“Lost and Found”  Luke 15: 10-10
St Giles’ Sep 12th 2010 

Back to Sunday School again this morning !
Lost sheep and lost coins. I can still see in my head the picture of a blond haired, perfectly clean Jesus carrying a persil-white little sheep down a neatly mown hillside. I think I may even have been given it as a sticker – you know when you got a book full of stickers you got a prize !

It is so tempting to revert to childhood when we hear these parables. But of course parables are designed to get under our skin. They are often the most challenging and shocking parts of the Bible, not least because they get through to our imaginations and emotions.

So I want to start this morning by inviting you to use your imaginations and your memories. It may be easier to close your eyes to do this. I want you to try to remember a time when you lost something – it might be something really important or something trivial. The only condition is that you need to be able to remember finding it again ! So try to remember those feelings when you lost this object – or it might be a person !

You start looking calmly, because you have half an idea of where you left it. And then perhaps you start to get a bit cross because really you should not have lost it – or someone else should not have moved it. And of course being cross is also close to being a little frightened. Perhaps I won’t find it ? Perhaps I really have lost it for ever ? So you start to move more quickly – rifling through drawers, looking under every pile in the room, checking all your pockets, again, because if you are like me you keep looking in the same place again and again because you can’t imagine how it is not where you think you left it… And of course there is all the frustration of not quite being able to remember. Where did I leave it ? And why can’t I remember.

And then perhaps, when you stop trying, suddenly you do remember. That’s where it is. And you go and there it is. Relief. Just relief. I can remember the relief at seeing one of our two when they had wandered off. It sort of overcomes all the other feelings – why had they wandered off in the first place. Relief and joy. Big smiles. If it is a really big thing, some tears perhaps too. Lost and found.

The parable is powerful because this is a universal human experience and we all feel it. And in that feeling, we are taken to heaven. Jesus says, “that feeling you are feeling now, that is how it is in heaven when one lost human being is found”. That joy and relief.

Now of course, all language of emotion and heaven is picture language, but that does not make it unreal. Jesus said to his hearers then, and says to us this morning: “this is how happy God is when you come back to him, when you let him find you”. As happy as when you lose something really precious and find it again. That is how much God loves each one of us.

But that is only half of the parable. And the second half is more challenging. The lost coin presumably wasn’t responsible for its actions, but perhaps the lost sheep was ? When we discussed this in our Exploring Prayer group we allowed ourselves to speculate about this lost sheep. Perhaps it was a bit reckless, a bit undisciplined, it had gone where it should not have gone… Or perhaps there is something wrong with it ? Perhaps it was lagging behind and got lost ? Perhaps it found some specially juicy grass and just forgot to keep up with the shepherd. Who knows ? It was fascinating to see how our imaginations were triggered when we wondered “why the sheep had got lost ?”

And Jesus used this lost sheep as a picture of a human being who has got lost, who has become a sinner. And he says, that God leaves the other 99, the safe and secure ones, perhaps even the ones who think they are safe and secure, and goes off into the wilderness to find the lost one. And it is the relief and joy of finding this lost one that is at the heart of the parable: God loves sinners who come home.

Parables stop working when you try to make systems out of them. What are we supposed to think of the 99 righteous sheep ? Were they never lost ? Were they saved by just being good obedient sheep ? But remember the context of this parable. Jesus told it when the sinners of his day – the tax collectors, the thieves, the prostitutes, those put out of society – were crowding around him because they suddenly discovered that they were welcome. God loves them too.

And the righteous, the good, the law-keepers, the publicly religious, didn’t think Jesus ought to be mixing with such people, because of course “God does not love sinners”. He only loves publicly good people.

Now it is starting to get a little uncomfortable for us, because put simply, you and I are members of the 99. We don’t really see ourselves as sinners, perhaps not even as sinners in the past who have been found and brought home.

It is just is the case that churches, like all sorts of other human institutions, find it difficult to stay honest and humble about themselves – “actually we are sinners too” – and therefore find it difficult to welcome not just repentant sinners, but sometimes anybody new.

But deep down, do we really want people like this in our community? Repentant thieves and criminals ? Because they are the people God wants in our community.

A brief comment – Jesus made everyone welcome (apart from the self-righteous) – but that did not make him soft. These sinners often publicly confessed they were wrong and turned their lives upside down with his help. There is such a thing as a good life and that is what Jesus lived and taught others to live.

But that would be part of a different parable. For this morning, we have to live with this both reassuring and challenging experience.

God really loves us, each one of us, and we get a glimpse of that love when we remember how we feel when we find something we have lost. Relief and joy. But this relief and joy is over people who, in real life, we might not be so cheerful about. Difficult people. Awkward people. People who have done bad things and turned their lives around. God welcomes them. The question this morning, is can we ?

Amen.

Rev'd Dr. Alan Bartlett