Pentecost 15                                      Luke 15:1-10                                      9/12/04

                                                       "Lost and Found"

Have you ever been lost? Would anyone like to share what that experience was like?

I don’t know about you, but I hate getting lost. It’s not just the time wasted or the chance of worrying someone who might be waiting for me. I hate getting lost because when it happens I get this sense of panic - this feeling that the harder I try to find my way or get straightened out, the farther away I get. Even though I’m probably not that far from home or from my destination and not in any real danger, I get the feeling that I may never find my way back again. I’ll be lost forever. I’m doomed.

I experience a similar feeling when I become spiritually lost. Even though my spiritual lostness doesn’t take the form of renouncing my faith or of committing some outrageous sin, I get that same sense of panic as when I’m physically, geographically lost. Getting lost spiritually may be an experience of letting the shame that has always plagued me push me into feeling that God doesn’t love me. It may take the form of guilt for something I have or have not done and which may or may not be known to someone else. It may take the form of anxiety over some situation - anxiety that crowds out trust in God’s care and memories of a long history of that care. It may take the form of just not feeling right with God, not feeling His presence, not feeling joy in my spiritual life, not feeling like trying to be a good Christian (whatever that is) anymore. Whatever form my lostness takes it always means that I’ve temporarily forgotten that I am one of God’s sheep and that as my Shepherd , He never stops looking for me and will go to any lengths to find me and bring me home.

In our Gospel for today, Jesus is criticized by the Pharisees for welcoming and eating with tax collectors and sinners. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always assumed that these rejects were people who had committed blatant wrong-doing. Without giving it any thought I’ve pictured them as thieves, prostitutes and other criminal types, but I think that’s wrong. In the first place, such people would have probably been in jail. In the second place, in the two parables that Jesus tells the objects of search did not get lost intentionally. They weren’t bad; they just got lost. Therefore, in all likelihood the reasons that these people Jesus chose to eat with were looked down on was that they couldn’t observe all of the ceremonial laws that the Pharisees obeyed and demanded that others obey. Because of this, these "sinners" were unclean and thus unable to enter the temple and perform the required rituals. They were lost perhaps, but they weren’t losers.

Just as an aside. Pharisees were lay leaders in the Jewish religious system. They came into being as a cultural group about a hundred years before Jesus birth and lasted for about two hundred years after. Though they are painted rather negatively in the Gospels, Pharisees were in fact extremely dedicated to their religion, studied Scripture with an ardor, gave a tithe or better to the temple, and tried their best to live a God pleasing life..

The problem was that they had gone astray like a lost sheep. They had become so focused on the minutae of the Law that they’d become lost. They were spiritually lost and didn’t realize that what God wanted was for people to repent (accept being found) and give up trying to find their own way to Him. The Pharisees when they felt a bit lost (have their rigid lifestyle questioned) would go into a panic that led them to go even further away from where they wanted to be.

This can happen to us as well. We can become so wrapped up in what a Christian should be that we can wander away. We may get so focused on the should’s that we forget about God’s love and grace. We then see every sin, then every weakness or fault, as one more sign of our shameful lack of Christian goodness. We may despair of getting back on track and literally wander way from the flock or we may try to cover up what we see and pray we can keep the cover up, only to get lost in our anxiety over being found out. We may even go so far as to pass our self-judgment off onto others by condemning their sins while acting as if we have none.

What we need to do when we get to this point is stop and sit down to wait for the shepherd. While we wait we mustn’t condemn ourselves for our attitude or try to counter-balance it by enumerating our sins. This just drives us further into lostness. Instead, we can seek to create an openness for the Shepherd by searching Scripture for all of the evidence that God loves and cherishes us. The Shepherd will use this Means of Grace like one of those fancy new "Anstar" tracking systems to come to find us and enter our hearts. There he will replace the lostness of judgmentalism, shame, guilt, anxiety, distancing or other interior sin with the knowledge of his ever abiding love.

Then, when we are filled with the Shepherd’s love, when we know we are accepted, when our woundedness is sufficiently healed we can hear the Shepherd say, "Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost." That will be the beginning of God’s great party, a party that is filled with His joy, a party we can only begin to imagine...but let’s try...

I’d like you to close your eyes and take a minute to bring to mind the most joyful experience or event of your life. Immerse yourself in that memory. See it in detail in your mind, feel the emotions of the time, be filled with joy. Take a full minute to re-experience this. I’ll let you know when the time is up.

This remembered experience is just the faintest shadow of what God feels when a sinner (that’s all of us) lets him/herself be found. God wants to replace anything that separates us from God’s love with the assurance that we are so special to God that He will always search for us. God wants to heal our wounds and help us see ourselves as He sees us. God wants to show us that we are more precious than we can ever know. God wants to invite us to the party that He hosts for all of His sheep.

Thus, we don’t need Anstar and we needn’t panic when we find we are lost. We don’t have to worry that we will never find our home or that we will be lost forever. We are not doomed. The Shepherd will find us, if we just repent -that is, let ourselves be found. Amen.