Today we’ve been presented with three stories about being lost, being sought after, and being found. While I imagine that we all can relate in some way to feeling lost and perhaps even the joy of being found, I doubt that many of us like to think too much about being sought after.
The thing is, we live pretty public lives, so we don’t usually talk about being “pursued” unless it’s some kind of stalker situation, or a horror film, or maybe a traffic violation. However you frame it, we don’t often talk about being pursued in a good way.
Today we’re going to talk about being pursued in a good way. We’re also going to talk about the fact that the only thing worse than being lost is believing that you are not lost and yet feeling like you may as well be. Beyond all of that, we’re going to talk about what it means to be found.
First, I want to talk a little about Mr. York. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, I’ll give it some context – Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and York. A bust of his likeness was recently installed anonymously and without permission on a pedestal on public land that used the host a statue that glorified a 19th-century newspaper editor who disavowed, amongst other things, the women’s suffrage movement.
Now, I realize that the last sentence had enough information in it that even saying it could have alienated a lot of people that might otherwise be really interested in what I was saying earlier about being lost and sought after and ultimately found, and I hope you’ll stay with me a little longer.
York is a figure who has been largely lost to history. I can’t even find out if York is his first name or if he even had a last name because he was a slave and the childhood companion of William Clark. He’s not entirely lost to historians, and there are other statues to him in other places, but he is not part of the stories that most of my generation and older have heard and grown up with – because he was a slave. Not only was he a slave who went under compulsion, but he was the first African American to cross the continent as a member of the Corps of Discovery, and as a reward, he was specifically and intentionally denied his freedom.
I tell you this because part of being found is recognizing where we have been lost, and one of those places is in the way we tell the stories of our history and the voices that we liberate and silence along the way. Without going too much further down that road, I think it is important to say that we are about as divided as we have ever been over the simple issue of how to value one another’s stories.
Into that space of conflict and confusion over who is worthy of what, we receive these three stories about being lost and found and sought after. It’s important to note why Jesus tells these stories first. He’s been drawing quite a crowd as he makes his way to Jerusalem – stopping in towns along the way – and there seem to always be Pharisees and Scribes and Tax Collectors and Sinners.
Before going any further, let’s do a break check on those Pharisees and Scribes. They always get such a bad rap, you know. The thing is, as Rolf Jacobson of Luther Seminary says, “They are the most like Jesus.” These are the keepers of the law. Actually, think about it this way. Think of someone who taught you about the Bible, or taught Bible stories to your children. Think about someone you can turn to when you want to know the history of something in your church or your faith tradition. These are people who love God and love God’s church, and they did not want someone who was so obviously a man of God to be “brought down to the level” of “those people” – the ones who did not understand the power and providence of God; the people who were outside of the covenant of God’s love; the type of people who were the reason for the rules in the first place.
You know, it’s funny. A friend of mine who is a youth minister was recently talking about the fact that he was the reason that some of the rules were set in place in his church when he was younger. Anyway, it was people like my friend Rob and maybe you and definitely me that were worried about the amount of time and the level of intimacy that Jesus was sharing with “those people.”
Jesus, being a good Rabbi, saw this as a teachable moment and went into storyteller mode. We could talk all day about each of these, but I think it’s best to say, for now, that the first two were told to set up the third one because they are all about the idea that we don’t actually understand what repentance is all about.
In the first story, a sheep is lost. The shepherd leaves the other 99, finds it, and shares the good news with all his shepherdly friends, and Jesus said, “That’s what repentance looks like.” The sheep never said, “I’m sorry. That was ba-a-a-ad.” It was simply lost, and so the shepherd pursued it out of love. We repent – we reorient our lives around God’s love – because we are pursued by God’s love, period.
Next we a woman who has lost a coin. It’s worth about a day’s wage. At that time, women were dependant on men for income unless they were widowed or otherwise disenfranchised, and then they were really vulnerable. If a woman had 10 coins, it may have been all she had and may have needed to last her for a very long time. It has great value to her, and she will look in every darkened corner until she finds it. “So it is when someone repents,” says Jesus. We repent – we reorient our lives around God’s love – because we realize that we matter to God.
Now for the slam dunk. A son demands his inheritance and promptly wastes it. He does all the bad things – things that should not be redeemable; things that should make him unacceptable as a human by others. He has it in his mind to confess and be taken in as a slave because he knows his father’s character and thinks he could be accepted as a slave out of pity.
Then, before he can even say the words his father has embraced him as a son. He makes his great confession and his father dismisses it like he hasn’t heard a thing and his father starts up a party to rival a New Orleans Second line because he is celebrating the son’s return to a life lived in communion with his father’s love.
