Sunday, September 11, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Lost

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 14
Luke 15:1-10

When I was on sabbatical, I did my very best to stay present to each day at a time, as well as to those with whom I was sharing it. It took some practice, because as a pastor, I am always focused on the next Sunday or the next liturgical season or the next board or council meeting. And because I am such a planner, I find it quite easy to constantly live in the future. So one of the gifts of my time away was the gift of concentrating on the present.

Yet because I was so focused on the experience of being on sabbatical, I did not honestly reflect on what I had learned about myself, about my hopes for our shared ministry, and about the ways I wanted to do some things differently, until the very end. That kind of intentional reflection is how I spent the last two weeks before coming back to be with you again.

One of the realizations that dawned on me in those waning sabbatical weeks was how much unacknowledged grief I had been carrying around with me for the last two-and-one-half years, ever since COVID-19 first began to steamroll over our world. I realized how deeply I grieved the loss of our routine together—from the variety of Sunday morning activities to in-person meetings and hospital visits. I grieved the loss of the vibrant chaos that always filled these buildings seven days a week. I grieved that in the fall of 2019 it had felt that you and I were finally hitting our groove together in ministry and mission and that we were firing on all cylinders until we suddenly had to stop midstride, completely stripped of any control.

I grieved being unable to be with family members or friends without always being nervous that one or more of us would get terribly sick. During the months of lockdown, I grieved the simple pleasure of going on a walk without needing a purpose to do so. And I certainly grieved for my children, for all children, for the myriad of ways their lives were completely upended for two years. Missed classes, missed celebrations, missed graduations, missed normalcy.

And as I reflected more deeply about my previously unacknowledged grief, I suddenly realized that a major source of my grief was feeling almost completely disconnected from you—the people of the group project called Fourth Church. Many of you know how much courage I regularly draw from seeing your faces as I preach and how much inspiration or challenge I discover when I learn about what is going on in your lives and how much joy I feel when I get to baptize little ones and hold them and the gratitude I experience when I welcome new members and see the look on their faces radiating they finally feel at home. I missed being church with my colleagues, and I missed being church with you.

Honestly, as I look back, once the panic of the constantly changing, quite chaotic first year of COVID had settled into a still-very-dislocated routine, I think I just felt lost. Cut off from this community who always helped me find sacred meaning in our experiences. Just kind of wandering around and trying to simply make it through.

I offer this more-in-depth-than-usual self-reflection because over this last month of my return, I have been hearing how so many of you have felt the exact same way. You, too, grieve the loss of connection you experienced with each other and with this community of faith. For some of you, that grief is showing up as anger with your church over feeling forgotten or seemingly tossed aside. I continue to hear how some folks who are a part of this group project called church now wonder if they should even attempt to come back, because they are unsure that anyone noticed they were absent. I am so sorry that is how some of you feel.

Others of you have just plain-out moved away and are not quite certain if it is worth it to find a new church home where you are or even to reengage digitally with us. And some of us are wrapping up our frustrations with partisan politics in the same bundle as frustrations over the way your church leadership responded to the pandemic and have decided to leave it all behind and find a different faith community entirely.

In conversation after conversation, email after email, Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting I hear echoes of the kind of grief I’ve experienced ringing out in so many of your voices. All of us have gone through a traumatic event, and quite a few of us are not sure what we do with all of it. Many of us who are a part of this group project called Fourth Church feel much more lost than we ever have before, and we don’t know how we are going to emerge on the other side.

These shared feelings are why I am so glad that on this Get Connected Sunday, we get to hear these parables from the Gospel of Luke: The parable of the seeking shepherd and the parable of the tenacious woman. And while I have preached on these parables before, I have always preached them either from the perspective of the religious leaders sitting at the table receiving these teachings from Jesus or from the perspective of the ninety-nine sheep who were where they were supposed to be and the nine other silver coins that remained safely in the woman’s purse.

Perhaps it was spiritual hubris, that’s likely, but I have never considered these stories that tell us something about God from the lived experience of those who were wandering and felt lost. I had always assumed I was settled in the land of the found.

So let us consider these stories, then, as people who have felt, to one degree or another, lost for a while. As preacher Debie Thomas has taught, being lost can “mean many things. Think for a moment about the ways you’ve wandered without even realizing it. The ways you’ve lost your moorings and found yourself in strange, frightening lands with no markers to guide you home.”

“Sometimes,” Thomas claims, “we lose our sense of belonging. [Or] we lose our capacity to trust. [Or] we lose our felt experience of God’s presence. [Or] we lose the capacity to discern right from wrong. Some of us,” she continues, “get lost when illness descends on our lives and God’s goodness starts to look not-so-good. . . . Some of us get lost in the throes of addiction, or anxiety, or lust, or unforgiveness, or hatred, or apathy, or bitterness” (Debie Thomas, from “A Sermon for Every Sunday,” Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost 2022, asermonforeverysunday.com). Suffice it to say, there are many ways to become lost, many meandering paths that traverse the craggy wilderness leading us to unfamiliar terrain that feels very far away from the settled land of the found.

