Lost

Scripture: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We all know what it is to feel lost.

There are times in life when we really aren’t sure how we’ve gotten ourselves into this mess. We took a wrong turn somewhere, or got blindsided by something we absolutely did not see coming. Life, especially modern life, can be anxious, overwhelming, and frankly disappointing. We may realize one day that we aren’t who we thought we were, aren’t who we hoped we’d be. Perhaps we just thought that we’d handle it better.

We find ourselves missing family, missing old friends, missing that feeling we used to have of being in control of life or at least of our emotions. Maybe we get frustrated more easily and yell more often than we ever intended. Maybe we don’t share long talks with our loved ones the way that we used to. Or maybe we’ve just gotten sick, and find ourselves with an unjust and unexpectedly heavy burden to bear. This isn’t the way we planned for things to go.

To be lost is to feel alone and vulnerable and at least a little bit desperate. It feels like there’s no one there to help or to understand, no one to whom we can turn in our need. Perhaps that’s part of growing up. Perhaps that’s part of being human. It is, after all, a broken world, full of broken relationships and broken dreams. A fallen world. A lost world.

But you know, I think there’s something worse than being lost, and that’s losing someone you love. Every parent knows the piercing panic of realizing that you’re not sure where your children are. You can’t see them, can’t hear them, don’t know that they’re okay. Who hasn’t watched a son or a daughter struggle with a fever or a nasty cough and wished that it were ours, not theirs, so that we could struggle in their stead, we could suffer for them? Those are the times, I think, that we have some small glimpse of what it’s like to be God.

I told some folks recently that I have the other God complex, the one where your kids don’t listen to anything you say and wreck all your stuff. See, we might not think that God knows what it feels like to be lost or alone or in pain. He’s God, after all. He’s supposed to be transcendent, to be above all of that. But really it’s just the opposite. God has lost His children. God has lost the ones whom He loves more than anything else in this world. And I’m not just talking about the angels falling from grace, or even the Son upon the Cross, but about you—you and me and all of us down here in the mud and the blood.

God has lost us, He has lost His children, and it has made Him desperate, made Him go crazy. Have you ever seen what a parent will do, a mother or a father will do, to find the child they love? They will move Heaven and earth. They will plunge down to hell to dig up the dead. There is nothing more dangerous than a Father in love. And God help you if you get in His way.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus speaks to us of lost things: first a shepherd who has lost his sheep. Not all of them, mind you, but just one, and he is desperate to recover it. The shepherd does not rejoice that 99 of his hundred sheep are safe, a perfectly acceptable margin of error. No, he is desperate to find the one that he’s lost. And so the shepherd leaves the 99 in the wilderness and hunts for the one, doggedly scours the rocky Judean wastes, until he finds his lost sheep. And when he has found it, he lifts it from the ground, drapes the dirty thing around his shoulders, and rejoices, rejoices that he has recovered his one lost sheep! And when he brings them all home, he calls his neighbors together to celebrate, to share the joy overflowing from his heart, that this sheep was lost and now is found.

This is God, folks. Jesus is telling us what God is like, showing us who God truly is. He does not glorify the strong or the beautiful or the obedient. He does not call the lost from afar, warning them that if they do not return to the fold He will leave them to the wolves. Nor does He send someone to find the one lost sheep while He concerns Himself with the flock as a whole. No! God Himself scours the wilderness, scales the rocks, searches the crevices, braving thorns and beasts and elements, and when he finds the lost sheep He reaches out with His own two hands, raises it from the ground, embraces it in love, carries it home, and rejoices with all His beloved that the one who was lost is now found.

He doesn’t blame the sheep for going astray. He doesn’t require anything of it. He, God Himself, risks injury, life and limb, sweats and toils and labors to bring the lost one home. And He reacts to the entire affair not with dispassion or judgment or wrath but with joy, overflowing joy, poured out upon the world.

Likewise with the parable of the coin: a woman loses a drachma, a day’s wages, and lights the lamps, sweeping the house, scouring the floor, searching doggedly, determinedly, until she finds the one lost coin. And when she finds it, what does she do? Stash it away? Hide it someplace safe? Heavens, no. She uses her money for what it is for: to celebrate, to rejoice, to share with her neighbors and family and friends that what she had lost now has been found, and she intends to share it, to put it to good use, out of joy and thanksgiving and relief.

Perhaps this seems foolish. Perhaps the shepherd is reckless in leaving 99 in the wilderness to find a silly, disobedient, distracted little lamb that has wondered off. This should be an acceptable loss. But it’s not. Similarly the woman: who wastes all that time and effort and lamp oil to find a day’s wage, only then to blow it on a party to celebrate finding what she’d previously earned? But this isn’t about any ordinary woman. It’s about God, the Father and Mother of us all. It’s about what God is doing—searching, fretting, scouring, suffering—for us, for His children, for His beloved.

We are lost, we are broken, we are alone. And God will not stand for it. God cannot take it. God has all the frenzy of a Father searching for His daughter, a Mother desperate to save Her son, to rescue us from darkness and distraction and death and despair. What won’t God do to find us again? What won’t God give to bring us home? He will plunge down from Heaven. He will dig up the dead!

He will come down Himself, down into the wilderness to search for the lost sheep, down into the darkness to find the silver coin. The time for half-measures, for messengers and angels and prophets, has passed. Now He comes Himself, in the flesh, taking on our humanity, laying upon Himself our brokenness. And He cures and He forgives and He instructs and He obeys. And He shines upon us the light of truth, and shows us the way, and promises the life. And He liberates us from the yoke of petty toil, the grind of our sin, the slavery of death.

And He just keeps on coming, keeps on forgiving, keeps on revealing, keeps on healing, until we can’t take it anymore, we just can’t deal with this sort of love, it’s too much, it’s too strong, and so we lash out. We flay Him at the post. We crown Him with scornful thorns. We crush Him with the Cross and nail Him to the wood and split Him with the spear and lock Him in the tomb.

But it doesn’t stop Him. God, it barely slows Him down! He keeps Rising, He keeps coming, because He will not abandon us in our despair, will not leave us in our darkness. How can He? He is our Father, strong and dogged, our Mother, impossible to deny. He will not stop. He cannot stop. It is not in His nature, not how Love works. He will keep Rising, keep forgiving, keep finding, keep lifting us up, keep embracing us, keep rejoicing at every wavering step we take back home.

Because He will not go back without us. Do you see? He cannot truly go home, cannot leave this earth for His Heaven, until every lost and wayward soul is brought home in Him. Because it isn’t Heaven without us! It isn’t home without you. How could a parent ever be home without all of His children gathered around Him? And so He must bring Heaven to us. He must descend into this lost world, bringing manna in the wilderness, water from the rock. You matter infinitely more than you know, more than any sheep, more than any coin. God cannot rest without you. It cannot be Heaven for Him without you.

These are scandalous parables, scandalous stories, all the more because they are true. God loves you as a shepherd loves the sheep, as a householder her coin, as a Father His lost and wayward child. It simply isn’t the Church without you in it.

Remember that, when we feel lost and alone. Remember that the same love which forged the stars has loved you from Heaven to earth, all the way to hell and back. And that someday, by His Blood and His Cross and the mysterious workings of His awesome Providence, all that is lost will be found in the end.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.