What we've lost

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

text: Luke 15:1-10

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Do you remember last time you lost something? Something you really needed? It doesn’t have to be something of great financial value. Maybe your keys, just moments before you have to be out the door. Or maybe your phone – I know I feel sort of incomplete when I can't find my cell phone. Do you remember what you did, how you searched? Were you methodical and reasonable in your search, or was it a mad scramble through the house, with increasing frustration and despair?

Do you remember the last time you lost a person? Maybe it was a child, lost sight of for just one terrible moment. Perhaps you lost a person from a relationship, a partner who left or a friend who moved away. Maybe you lost someone to death, or had a loved one who disappeared inside an illness or addiction. And perhaps you don’t search frantically for them, whoever it is that you have loved and lost sight of. But even when we lose people in these ways, our hearts still search for them, right? We still half-expect a phone call, we long for past conversations, our eyes search the horizon for that familiar face. If you were to get that person back, really back, how would you feel? Would you rejoice? Throw a party, write a love song, call all your friends to laugh and cry with joy?

Our gospel lesson today is all about what we've lost, and God's deep desire to find it, bring it back, and make us whole again. We find Jesus here in Luke’s gospel still surrounded by people. Apparently all his talk in last week’s text about giving everything up and hating your family and self and sacrificing all your possessions in order to follow him hasn’t discouraged very many people. In fact, he is starting to attract some of the least desirable people that his society has to offer. And not just some of them. Chapter 15 starts out by telling us that “all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.” This produces some tension in the group of more respectable people who are also close enough to Jesus to listen and to speak to him. They grumble, and accuse Jesus of once again trespassing important norms by welcoming and eating with people who a respectable Messiah would not associate with. Jesus responds by telling three parables that are about the lengths to which God will go to find what is lost, the joy that God feels when we are found, and the invitation that is always present to us to be a part of God’s searching, to join in God's rejoicing, and to imagine a world where God's community of love is complete.

"Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" Jesus begins his trinity of parables with this question. And the answer is probably – no one. No sane person with one hundred sheep would leave 99 of them in peril in the wilderness to save one that has wandered off. It doesn't make sense. It is a scenario where we move from one lost sheep in the wilderness with no shepherd to one hundred sheep left in the wilderness with no shepherd. It is a foolish move, if the goal is saving the most sheep. It is the only move, if the goal is to save the whole flock.

In contrast, the woman with the coin who searches makes more sense. She has lost a coin and does a thorough and reasonable search, lighting lamps and looking under furniture. What is harder to understand in this parable is the woman's response when she finds her coin – we might be able to understand the joy and relief of the shepherd who has rescued his sheep from the wilderness, it is a little more difficult to get behind a party for a lost coin. If the first parable shows us something about the lengths to which God will go to search for the lost, perhaps this little story shows us the depth of God's joy when all of us are together, a complete community. God longs for all one hundred sheep, for the whole set of ten coins.

We don't hear the final parable in this set of three this week, our lectionary puts it on its own Sunday, separately. But I want you to to know that Jesus ends his lessons on losing and finding with the parable of the lost son, more commonly called the prodigal son. In this story it is harder to tell who is being foolish and who is being reasonable, but the bare bones are similar to the parable of the sheep, and of the coin. A son leaves his family for foreign lands and squanders his inheritance. He returns broken and hoping only for food, expecting to be treated like a hired servant. But his father sees him far away and runs to greet him, throws a party for him, and does not tolerate the protests of his other son, who never left. That son, the faithful one, feels sad and sour about all the rejoicing. "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." The father says. "But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found" The rejoicing is because the family is complete – a state that benefits everyone.

In the book of Leviticus, the law instructs the high priest to take one goat and lay upon the goat all the sins and iniquities of the people. The goat is then abandoned in the wilderness, symbolically taking all those sins with it, far away from the people who committed them. This is part of the preparation for the day of atonement – for a day when all things are set right between people and God. It's where we get the term scapegoat – a practice of blaming one person for things that in fact many people are responsible for. Better to sacrifice that one, than to face the things we have done, the ways in which we are not righteous, not faithful, not worthy of love, community, and wholeness.

What Jesus sees in the grumbling of the Pharisees, their discontent that he is welcoming tax collectors and sinners, what he sees is scapegoating. Tax collectors were hated because they colluded with the Empire, they betrayed the people who they collected money from. And the other sinners? Who knows what they did, but the Pharisees were pretty sure it was worse than anything they were up to. It's natural to ostracize people who make bad choices, who do things differently than we do. Shaming them makes it a lot easier to ignore our own stuff, to explain why we deserve to be welcomed and they don't. It feels risky to keep them close – to let them in to our hearts, homes, churches, and lives. We see this in a country that is afraid to welcome refugees, we see it in communities who divide along lines of race or poverty or homelessness. And we see it in families and friendships that get broken and never fixed because we are so certain the other person is to blame.

But our gospel this morning tells us that without these people, we are not complete. That without the tax collectors and sinner, the people who we shame and ostracize, the goats who we are happy to send out into the wilderness to preserve our righteousness, without them we are one sheep short of a hundred, we are a worthless collection of coins, without them we are a family bereaved of its beloved child. "I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents" Jesus says to the Pharisees and I have to wonder who this call for repentence(which literally means to turn around in a different direction) is really for. Is it for the "sinners" who have been regularly and routinely left out of the feasting? Or is Jesus calling to the righteous to turn around and see what and who their community is missing?

Here is the challenge and the good news for us this morning: we are all lost and we are all found. Every one of us wanders away from the flock, rolls under a chair sometimes, squanders our inheritance far away from home. Know that the community of God cannot be complete without you. Know that God searches for you even now, and that when you turn around toward God's love, there will be nothing but rejoicing greeting you. And – every one of us scapegoats parts of our society, parts of our world, and parts of our own selves, so that we can feel better, cleaner, and safer. This hurts us, it breaks us, and it makes us less whole. God's desire is that love would continue to bind us together, to bring us to wholeness, to release us from the need to blame vulnerable parts of ourselves or our world for things that frighten us.

So this morning open your hearts in welcome, and rejoice. Turn toward God's love, and rejoice. We feast at a table where God breaks into pieces and pours God's own self out, so that we can be complete, so that God's community of love can be made whole.