Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Lost & Found” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Exodus 32:7-14/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 15:1-10/NRSVUE)
It was a little after eleven on the Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend when my friend David and I rolled up to the intersection of Clark and Addison Streets on Chicago’s North Side which, if you don’t happen to know much about the Second City’s geography, is the southwest corner of Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs.
We were there to procure item number forty-one on our college’s annual scavenger hunt list, which was: “a waxed Cubs drink cup;” and it was worth a whopping five points. There were two hundred and eighty three items with varying point values to be found that year, and teams had from Thursday at seven pm until the judging on Monday at noon to locate as many of them as possible. To put things in some perspective, an uneaten airline meal was worth thirty-five points; Jim McMahon, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, was worth a hundred; and a complete set of fifty-six driver’s licenses from all U.S. states and territories was worth five hundred.
Our team of about thirty people formed smaller groups and divided the daunting list according to locations in which clusters of things were likely to be found with the hope of making the search process as efficient as possible. David and I were charged with finding the ten or so items likely to be residing in and around the Wrigleyville neighborhood (hey, at least we didn’t have to drive to Canada, which some of our teammates did), and the aforementioned waxed Cubs drink cup was the last item we needed. It wasn’t worth much in the grand scheme of things, but we were there so figured we’d try and score one — I mean, how hard could it be, right?
It had already been a really long night by the time we parked the car and started looking for the cup; we had been searching diligently for all sorts of weird stuff for about six hours by that point. Now, you wouldn’t think that it would be too difficult to find a drink cup with a Cubs logo on it directly outside of the stadium in which the Cubs play; I mean, they do sell an awful lot of beverages of various types at baseball games.
But the judges who came up with the list of items that year were a devious bunch. You see, the quest to locate what should have been a really easy thing to find was made markedly more complicated by the fact that the Cubs were in the middle of a lengthy road-trip; and they don’t actually sell many beverages at Wrigley Field when there are no baseball games being played. The judges, of course, knew this when they put that cup on the list.
So there David and I stood, trying to figure out what we were going to do next, when he came up with the brilliant idea of taking a lap around the perimeter of the stadium to see if we could find a stray cup lying around. A short while later, he came up with the even more brilliant idea of climbing around in dumpsters and trash barrels on our second lap when the first lap yielded us nothing. Unfortunately, though, the second lap also yielded us nothing — and now we smelled like rotten garbage.
We arrived back at the car exhausted and dejected (not to mention rather odiferous). As we sat down on the curb and debated whether to abandon our search, David’s eyes suddenly got as big as saucers and he couldn’t seem to get words to come out of his mouth; he just looked and pointed toward the concrete barrier at the front of our parking spot. And, I kid you not: Standing right there, on the ground underneath the bumper was a single, solitary waxed Cubs drink cup.
Up to that point all we could do was lament our misfortune; we were completely exhausted and reeked with the awful stench of whatever inhabits baseball stadium trash receptacles on non-game days. But now we had the cup and we were going to get the five points we needed; we’d completed our mission. So we celebrated instead.
But it was kind of a strange victory. I mean, we got what we hoped to find, but we ultimately did so through no effort of our own; we only found what we were looking for once we’d actually stopped looking for it. In fact, it felt like the cup had found us instead of us finding it. In fact, what we’d been searching for had been there all along. And as I was thinking about today’s gospel passage, my mind kept going back to that experience from my misspent youth.
At the beginning of the fifteenth chapter of Luke, from which today’s reading is drawn, Jesus shares with his listeners a pair of parables that are about things lost and found. He’s responding to some Pharisees and scribes, who have once again been complaining about the unsavory company that Jesus has been keeping; it seems that he’s continued to eat and drink with the dregs of society — “tax collectors and sinners,” to be more precise — and the powers that be are not very happy about this.
The two parables that Jesus presents here raise questions we’ve heard him address before: Who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy of being saved and who’s not, who’s welcome in the reign of God and who’s welcome in the kingdoms of this world, who’s lost and who’s found. But there’s a bit more to these stories than that.