Now for the kicker. His big brother was in the field. He came home after a hard day and saw the party. He asked what all the fuss was about, and I can’t help but wonder if he was secretly hoping for dear old dad to jump out and say, “Surprise! What a great son you are! Let’s pass a good time.”
Nope. It was his derelict brother. He was so mad! Who can blame him? Then his father came out and he let him have it! Oh, it must have felt good to tell his dad how he felt. “I’ve served you as a slave and yet this son of yours…” You see what Jesus did there. The older son lost his sense of value. That’s why the Father said, “This brother of yours was dead and is now alive!”
That’s where the story ends, with the older brother feeling as lost as can be and trying to decide what to do next. I think it’s pretty clear that Jesus left it like that to help the Pharisees understand the choice before them – the party that they were being invited to join.
The same is true for you and me, whether you feel that you are lost and unable to find your way back or you feel that you’ve been doing all the right things and no one seems to care. We are all being invited to the table of grace and mercy. We all have a role in the work that God is doing to draw us all together in the Spirit’s tether.
I wish that “being found” were as simple as throwing open the church doors and just having a good old worship service that we all miss and long to enjoy, but unfortunately, it’s not. The good news is that it isn’t limited to that, either. Being found by God starts by recognizing where and how you are lost, but it also includes realizing that God has been pursuing you out of love all along!
God’s love is the original cause for all that moves us toward wholeness, and part of the journey is to realize that those whose voices have been silenced and those we see as the “other” are the very ones that God is calling us to embrace as siblings, partners, and collaborators if we are ever going to make it to the banquet that God has in mind for all of us.
Mitzi J. Smith, Professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary says it this way in her commentary: “The physical and spiritual are existentially connected. The personal is political; the domestic and public are interconnected… The lost ones in our homes and in our global neighborhoods impact all of us. If we cannot see our lostness as connected with the lostness of others (economically, spiritually, physically), we will likely work less diligently for a quality of life, justice, and love for others.
Friends, I believe that we are being pursued by the love of God and that when we see our value in the eyes of God we are restored again and again and again. Not only that, but I believe our restoration moves us to invite others into a life where we work diligently for the quality of life, justice, and love that we receive at Christ’s table. That’s what it means to be “Found,” and I pray that you, and I, and all of God’s children may not only see each other in our shared need but also in a shared experience of valuing one another. In that way, may we all be found, giving honor and glory to God. Amen!
The thing is, we live pretty public lives, so we don’t usually talk about being “pursued” unless it’s some kind of stalker situation, or a horror film, or maybe a traffic violation. However you frame it, we don’t often talk about being pursued in a good way.
Today we’re going to talk about being pursued in a good way. We’re also going to talk about the fact that the only thing worse than being lost is believing that you are not lost and yet feeling like you may as well be. Beyond all of that, we’re going to talk about what it means to be found.
First, I want to talk a little about Mr. York. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, I’ll give it some context – Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and York. A bust of his likeness was recently installed anonymously and without permission on a pedestal on public land that used the host a statue that glorified a 19th-century newspaper editor who disavowed, amongst other things, the women’s suffrage movement.
Now, I realize that the last sentence had enough information in it that even saying it could have alienated a lot of people that might otherwise be really interested in what I was saying earlier about being lost and sought after and ultimately found, and I hope you’ll stay with me a little longer.
York is a figure who has been largely lost to history. I can’t even find out if York is his first name or if he even had a last name because he was a slave and the childhood companion of William Clark. He’s not entirely lost to historians, and there are other statues to him in other places, but he is not part of the stories that most of my generation and older have heard and grown up with – because he was a slave. Not only was he a slave who went under compulsion, but he was the first African American to cross the continent as a member of the Corps of Discovery, and as a reward, he was specifically and intentionally denied his freedom.
I tell you this because part of being found is recognizing where we have been lost, and one of those places is in the way we tell the stories of our history and the voices that we liberate and silence along the way. Without going too much further down that road, I think it is important to say that we are about as divided as we have ever been over the simple issue of how to value one another’s stories.
Into that space of conflict and confusion over who is worthy of what, we receive these three stories about being lost and found and sought after. It’s important to note why Jesus tells these stories first. He’s been drawing quite a crowd as he makes his way to Jerusalem – stopping in towns along the way – and there seem to always be Pharisees and Scribes and Tax Collectors and Sinners.
