September 15, 2013 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Searching for the Lost

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
Luke 15:1–10

Almighty God, since you so kindly invite us to yourself and do not cease . . .
to extend your grace toward us, grant that we obey you willingly and allow ourselves to be ruled by your Word. And grant that we might obey you steadfastly, not only for a day or a short time, but until we have completed the course of our journey and are gathered together in your heavenly rest.

John Calvin

This is a sermon about being lost.

In the text that is before us today, Jesus is among a diverse group of people. Tax collectors and sinners, it says, have come to listen to him. There’s never been a lot of love lost between citizens and the tax collector, but in the ancient world, these folks were particularly ill thought-of, not only because they collected taxes but because they took their own salary off the top, some rather generously. Other “sinners,” we’re told, are there as well, people equally disreputable in their own way, people who were somewhat publicly in defiance of the law. These are the people who have come near to Jesus.

In ancient days, no different than today, people judge you by the company you keep, so there are scribes and Pharisees, the officials of the temple, standing by observing Jesus, the young rabbi, and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” These temple officials, who were in charge of the sacrificial rites, also made their living by charging a fee and keeping a percentage for their own purposes, some rather generously. It’s always easiest to point a finger of blame at a crime you know well. And so here we have two groups of people, on the surface quite diverse, but perhaps more similar than they realize. And Jesus begins to tell a story.

A shepherd had one hundred sheep and one of them wandered away and became lost, and the shepherd left the ninety-nine to find the one. Likewise, says Jesus, a woman with ten silver coins, having misplaced one, searches all night to find it, and when she finds that coin she calls her friends and says, “Rejoice with me, for see, I have found my coin!” “Just so, I tell you,” Jesus says, “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Note that both of these lost items are totally without help or hope. Take the silver coin—this is a considerable amount of money, by the way; the woman wants to find it. If you’ve ever lost a diamond earring, you know that it doesn’t shine all the brighter in expectation of being found. Likewise, shepherds will tell you that lost sheep are not easy to find; they don’t run around bleating loudly, calling for help—that makes matters worse and attracts the wolves. No, lost sheep find a place to hide, and they burrow down under a bush, and wait (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Proper 19). These are stories about things that are lost and need to be found.

Jesus asks those who are listening, “Who among you, if you were this shepherd, would not leave the ninety-nine and go after the one? Who among you wouldn’t search all night for the coin, and how greatly would you rejoice when you have found that thing you have lost?

Jesus says this in the presence of Pharisees and scribes, religious officials who have noted that he welcomes sinners and eats with them. And you take the point that it is the responsibility of good and faithful people, and especially the comfortable and capable members of society, to do as the shepherd does: to seek out and save the lost, to find those who need help and to reach out to them.

The annual financial appeal for Fourth Church and Chicago Lights will soon be upon us—stewardship season, as some people know it—and this narrative provides a perfect opportunity to tell you about the many members, volunteers, and staff here at Fourth Church who are about the daily business of seeking out and saving the lost. We do so through hunger prevention, housing and job training assistance, tutoring, juvenile detention ministries, outreach to people who are sick and isolated in their homes—the list is endless, and though the needs are troubling, the help that is provided is something for which we can and should be thankful.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about this morning, because it represents a fundamental interpretive mistake in reading this story. Many of you know this already, because any one of you who has read your share of Bible stories, attended Sunday School, or come to worship and sung the hymns knows that when Jesus tells a story about a shepherd, the shepherd is God. So Jesus is not telling this story in earshot of the scribes and Pharisees in hopes that they will change their lives and be about the business of seeking out and saving the lost. Neither is he telling this story because he wants to reinforce the faith of his disciples who are also listening. And he is not telling the story to offer a word of congratulations to the people who think of themselves as being among the ninety-nine sheep who have stayed within the fold, even when the shepherd was out seeking the one who was lost.

No, Jesus is telling this story because he wants the comfortable and capable and respectable people, the quietly faithful people, the people who are inclined to think they are pretty much on the right track, the people like us, to remember that God is the shepherd who seeks and saves lost sheep. And the lost sheep in this story is us.

It is not only these two short stories I read to you this morning, the lost sheep and the lost coin, that convince me of this interpretation, but it is the more familiar story that follows. Jesus tells these two stories as a sort of introduction to the longer and more developed story of the Prodigal Son. Many of you will remember that story well: A man had two sons. The younger of the two, having come of age, asks for his share of the inheritance early. He then leaves the house and squanders every last cent. He spends it on booze and gambling and prostitutes. Later, he finally returns home, with nothing but the clothes on his back, hoping to work in his father’s fields as a common servant. But his father welcomes him home, throwing a lavish party for him. And meanwhile the older brother, the one who had always stayed home and had always done the right thing, stews in resentment because his rebellious younger brother gets the party his older brother deserves.

The reason this story is so powerful is because everyone knows a family like this one. It is a family in which a child gets lost. This is a family in which a teenager or young adult had every opportunity and blessing in life, went to the best schools, had good, well-meaning parents, had all the good looks and brains. But at some point, things began to unravel. Perhaps it was rebellion or boredom, or alcohol and drugs. Perhaps it was anxiety or depression that was difficult to manage. Maybe there was anger over a divorce or an old family dispute and the son or daughter grew distant and eventually got lost.

Those of you who know this family well know that not just the problem child but everyone in such a family is lost. The siblings who always did the right thing and stayed close to home are lost. They go back and forth between trying to be a good friend to their lost brother or sister, sometimes giving them a little help on the side, keeping a secret, hoping things will change, but also being deeply angry and resentful that mom or dad keep giving so much attention to the problem child. “What about me?” they ask. “I’ve been doing the right thing all along.”