In the first, a shepherd leaves behind ninety-nine of his sheep to go retrieve one that’s run off from the flock. When the shepherd returns with the lost sheep, he’s so happy that he invites all his friends and neighbors to celebrate with him. At the story’s conclusion Jesus explains that, “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”
In the second, which is very similar to the first, a woman with ten silver coins loses one of them and turns her entire house upside down in order to find it. After she locates the lost coin, she too invites her friends and neighbors over for a party so that they can all rejoice together. Once again, Jesus ties it all up for us with a neat little bow at the end: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Okay, this seems straightforward enough: God goes to great efforts extending grace to all who are lost, to all who currently exist beyond the fold — because, in God’s kingdom, all are welcome. The obvious implication is that we should seek out and welcome the lost and the marginalized in our world, because that’s what God does. This is all well and good, but Jesus’s stories are never quite as simple as that.
When reading Jesus’s parables, there is an almost irresistible temptation to try to figure out who’s who in the story — more specifically, to identify who we are in the story.
Just four chapters earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus — when speaking about the virtue of persistence in prayer — tells his eager listeners, “Search, and you will find.” So, it would be completely understandable if we were to view these two stories that follow soon after as making the same point, and to see ourselves as the shepherd who is seeking his lost sheep and/or the woman who is looking for her lost coin. It’s a set of circumstances that’s highly relatable — I mean, is there anyone here who hasn’t looked all over the place hoping to be reunited with their wallet or their car keys or their dog? And is there anyone who hasn’t searched far and wide hoping to find God?
But what if these parables are trying to tell us not only that, but also something more, something else? What if they are trying to tell us that we are not only searchers but also the lost who are on someone else’s radar screen? Because, you see, the God whom we seek (and will never find purely by our own seeking) has actually sought us out too. In fact, God has already found us — even if we don’t necessarily realize that or grasp what it means.
This sounds pretty appealing for a whole bunch of reasons, and one of those reasons is that it doesn’t seem, at first glance, to require any obvious work on our part. Like the lone sheep happily chewing on some grass all by itself out there in the pasture, or the quarter residing under the cushion on my couch at home, or the waxed Cubs drink cup sitting under David’s front bumper that didn’t actually need to do anything in order to be found, we are recipients of a gift of grace that has already been bestowed upon us by God without regard to either merit or effort on our part. But God rightfully expects more from us than anyone would from a sheep or a coin or a cup. And that’s the situation Jesus is addressing here.
The key to unlocking the meaning of this passage seems to lie in its very last word; as Jesus tells us, “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” It all hinges on repentance. And to “repent,” despite all of the fundamentalist baggage with which it’s weighed down in our place and time, simply means to see things differently, to change one’s orientation toward creation. And we bring joy to the heavens when we accept God’s invitation to do that, when we stop searching for God and allow God to find us. So, unlike the passive sheep or the quarter in the parables, who can’t repent, we’re called to do something to respond to God’s grace but what does that actually mean?
It means living our lives as if we’ve already been found by the God who loved us enough to seek us out in the first place.
It means not spending all of our time and effort seeking God’s favor but rather showing concern and love for all God’s people and for all God’s creation because we already have God’s favor.
It means that whenever we seek and welcome into our fold the least of these, the outcasts, the ones our world so easily dismisses as unlovable or unworthy, we meet the God we so desperately seek — the God who has already welcomed us home, the God who rejoices that we’re there, the God for whom absolutely no one is unlovable or unworthy.
It means that we don’t need to search high and low for an elusive God because God is, always has been and always will be, right here with us.
Sometimes the thing we’ve been searching for our entire life has been sitting there staring us right in the face the whole time. It’s kinda like the hymn “Amazing Grace” says: “We once were lost but now we’re found” — except, the truth is, we’ve always been found.
So what do say we go out there and act like it?