LOST AND FOUND

Scriptures:     Psalm 51:1-10

                        Luke 15:1-10

            How many of us have had the experience of being lost as a little child?  And if we have had it, do we really want to remember it, as frightening as that is?  Or, if you are a parent, can you recall the absolute panic that you felt when you turned around and all-of-a-sudden your small child isn’t there?  I can remember that happening to us when our oldest son was – oh, I don’t’ know – four or five or so and we were at an amusement park.  There is nothing quite so frightening or panic-inducing as the feeling of being lost or of having lost someone.  And the sense of relief when you finally get them back or become re-united with a loved one – whew, what an indescribable feeling!

            Jesus is playing on these feelings a bit in the two quite familiar stories he tells here in Luke 15 about being lost and found.  Of course, he has a deeper purpose in mind than simply evoking those feelings of panic and relief – in fact, he really has a double purpose working here.  At one level he’s telling these stories because of his on-going confrontations with those groups the Bible likes to link together and call the “Pharisees and the scribes”.  The set-up for the telling of these stories is that these groups were “grumbling” because Jesus was eating with, talking to, and thus being friendly with tax collectors and sinners.

            Now, it’s important to understand, as a kind of side-bar here, that these groups, particularly the Pharisees, have gotten a bad rap as a result of passages like these.  And since our Jewish sisters and brothers are now in the middle of the High Holy Days – the holiest time of their year – it is important to note this.  By the time the gospel of Luke was written the Pharisees had become the dominant group in Judaism, and in fact after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD the Pharisaic sect was re-established as Rabbinic Judaism --

which ultimately produced normative, traditional Judaism, the basis for all contemporary forms of Judaism.  Some have even argued that Jesus was himself a Pharisee, and that his arguments with Pharisees were a sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict.  Jesus' emphasis on loving one's neighbor, for example, echoes the teaching of the school of Hillel, a famous Pharisee.  Pharisees were concerned with ritual purity and with upholding the law, and on the surface these emphases looked like they clashed with Jesus’ emphasis on love and forgiveness.  For example, when Jesus declares the sins of a paralytic man forgiven, the New Testament has the Pharisees criticizing Jesus' blasphemy.  But Jewish sources from the time commonly associate illness with sin and healing with forgiveness, and there is no actual Rabbinic source that questions or criticizes this practice.  Although the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with avoiding impurity, Rabbinic texts reveal that the Pharisees were concerned merely with offering means for removing impurities, so that a person could again participate in the community.  Many Rabbinic texts from the Pharisaic period emphasize the availability of forgiveness to all.  Indeed, much of Jesus' teaching, for example the Sermon on the Mount, is consistent with that of the Pharisees.

            Sorry for that long side-bar.  But it’s important to grasp that what is going on here is more in the mode of a lover’s quarrel, and that what is happening between Jesus and the Pharisees is more a matter of emphasis than outright confrontation.  Jesus wants to demonstrate for the Pharisees and the scribes that by his actions he is fulfilling the law of love and showing how God’s forgiveness is available to all, not subverting these key Pharisaic ideas.  Being lost and found is central to what faith is all about, and the Pharisees were well aware of this.  So, for example, in the image of the shepherd carrying a lost sheep over his shoulder the Pharisees would have remembered the Passover and their freedom from slavery in Egypt.

More importantly, they would have been reminded of the power of being found.  To be lost in the ancient world meant to be lost for good.  The Semitic words for “lost” and “destroyed” are the same.  A person without a home, a tribe, or a god could not survive.  A person simply didn’t make it on one’s own.  To be found meant literally to be saved.  When Jesus told them that the shepherd risked everything for the one little lost lamb, they understood the profound implications:  when we are lost, God seeks us, lifts us up, and carries us to safety – across the Red Sea, across the desert, across whatever wilderness we find we are in.

Being found, therefore, is a powerful, powerful psychological blessing.  It is central to our sense of well-being.  And it’s key to the stories we tell – think of “Hansel and Gretel”; think of “Robinson Caruso”.  Or, think of real-life stories that hold us enthralled – mountain climbers lost in a snow storm until they are finally rescued, explorers lost in a jungle until brought back to safety.  There’s a website called Craigslist where all manner of lost things are posted, and some of the stories on it are truly heart-warming when it turns out the lost is found; for example:  a 39-year-old woman in Frankfurt, Germany, looking for her birth mother; a Florida, mother searching for a lost dog named Sparky that detects her 17-year-old epileptic son's seizures and barks for help; the 1-carat diamond engagement ring that slipped off a woman's finger in the hills outside Berkeley, California.  Of course, these stories do not always have a happy ending, as with the Utah miners last month.  But when the lost are found there is a sense of exaltation in our spirits, even if we’re just reading about it in the newspaper or on a website. 