The parents are lost. They exist in the moral limbo between the deep compassion they feel for their child and the tough love that is sometimes necessary in parenting. They wonder how many second chances to give a child before it’s time to finally draw the line, how long to allow a child to squander your money, lie to your face, bring drugs into the house, before it’s finally time to tell them they can’t come back home. And because parents often differ in their individual judgments on those questions, at times they are lost in their marriage as well, angry at each other about the problem child they can’t change.

Even onlookers are lost in this situation. If this family is not yours, but you know them, it’s often impossible to advise them as to what they should do, because you don’t know either. Yes, everyone in this story is lost.

Not all of the time, in this life, but some of the time, every one of us finds that we have somehow arrived in the midst of a terrible situation we are unable to repair. Perhaps it’s a problem with a damaged relationship that seems too far gone to fix. Maybe you made a career miscalculation or a mistake managing your finances, or maybe you are stuck in a situation of drug or alcohol dependence, and you can remember the time when you didn’t feel so stuck, but you’ve no idea how to get back to that place. Or perhaps like the story in the Bible, you have a child or a brother or sister who is lost and you just can’t figure out how to help them. Perhaps that person is you. In all of these situations we know we are lost.

I have watched the debate over what to do about Syria with a similar feeling of helplessness. The situation is certainly not a direct parallel, but there are enough similarities to make the point. Here we are, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, feeling totally at a loss in the face of this tragedy. On both a national and international level, there is frighteningly little consensus around how to solve the situation. A variety of strategies are being proposed, but many of the nations that have lined up on one side or the other have not aligned themselves the way we’re used to seeing. Our congressional leaders are in open disagreement as well, but not at all along the strict party lines that we’ve come to expect. And common citizens who have followed the story are likewise all over the map; the opinions about what to do don’t align with whether you are conservative or liberal, rich or poor, old or young. And even in the wake of a new reprieve from the impending threat of airstrikes, we still have no reason to believe that the international community has found an adequate way to put a stop to the killing, to what is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. In this situation, we truly seem to be lost.

In the midst of this, I would like to humbly suggest that we, as a people of faith, take time to pray about it. I suspect that this suggestion will seem to some of you like impractical religiosity that is passive or lazy or unlikely to produce a measurable result. To those objections, I can only reply, Who among you, if you have had a time in your own life when you have been truly, hopelessly and utterly lost, has not been inclined to ask God for help? Imagine the parents of a lost child, up late into the night, wondering “Where is my child? Is she hurt? Is he scared? Will we ever see her again?” They pace back and forth, try to busy themselves with random chores, pour another drink and rationalize, “Would some earlier intervention have made a difference? Where was it that things began to fall apart?” It is at a time such as this that we are most likely to finally find ourselves on our knees, saying, “God, we are lost. Please help!”

It is in the lost times of life when we do not know the way that prayer is our guide. I was reminded this week of a story told by one of our pastors, the late John Boyle. It was 1945 and John was a member of an infantry unit in France, near the German border. Having come to the edge of a mine field that the men had no choice but to cross, three small groups were to be sent across the field in hopes of finding a safe place to cross where the rest of the unit could follow. John was appointed with three others, a Jew, a Catholic, and a Lutheran, and the three of them, knowing that John had hopes after the war of studying for the ministry, asked him to offer a prayer. He nervously uttered a prayer for God’s guidance and presence and protection, finding himself even more frightened at the end of his prayer than when he began. But as they started across the field, he quite suddenly remembered the words of an old hymn from his church in New York, and he began to pray those words that gave him some measure of peace as he stepped across the field:

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom; lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

John wrote, “I do not feel that I and my comrades survived because of my prayers. I believe it was the grace of God. . . . I [also] believe that a clue to the business of living was provided [to me that day] . . . that I live [each] day that I [have] in the best way possible and ultimately entrust it and myself and those for whom I care into the loving hands of a good God who has promised never to abandon me or leave me alone” (John Boyle, “Experiencing the Presence of God”).

John Calvin said God “ordained prayer not for his sake, but for ours.” And while prayer is not to be reserved exclusively for the most desperate situations in life, it is true that prayer can be most powerful for us when we come to God having finally acknowledged our inability to fix things, and thus our deep and real need for God. And it is my hunch that many of you have felt that need, as you wait for children, as you wait for test results, as you wait for the resolution of broken relationships or past mistakes.

The angst of this waiting can be easy to forget when the hard times are past. We read the story of the Prodigal Son and remember the father running to his son as he makes his way toward the door of the house. We see the shepherd, carrying on his shoulders the sheep he has found and we forget the agony of the search—what if I don’t find the sheep that is lost? What if my son never returns home? It is precisely because these fears are so real that our joy is so great when we discover that what we lost has been found.

I believe in a God that never stops looking, who seeks out and saves the lost, who is eager to welcome us home, and I try desperately to believe in that God even in the midst of times that are dark and uncertain and in situations where we have become lost and do not know what to do.

And so I ask that today you would join me in a moment of silent meditation, a time of prayer, in a time when we are so in need of God’s guiding hand in the world. I ask that you would join me as together we pray for the people of Syria, for those in our world community who are our friends and also for those who may be our enemies. I ask you to pray for our president and our elected leaders here at home who have a crisis before them that will last as long as innocent lives are being lost. And I ask that you would pray for each other and for yourselves, for there are surely some among us this morning who, in their own way, are lost. Pray with me, for we are living in a time when there is much that is unknown and a future that is uncertain, but I believe in a God who is yearning, as we are, for a day coming soon when there will be rejoicing in heaven and on earth, because what is lost has been found, a day when God our protector and sustainer, arms open wide in welcome, lifts us upon strong and secure shoulders, lost sheep that we are, and carries us home. Let us hold silence together . . .

Amen.