Lost and Found

FBCGSO Sermons

https://fbcgso.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/9-18-16-sermon-jh.mp3

Luke 15:1-10

“Do we have a lost and found?” This was Gayle Adams’ question to me this week. Someone had left a scarf or a book or something, so together we rummaged around in the front office, looking in cabinets and drawers until we came upon the lost and found box, tucked underneath a table, where all the misfit items end up.

In this box you’ll find all the reading glasses you could want, a single red glove looking for its twin for who knows how long, plenty of umbrellas, and, I have to say, a number of unclaimed Bibles (God is watching you!).

It’s the place you’d go if you were missing a coffee mug, or a house-key, or your child’s hoodie sweatshirt; usually these things sit in the box for ages and seemingly reproduce themselves, but every now and then an item and its owner are reunited, and there’s relief and excitement and a little more room in the box for the next lost thing.

Do we have a lost and found? Well, we better, considering just how many things end up getting lost in church. Our church is full of people – many of us – who have lost things – spare keys and coffee mugs – but much more, like some lost direction, or lost hope; surely someone in this church is experiencing a loss of perspective or a loss of purpose, and somewhere, maybe beneath the table or tucked in the quieter corners of this church, there are even those of us who have lost faith.

We know what it is to be lost. Maybe especially here, in church. Which is why this section of the gospel of Luke speaks so deeply and powerfully to us.

Chapter 15 is the heart of the gospel of Luke, with three parables of lost things: lost sheep, a lost coin, and two lost sons.

Jesus is where we left him last week. Having already moved toward Jerusalem, he is now telling those who follow him more and more about what it will cost, and what will characterize the lives of those who follow in this way, and now in Chapter 15, he stops to tell three stories about losing and finding, searching and sweeping, looking and discovering.

One lost sheep, so valuable to the shepherd that he would leave the ninety-nine to go and find the one who had gotten separated from the others.

This story is followed by the story of the woman who had ten coins, and who lost one, and who lit a lamp and swept the house, and wouldn’t give up until at last she had found the lost coin. She was so happy with its recovery that she gave a party for all her friends and neighbors, inviting them to come celebrate with her, probably spending more on the party than the worth of the coin.

These two stories give way to what is perhaps Jesus’ most important parable – a wayward son and a dutiful son – one lost to his squandering, and the other to his self-righteousness – and both found by the love of their father.

In each of these parables we hear the earnestness with which God seeks us out and welcomes us home. Like a sheep cowering on a hillside,or a coin collecting dust in the quiet corners of the house, or a child trudging up the road–this is the heart of the gospel, because it’s the heart of the story of Jesus, and the heart of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

But as he proclaims it, maybe you can hear the noise that begins chapter 15 – the resistance of the Pharisees and the scribes. Jesus is telling these stories in response to them. For as Luke describes, they were saying to themselves, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So as we listen to these powerful, joyous stories of lost things being found – and in every case, great rejoicing and celebration, by the angels themselves, but all of this is being described with the background noise of grumbling Pharisees and scribes.

As hard as we are on them, it’s important to remember that the Pharisees were simply a segment of first-century Judaism doing the best they knew to keep the law of Moses; they spent much of their time with scribes, because the scribes were the experts in this law: laws about what to eat, what to wear, or laws about just what exactly constituted work on the Sabbath day, or just who qualified as a sinner. And the Pharisees wanted to know that, too; they wanted to stay close to the heart of God, within the bounds of the law, so much so, that they were said to build a fence around the Torah – or the law.

The motivation seems to date back to Deuteronomy 22:8, where the instruction is given that when you build a house, you must build a fence around it in order to avoid any guilt should someone fall from the roof, which in the tradition that followed became a charge to build a fence around the Torah, around the law.

This was the commandment in the Talmudic tract Pirque Avot – The Ethics of the Fathers. “Build a fence around the Torah,” the rabbis said; that is, this law is a gift from God, and it helps us to live together as God intends; it’s a gift to be preserved, insulated from anything that could compromise it, and so fences were built, some small and some big, as a means of ensuring that the people of God would stay as far from sin as possible, fences in the form of extra laws that if obeyed would ensure that the people would not ever come close to disobeying the Torah.

We can’t fault them too quickly; fence-builders aren’t evil. They are often motivated by a desire to preserve, define, make safe; it’s just that those have never been Jesus’ primary motives and concerns.

When Jesus came up against any boundary constructed by others in his Jewish tradition, he seemed to ask a clarifying question, something like what the mystic and prophet Howard Thurman once asked: What do our teachings “have to say to the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed, to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall, or with their backs against the fence, or those left standing on the outside of the safety of this fence altogether?”

And we know this from what the Pharisees are always saying about him. “He welcomes sinners and eats with them.” There were crowds of people coming near to Jesus that the Pharisees weren’t prepared to see so close to a man claiming what Jesus claimed. They had already labeled Jesus earlier (Luke 7:34), ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ And they had asked him once before, “Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?” To which he replies, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger suggested this could be the theme of the whole of Luke’s Gospel.

And now we see it again. The crowd grows, and from the vantage point of the Pharisees, it’s loaded with these sinners that Jesus keeps welcoming.

The word Luke uses for sinner means literally “to miss the mark…”

And as it has from the beginning, sin separates. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they hid themselves. God came looking for them in the Garden but he couldn’t find them anywhere. And who knows how long that went on before Adam finally blurted out, “Here I am.” And God said, “What were you doing? Why were you hiding?” And Adam said, “Well, I heard you walking in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.”

But notice that God didn’t hide from them. God doesn’t hide. God searches. God looks. God seeks.

