Texts: Luke 15:1-10; 1 Timothy 1:12-17
Date: September 12, 2004
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

Lost or found?  Lost or found?  What about you?  Are you lost or are you found?

I puzzled and puzzled this week over whether I would be addressing the lost or the found on Sunday morning.  I puzzled, as Dr. Seuss would say, until my puzzler was sore.  Will I be talking to the lost or to the found when I step into the pulpit on Sunday morning?  What do you think?

The gospel lesson today has something to say to both the lost and the found.  I could certainly preach it either way.  I realize that I'm addressing a mixed company of lost and found.  If I went around and pointed at each of you and asked you to make a choice, some of you would self-identify as "found"-as in, I found God or God found me-and others would confess to being "lost"-as in, I don't know where my life is going right now.  There might be a few more "losts" if there weren't a hundred people listening.  But at any rate, I assume as a congregation we are both lost and found. 

As soon as I put those three words together-Lost and Found-I'm immediately mentally standing in front of the plastic Lost and Found bins at Sakai Intermediate School.  I spent a little time there when Karen was a student at Sakai.  The memory of the sight and smell of those bins is so vivid that if I were Jesus making up a parable about the lost in my setting it might go something like this: "Which one of you moms, having done the laundry at home and having eleven sweatshirts in the clean clothes basket but detecting the favorite dark-hued hoody with the ripped pocket and the frayed cuffs that your beloved offspring wears almost daily is missing, does not leave the eleven sweatshirts in the clean clothes basket and go to the Lost and Found bins at the school to seek the lost fleece garment?  She holds her nose and dives into the wilderness of lost raincoats, polar fleece vests, sweaty sweat pants, grayish socks and moldy lunch boxes.  When she has found it, she puts it in her mini-van and rejoices, and when she comes home she calls together her family and says, "Rejoice with me, for I have found the garment that was lost."  And her husband and children, who can't believe she wasted so much time looking for that old rag give her that look, you know the one, the you're-on-your-way-to-the-loony-bin look.  At our house we call it the "camel look," the watch-out-they-spit look that appears with increasing frequency on the face of an adolescent as they grow older.  I've also heard it called "Stink Eye."

I think the Pharisees and scribes were giving Jesus the ol' Stink Eye when they surveyed the crowd to see who was coming to hear Jesus teach.  One thing you should know about the Pharisees and the Scribes was that they were, as a group, Found.  If you were to ask them, Lost or Found? They'd be shouting FOUND before you could finish asking the question.  They had found God and the right way to live in a way pleasing to God.  They had found in their laws and rituals a sure-fire way to be part of God's flock.  It irritated them to no end to see Jesus spending his time with people who weren't living in the God-pleasing way they had found. 

You may know that in their spiritual system, those who were worked hard at being clean and pure both inside and out believed they could easily be contaminated by contact with those who were unclean and impure.  Without going into a complex explanation of the hows and whys of it, just keep in mind that the Scribes and Pharisees sincerely believed they would get the spiritual equivalent of "cooties" from the sinners, and it was a time-consuming process to un-cootied once you got cooties from someone unclean.  That's why they liked to stick with their own kind.  They didn't get why Jesus would want to hang with the cootie crowd.

There was even more reason in their minds to stay away from sinners than the whole spiritual cootie thing.  There's a story in 2 Chronicles about a good king who started keeping company with a wicked king.  They got into a ship-building enterprise together.  A prophet came to the good king and announced that the Lord was going to destroy the ships that they had made because they had been built in partnership with this wicked fellow.  Sure enough, they were wrecked at sea.  There was a midrash on that 2 Chronicles 20:35-37 story known in Jesus' day, a rabbinical commentary on it, that warned against consorting with the ungodly.  The good worried that their enterprises would be dragged down by a relationship with those who were considered bad.

That's how they would have thought of the sinners and tax collectors-as bad.  They weren't merely uninteresting or uncool in the minds of the scribes and Pharisees.  They were bad.  And they had learned clear back in Hebrew school that the good ought not rub elbows with the bad if they could help it. 

One of the things Jesus does with his parable of the sheep is try to reframe their thinking about the people he's been spending time with that have got the Pharisees and Scribes' knickers in a knot.  He wants them to start thinking of these outsiders not as "bad" but as "lost."  You can sense the difference right away, can't you?  The lost are more to be pitied than punished.  After all, there are all kinds of reasons people and things get lost.  Luke has at least three stories of lost-ness that seek to open the imagination of those who are peering down their noses at outsiders.  They all suggest different reasons why a person might become lost, out of touch with the community of the securely godly.

One is the parable of the Prodigal Son.  The younger son in that story becomes lost pretty much by a selfish act of his own will.  He demands his share of the inheritance and then squanders it on loose living.  Later he comes to his senses and realizes he has lost his way, and he wants to go home.