So, Jesus was using these stories about the importance of what it means to be found in contrast to what it was the Pharisees were criticizing him about:  that he would eat with and share fellowship with tax collectors and sinners.  Not only was Jesus saying, in effect, “No big deal”, but he was also demonstrating with these stories how significant it was for him to share his time with these people.  It was central to his ministry.  He came to be with those who either feel themselves to be lost or are put in that role by the dutiful supervisors of society.  And by implication, too, Jesus was saying to these Pharisees and scribes that we are all lost in one way or another and that strict adherence to the law or the rules of purity can’t keep you from being lost as well.

The parable of the lost sheep goes even further.  The shepherd, who, of course, is God in Jesus’ telling of it, leaves all of the others in the flock to go out and look for the one who is lost.  The implication of the parable is clear:  no matter how lost we may feel ourselves to be, God never gives up on us.

The second parable Jesus tells here is even shorter.  And it seems fairly simple and straightforward.  But in the context of Jesus’ time there’s more to it than first meets the eye.  A woman lost one coin of the ten she had. She swept the house looking for it.  She found it and invited all her friends and neighbors for a party.

            It sounds clear-cut, but this story, too, is filled with images that would have held special meaning for Jesus’ hearers.  First, lost and found property was a huge issue to the Hebrew people.  They had developed an intricate system of laws governing lost property.  In Jerusalem there was actually a centralized lost and found system.  In the countryside, people relied on the rumor mill of friends and neighbors which acted as a bulletin board of lost things.  It was a sort of an ancient form of property and casualty insurance for the protection of the entire tribe.

            In the matter of lost money, because there would have been no way to know to whom it belonged, if one saw a coin on the ground, one did not pick it up.  One left it where it was until the rightful owner found it.  It was helpful that coins were not perfectly round and they were concave, like little misshapen dishes, so they were not likely to roll far from where they were dropped.  So, in this parable that Jesus told, the lost coin in question absolutely had to be in the house – or almost absolutely.

            I say “almost absolutely” because there is a hidden drama in the story that everyone hearing it for the first time would have understood.  The women of the village would have been in and out of one another’s homes all day long, and because a coin was not likely to have rolled out the door, anyone who had been in the house was a suspect of thievery until the coin was found.  And such thievery would have been a violation of religious law and a crime against not one person, but against the entire tribe.

            So, those who heard his story would have understood right away that this little lost coin hit the rumor mill in a flash.  For two reasons every single woman would have been promptly informed that this coin was gone:  reason one was concern for the woman who lost it, but the other reason was self-preservation. You can imagine what might have happened to a thief in that tight community.

            Then as Jesus tells the story, “When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”  And the party began (just like I told the kids earlier)!  They were celebrating both for the joy of what had been found but also because they were off the hook.  As soon as she found that lost coin, the entire tribe was declared innocent, liberated, set free.

            Note, too, that these stories are not about economic salvation but about God’s extravagant welcome.  The shepherd probably slaughtered two or three lambs in order to have meat for the party for the one lost sheep.  The woman probably spent two or three of her other nine coins in order to celebrate finding the one.  A party in heaven is not about making things right economically but about the joy to be found in a found soul.

            To be found is to be saved.  To be found is to be set free.  Our salvation gives us our freedom.  We are no longer slaves to anyone, or, more importantly, to any thing.  The Hebrews who had been slaves throughout much of their history would surely have heard this message in these two parables.  They would have caught the connection between being found and freedom.  And there’s one more important nuance in this second story which is practically a pun (and you know how I love puns):  the word used in the text for coin, zuz, is the same as the word for a person who was cast aside.  Jesus is telling his pious critics – and each one of us -- that everyone needs to be found, and that all of us are held responsible until all are welcomed in.  No one can be truly free until every little last lost zuz has its rightful home in the welcoming arms of God.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,” says Psalm 51, as we heard Ray read it this morning.  The Psalmist knew that in response to our lostness God wants, even yearns, for our renewal, our acceptance that we have been found.  The Psalm begins with an earnest plea, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love (your chesed); according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.”  God’s love is steadfast; God’s mercy is abundant; God’s grace abounds.

It is no mystery why “Amazing Grace” is arguably the most beloved hymn of all time.  “I once was lost, but now am found…..”  “My God has promised good to me, whose word my hope secures…..”  To affirm that he had been found gave John Newton the greatest hope he could imagine.  As we sing this great and hope-filled hymn at the end of the service may we, each one of us, feel deep within our hearts that we have been truly found.

Amen

                                                Dave Pomeroy

                                                First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ

                                                Las Vegas, NV

                                                September 16, 2007