That’s what we see in Jesus as he continues to welcome; it’s a powerful word here in our Gospel lesson. It means “seeks out.” As in, Jesus “seeks out” – active, restless, like a good shepherd who will leave the ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness to seek the one lost sheep until he finds it, then lay it upon his shoulders and returns home, calling together his friends and neighbors to celebrate.

Like a woman who has ten coins and loses one of them. So she lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house until she finds it. And when she does, she calls her friends together and rejoices. “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

This is who Jesus was. It’s who God is. Love that tirelessly looks for whatever is lost, who sees in those far from home not a misfit, or a cast off, or a sinner beyond the reach, but simply someone who has gotten lost along the way.

And what if that was who we were, the ones who wouldn’t give up the search, or cut people off, who keep watching from the window, or searching in the night, or sweeping into the early morning hours, who leave the safety of the fence line, remembering that it’s out there beyond the boundary that we were found and carried home? Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them, which is how he found you and me.

What if we could do the same?

Some of you know that this week I had the opportunity to take a quick there and back again trip to Atlanta to hear former President Jimmy Carter speak at the new Baptist Covenant meeting. Founded by President Carter in 2007, New Baptist Covenant seeks to encourage relationships and action for the common good among Baptist congregations across racial lines. Originally I planned to skip this meeting, not a great time in our family life for travel, but then this carrot was dangled out in front as my friend Darryl Aaron, pastor of Providence Baptist here in Greensboro, and I were invited to come and share about our friendship, what it means to us, and how we imagine such a relationship could impact our churches and our community. “We’d like you to give the invitation after President Carter speaks,” they said. Well, I imagined us shaking hands with the former President as he said, “Guys, I’ll set em up you knock em down.” It was nothing like that; instead it was listening to filler music for a while until President Carter arrived, spoke and was whisked away, on the opposite side of the stage from us, no handshake.

But I was up close with this 91 year old man, who here in the latter years of life, continues to build Habitat Houses, and stand for peace, and teach Sunday School at his local Baptist Church, and continues to inspire relationships across the boundaries and fences our world constructs, continues to be tireless about searching for those who feel lost, and who in this passing speech on his way to somewhere else, didn’t celebrate all that had been, but talked about all that was not yet, describing the crisis of abuse of women and girls in our world, lamenting the state of poverty and homelessness, and asking us how closely we are living to the things that defined the life of Jesus – who welcomed sinners and ate with them.

There will always be those who would rather stay within the fences and prefer the shepherd to stay right there, too, with the ones who haven’t wandered far and gotten themselves lost; we’d rather stay within the bounds of what we’ve neatly constructed, sometimes motivated by the best of intentions, like preservation, or piety, or distance from sin. These are not bad things; it’s just that those have never really been Jesus’ primary concerns.

It was the early 20^th century, after the devastation of WWI, when a group of Quakers brought relief to the impoverished people of Poland. They distributed food and clothing, along with other relief measures. In the course of their work, one of the Quaker relief workers contracted Typhus and died. There were only Roman Catholic cemeteries in this little Polish village, and church law forbade anyone not of that faith to be buried in that ground.

So the Quakers buried their friend in a grave just outside the Catholic cemetery.

The next morning, however, there was a surprise. During the night the villagers had moved the fence so that the cemetery now included the grave of the Quaker relief worker.

I don’t know much about those fence movers, but I know they understood the nature of the gospel, he love of the Christ who was not only a fence mover, but a fence-leaver, who saw no boundary so well-constructed that it could breached by the immediacy of love, urgency of justice, the desire for even one to find their way home.

So maybe they remembered this one who leaves the 99 to search for the one.

Maybe they even sent him out, knowing that none of them are safe until all of them are safe; none of them are found until all of them are found.

I once heard Fred Craddock preach on this theme of lost things found. Craddock, who taught preaching at Emory University, was a slight man with an unassuming demeanor and presence, and he used to say he thought being a preacher meant playing a tuba, but he realized he only had a piccolo, but how he could sneak up on you with the gospel, like as he told a story about playing hide-and-seek in the summertime with his sister as a boy.

And you all know how that goes. Somebody is “It”and whoever is “It” hides their eyes, counts to a hundred really fast, and shouts, “Ready or not here I come.” In the meantime everybody else has hidden themselves in a secret place. Then the person who’s “It,” comes looking and tries to beat the first one found to home base and touch the base three times saying, “You’re it.” Then the other person is “It.”

Craddock says he loved to play this game because when his sister was “It” she counted really fast; in fact she skipped all the numbers between ten and ninety eight, ninety nine, a hundred and started looking right away. But Craddock had ingenuity on his side. He was small, and there was a little crawl space under the front steps of the house where he could go right away and hide and she couldn’t see him. His sister would go looking all over the place. In the house, out of the house, in the weeds, in the trees, in the barn. But she couldn’t find him.

Craddock says sometimes she’d get close and she’d be standing right beside the steps and he could see her legs, and he could just barely hold in his snickering. He thought to himself, She’ll never find me here. She’ll never find me here. Then it occurred to him… she’ll never find me here.

So after awhile he’d stick out a toe. And when she came by, she’d see the toe and say, “Uh oh, I see you,” and she’d run back and touch base three times and say, “Ha ha, you’re it.” And Craddock says he would come out brushing himself off and saying, “Oh shoot, you found me.”

And then Fred Craddock looked out at all of us who were sitting there in that chapel and said, “But what did I want? What did I really want?”

And I knew the answer. Sitting there on the front pew it was all I could do to keep from shouting it out loud. “To be found!” I thought. “You wanted to be found!” And then it seemed he looked right at me, pointed his finger and said, “The same thing you want!”

It’s what the kingdom wants: for all that is lost to be found.

And whenever that happens, there will still be some Pharisee or another who grumbles, but here among the people of God there will be joy; there will be great joy.