welcoming the seedy and unclean.  Jesus sees a group of people who really need to hear God’s welcome.

Now, here in this story of “a dinner party for the unwelcome and the written off” appears this word where “welcome” means hospitality as well as hope.  When Jesus welcomes the sinners in, it is the gospel he preaches being acted out.  Indeed, he does welcome people, to table as well as to hear of the Kingdom of God.  As one Baptist New Testament scholar observes,  “Place Jesus at a dining table filled with all kinds of folk whom the religious tradition had rejected, and you will see Luke’s [gospel] clear and undiluted” (Linda McKinnish Bridges, The Church’s Portraits of Jesus, Smyth & Helwys, 1997, p. 68).   

          A few years ago, the American Baptist educator and evangelist Tony Campolo traveled to England for some speaking engagements.  While on an early morning train, he noticed a young man slumped in a seat.  The young man was traveling back from Glastonbury, a big music festival in the United Kingdom.  The fellow looked a bit “out of it”, just staring off in his own little world. 

Campolo noticed the man was wearing only one shoe.  He said, “Sir, have you lost a shoe?”  The young man said, “No, man. I found one.”

  Read any of his books or listen to many of his sermons, and you’ll find this type of story abounds in Tony Campolo’s ministry.  He tells these sort of stories to help Christians remember that we tend to ignore or forget persons who don’t fit our own understanding of what “good” or “proper” is all about.  Some folks would look at the stoner on the train and think, “He’s lost his way.”  Campolo sees someone able to be found.

For the Pharisees, they could not believe such people around Jesus were redeemable.  The religious and social maps they followed said these people were beyond good and decent.   They were “lost”. Case closed.

The behavior of the Pharisees lives on in religion and society today.  When I was a child, the little church we first attended had a little motto:  “The little church with a BIG welcome”. As I grew older, I wondered if the church knew itself to be truthful about this motto.  Children pick up a lot when they listen to the adults talk.  During the social time after church, people sometimes talked about things, and I lament some of the stuff I overheard “the grown-ups” saying.  As I became a teenager (and likely in the moodiness that comes with it), I used to look at that motto around the church and think, “Yeah, right.  A ‘big’ welcome, as long as you fit in.”

Like the rest, these parables press home questions that challenge as well as chasten.  How do we understand the call of a congregation?  Is it a household of faith where boundaries abound or the household where the marginal can find full welcome?  Do you see in the life of the gathered people some foretaste, some promise of the welcome given freely to all by the God who never stops seeking the lost?

         Each of these three parables offers very little instruction about how one repents.  Each parable avoids moralizing, instead ending on a celebratory note.  The shepherd invites his friends to celebrate, the woman claims the angels dance in heaven above with joy, and the father throws one of the wildest parties the neighborhood has seen.  The lost are found by the God who is like a shepherd searching, who is like a woman diligently seeking, or who is like a father long pained by a child’s absence and now overjoyed at receiving the prodigal.

    Jesus comes up to you and says, “I’m glad you are here.  I have some last minute details to work out.  I have some folks decorating the room.  I have other people laying out the food.  I really need some help with someone to hold up this sign.   Could you stand over there by the door and hold it up when they come in?”

            You look at the sign and say, “Sure, I will. Of course.”  And you go over to the doorway and take your place.

            And what does that sign say?