In a podcast called “Evolving Faith” that is once again making the social media rounds, Barbara Brown Taylor, in reflecting on the sense of lostness that we all will carry at one point or another in our lives, speaks about it as a time of wilderness. “Evolving faith in the wilderness,” she begins—

in the beginning, you weep. Because all the familiar landmarks are gone, because you don’t know where you are. Because the only food left in your backpack is disgusting. And the little bit of water in your canteen has turned green. You’re hungry, you’re tired, you’re lost, you’re alone, it’s getting dark. . . . So now what? If you are a pray-er, you pray. If you’re not a pray-er, you pray. What else can you do once you’ve come to the end of what you can do for yourself? It’s time to find out what faith means out beyond the boundaries. (Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Evolving Faith” podcast by Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, evolvingfaith.com)

That’s kind of where we’ve been, where we still are, isn’t it? All our familiar landmarks are gone. We are not sure who we will be as we move into this programmatic year—who we will be as people or who we will be as a community. Our lives are evolving, our church is evolving, our faith is evolving, and we pray and pray and pray because we are sneakily suspicious that we have indeed come to the end of what we can do for ourselves. Our illusions of control and power have been wrested from our hands and minds. It is time for us all to discover what faith means out beyond all the boundaries of what used to be, what used to work, what used to keep the chaos in check and the paths leading into the craggy wilderness of lostness completely blocked.

And yet, my dear church, here’s the thing: we do not experience any of this alone! First of all, it would be good for us to remember that Jesus began his entire ministry out in the wilderness, as he battled the temptations to go the easy route or to give into the powerful pull of the familiar and known. He, himself, was emptied out of certainty in order to be filled with the Spirit of God.

So we know that because of Jesus there is forever a part of God who has taken in that kind of wilderness battle, wilderness wandering, wilderness desperation, into God’s very self. God, God’s very self, had to figure out what faithfulness meant out beyond the boundaries of what was comfortable, safe, and familiar.

And second, in these parables Jesus is again reminding all of us who have ever felt lost that even though we might think we are the ones trying to find God, trying to find our way back home, the truth of the matter is that God is already seeking us and has been seeking us from the beginning. These parables reveal to us that God, the seeking shepherd, has already left the other ninety-nine settled sheep behind because God knows we feel like we are missing. And God is taking his crook and beating back the brambles and the thorns, making God’s way along the windy, treacherous, shadow-filled and rain-drenched paths in order to reclaim us, throw us around his shoulders, and bring us back into the fold of feeling known and claimed. And as God returns us to the others, God is filled with so much joy that God starts to dance and invites all the other sheep and shepherds to join in the fun.

These parables reveal to us that God, the tenacious woman, has already taken up her broom, is busily sweeping out every crook and cranny, is ripping up every rug, is moving every single piece of furniture, and, by the light of God’s lamp, is conducting her own kind of grid search of the house, diligently looking for even the slightest glint of silver that will indicate our presence. And when she finds us, she does not even bother to put things back together again before she throws open the doors and the windows and announces to the entire neighborhood that a party is starting, right then and there, because she has restored us to who we are and put us back into her safekeeping.

You see, dear fellow group project participants, the truth of our faith is not only that Jesus has felt fully what it means to be human, to be us—and therefore every experience we have has been taken into God’s own heart, proclaiming God’s all-encompassing solidarity with us—but also the truth of our faith is that even if we have spent the last few years feeling totally lost, full of grief, out of sorts, angry or frustrated or bitter, we have never been forgotten by God, even when we wondered if we had been forgotten by each other.

God has been diligently, relentlessly, lovingly, extravagantly, boldly searching us out, one by one, tossing us over his shoulders and restoring us back to her care, again and again and again. And God will not stop this kind of relentless search until all God’s people are located, regardless of where they have wandered, knowingly or unknowingly. Until all God’s people have been seen and known and loved and restored. Until all God’s people have had every last tear wiped away and know fully that they are home, settled back in the land of the found.

So yes, we have had much to grieve, and we probably have more to come. And we do not know just yet how we will evolve as a church or as people. We will probably have days or moments during which we once again feel lost. We are not finished with this journey beyond what was once familiar.

But even in the midst of that, I believe with every fiber of my being that God will never stop searching for us, reclaiming us, restoring us, and bringing us back into the safety of God’s home, no matter what. God will never give up on us. So may we, as a group project called church, never give up on each other, either. For we will never be lost to God. So may we let that truth of our faith guide our living and our being in these liminal, “now-what” days. Amen.