Another lost story is the first one we heard this morning.  A sheep gets lost.  You don't think of a sheep getting lost quite in the same way as you think of the prodigal son packing up and leaving home, do you?  Sheep are not willful and selfish.  They're just not so bright.  To get lost was in keeping with sheep nature.  A sheep acting like a sheep-it just happens.  You might get frustrated, but anger and blame are not appropriate, right?

Another lost story is the one about the coin.  No will involved at all with the coin.  Forces of nature--like gravity--work on it and it gets lost.  It can't decide to leave the pocket nor can it decide to go back.  It's totally dependent on the owner to take the time to seek and find it. 

Jesus is using stories to get the company of the "found" to think of the folks they are grumbling about him spending time with as "lost" and further to consider why they might be lost.  They might be lost because self-will and reckless living has landed them in that company.  But even if that's the case, it's still more helpful to think of them as lost than to think of them as bad. 

Another category of folks might be lost simply because it's human nature to get lost from time to time.  Thoughtlessness leads many a human meandering into sin and danger they hadn't imagined when they wandered out of the sheepfold.  This may apply to young people especially who caper off in search of adventure and excitement and are stunned to discover they are in real danger. 

Then there are the people who become lost through no fault of their own.  They fall out of the pocket of the loving and secure family every person deserves by being born into abusive or neglectful families.  They fall out of the pocket of a cozy theology that suggests that bad things only happen to bad people when they are struck by an unexplainable tragedy and they roll away into a dark corner of despair.  They fall out of the pocket of a religious community that betrays them and equate that imperfect faith group with God, rolling away from faith altogether. 

"You see?" Jesus is saying to the Pharisees.  "Not bad.  Lost.  And lost in different ways, for different reasons."  Part of the two stories we heard in Luke include a bit in which when the finder finds the lost, he or she calls friends and family together and asks them to help celebrate the finding of the lost.  "Rejoice with me!" the shepherd and the housewife say.  I think he's saying to the Scribes and Pharisees that if they aren't going to join in the effort of finding the lost the least they can do is rejoice when someone is found again through the embracing love of God.

The Pharisees and Scribes would of course identify with the 99 sheep who never troubled the shepherd by getting lost in the first place.  They were too smart and too good for that.  Can you picture the 99 sheep bumping around in the pen, irritated that the shepherd is wasting time with the nitwit who got lost?  When the lost one is brought home on the shoulders of a singing shepherd, maybe they barely lift a fleecy chin to acknowledge that it has joined the flock.  Huh, someone else in the pen.  Big wooly deal.  Or worse, can you picture them kind of subtly blocking the gate, making it hard for the lost one to get in?  They've kind of got their fluffy white backs turned, standing in a knot, baaing earnestly to each other about the quality of the fodder this year and the dry rot in the pen.  They're not facing the found sheep to insist she can't come in; they don't have to.  A picture paints a thousand words.   

Lost or found?  Lost or found?  Sometimes those who might identify with the found have lost their sense of the glorious grace of God that never stops searching for the lost.  The verses we heard from 1 Timothy revives a sense of the grace that finds the lost where they are.  "I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord…even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence…I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus…Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners-of whom I am the foremost.  But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe…" [1Timothy 1:12-16, selected]  The writer's sense of grace is sharp and vivid, contrasting, perhaps, with the ranks of the found whose memory of being once lost and now found has faded into a comfortable sense of self-satisfaction.

Hearing someone else's testimony can bring it back in a flash, like the aroma of bread baking can take you back to the home of your childhood.  I heard it again Friday night as a woman speaking at a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser spoke tearfully about how so many terrible things had happened to her that she had lost her faith in God, but that being selected to receive a Habitat house and working with the faithful community of Habitat volunteers had returned faith in God to her.  It was beautiful.  Christ Jesus was standing with her at that microphone, saying, "Rejoice with me!  I have found the one that was lost."

The gospel always has a word for the lost-God is still looking for you, tirelessly, relentlessly seeking you out with forgiveness, grace, and love.  And the gospel has a word today for the ranks of those who think of ourselves as found.  If you're going to stay here in the confines of the pen, when I bring someone to you, at the very least, rejoice with me.  Don't fret about how that one got lost in the first place; it's not for you to judge.  Rejoice that they have been found, and for Pete's sake, don't make it to too hard to break into the fold.  You once were lost too, remember?  (If you don't remember, take my word for it.  You were lost before you got found.)  Welcome those who come in as though they have been the subject of a decades-long search for God's favorite child.

A mother of eight children was asked if she had any favorites.  "Yes, I have favorites," she answered.  "I love best the one who is sickest, until he is well.  I love best the one who is in trouble, until she is safe again.  And I love best the one who is farthest away, until he comes home."  Maybe one day we who have been found will even join the shepherd's search party, along with the shepherd's found! party.