Before going any further, let’s do a break check on those Pharisees and Scribes. They always get such a bad rap, you know. The thing is, as Rolf Jacobson of Luther Seminary says, “They are the most like Jesus.” These are the keepers of the law. Actually, think about it this way. Think of someone who taught you about the Bible, or taught Bible stories to your children. Think about someone you can turn to when you want to know the history of something in your church or your faith tradition. These are people who love God and love God’s church, and they did not want someone who was so obviously a man of God to be “brought down to the level” of “those people” – the ones who did not understand the power and providence of God; the people who were outside of the covenant of God’s love; the type of people who were the reason for the rules in the first place.
You know, it’s funny. A friend of mine who is a youth minister was recently talking about the fact that he was the reason that some of the rules were set in place in his church when he was younger. Anyway, it was people like my friend Rob and maybe you and definitely me that were worried about the amount of time and the level of intimacy that Jesus was sharing with “those people.”
Jesus, being a good Rabbi, saw this as a teachable moment and went into storyteller mode. We could talk all day about each of these, but I think it’s best to say, for now, that the first two were told to set up the third one because they are all about the idea that we don’t actually understand what repentance is all about.
In the first story, a sheep is lost. The shepherd leaves the other 99, finds it, and shares the good news with all his shepherdly friends, and Jesus said, “That’s what repentance looks like.” The sheep never said, “I’m sorry. That was ba-a-a-ad.” It was simply lost, and so the shepherd pursued it out of love. We repent – we reorient our lives around God’s love – because we are pursued by God’s love, period.
Next we a woman who has lost a coin. It’s worth about a day’s wage. At that time, women were dependant on men for income unless they were widowed or otherwise disenfranchised, and then they were really vulnerable. If a woman had 10 coins, it may have been all she had and may have needed to last her for a very long time. It has great value to her, and she will look in every darkened corner until she finds it. “So it is when someone repents,” says Jesus. We repent – we reorient our lives around God’s love – because we realize that we matter to God.
Now for the slam dunk. A son demands his inheritance and promptly wastes it. He does all the bad things – things that should not be redeemable; things that should make him unacceptable as a human by others. He has it in his mind to confess and be taken in as a slave because he knows his father’s character and thinks he could be accepted as a slave out of pity.
Then, before he can even say the words his father has embraced him as a son. He makes his great confession and his father dismisses it like he hasn’t heard a thing and his father starts up a party to rival a New Orleans Second line because he is celebrating the son’s return to a life lived in communion with his father’s love.
Now for the kicker. His big brother was in the field. He came home after a hard day and saw the party. He asked what all the fuss was about, and I can’t help but wonder if he was secretly hoping for dear old dad to jump out and say, “Surprise! What a great son you are! Let’s pass a good time.”
Nope. It was his derelict brother. He was so mad! Who can blame him? Then his father came out and he let him have it! Oh, it must have felt good to tell his dad how he felt. “I’ve served you as a slave and yet this son of yours…” You see what Jesus did there. The older son lost his sense of value. That’s why the Father said, “This brother of yours was dead and is now alive!”
That’s where the story ends, with the older brother feeling as lost as can be and trying to decide what to do next. I think it’s pretty clear that Jesus left it like that to help the Pharisees understand the choice before them – the party that they were being invited to join.
The same is true for you and me, whether you feel that you are lost and unable to find your way back or you feel that you’ve been doing all the right things and no one seems to care. We are all being invited to the table of grace and mercy. We all have a role in the work that God is doing to draw us all together in the Spirit’s tether.
I wish that “being found” were as simple as throwing open the church doors and just having a good old worship service that we all miss and long to enjoy, but unfortunately, it’s not. The good news is that it isn’t limited to that, either. Being found by God starts by recognizing where and how you are lost, but it also includes realizing that God has been pursuing you out of love all along!
God’s love is the original cause for all that moves us toward wholeness, and part of the journey is to realize that those whose voices have been silenced and those we see as the “other” are the very ones that God is calling us to embrace as siblings, partners, and collaborators if we are ever going to make it to the banquet that God has in mind for all of us.
Mitzi J. Smith, Professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary says it this way in her commentary: “The physical and spiritual are existentially connected. The personal is political; the domestic and public are interconnected… The lost ones in our homes and in our global neighborhoods impact all of us. If we cannot see our lostness as connected with the lostness of others (economically, spiritually, physically), we will likely work less diligently for a quality of life, justice, and love for others.
Friends, I believe that we are being pursued by the love of God and that when we see our value in the eyes of God we are restored again and again and again. Not only that, but I believe our restoration moves us to invite others into a life where we work diligently for the quality of life, justice, and love that we receive at Christ’s table. That’s what it means to be “Found,” and I pray that you, and I, and all of God’s children may not only see each other in our shared need but also in a shared experience of valuing one another. In that way, may we all be found, giving honor and glory to God. Amen!
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