Lost and Found
A Sermon of The Rev. Dr. David A. Killian, Rector
All Saints Parish
Brookline, Massachusetts
September 12, 2004
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Luke 15:1-10
I
Yesterday was the third anniversary of the tragedy of September 11. Each of us remembers where we were that morning as the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. This tragic event still shapes our thinking personally and as a nation. Over the last three years we have prayed, questioned, and tried to understand what happened. We have wrestled with the response that we wish our nation to make against terrorists. In two months, on election day, our nation will chose leaders who will guide our country’s response to the continuing challenge of terrorism. That is a serious choice -- which I know many of you feel very passionately about -- because you have told me! That choice is not the subject of my sermon today; I leave it to you to continue to weigh the issues, listen to the candidates, thoughtfully evaluate, pray for wisdom, and then vote your conscience.
Today is "Homecoming Sunday" as we welcome many of you back after your summer vacation and travels. It is good to see you - and I look forward to seeing more of you in the coming months. This summer was a time of transition for our family. Two weeks ago I accompanied my son Brendan to begin his first year of college. He is safely settled in at Goucher College outside of Baltimore and he enjoys his roommates, teachers, and classes.
Many memories flash through a parent's mind as he sees his child growing up and going off to college. I remember when I took Brendan when he was an energetic four-year old with me to a New England Church Conference at the Hynes Convention Center. While I was talking with someone at one of the display booths, he wandered off; it only took a couple of seconds. I couldn't see him. I looked down the aisle and then the next aisle. I couldn't find him. I was worried. The Hynes Convention Center is a big place. Where could he be? I went to the security desk to report a lost child. Horrible thoughts went through my mind. I wondered if he had been kidnapped or had wandered into some danger. How could I ever explain to my wife Barbara that I had lost our son? Finally, the man at the security desk got a call that my son had been found and I could pick him up at the other side of the convention center. I was ready to dance for joy -- I was so happy that my son was found and was all right.
My anxiety and worry nearly overpowered me when he was lost. Now when he was found, I was nearly overpowered with joy and relief. I didn't want to keep those feelings to myself. I shared my joy with Barbara and our friends.
II
Today's Gospel has two parables of "lost and found" -- the lost sheep and the lost coin. There is great distress when the sheep and coin are lost, but then great rejoicing when they are found. The shepherd and the woman call together their friends and neighbors to rejoice with them.
The parable goes on to tell us that this is the way God feels about us -- God is sad when we are lost, then rejoices when we are found. As a shepherd with his sheep and a woman with her coin, God and all heaven rejoice when a sinner repents.
In the course of history some pretty big sinners have felt nearly overpowered by their sins and felt very lost. One of them is Paul, who lays it out in today's second reading to Timothy. Paul says, "I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence," "the foremost" of sinners.
Another who felt deeply sorry for his sins was John Newton, who wrote the famous hymn, "Amazing Grace." There is a revealing line in the hymn, "I once was lost, but now am found." What is John Newton referring to? Well, at one time he was a captain of a slave-bearing cargo ship between Africa and the new world. When he came to see the evil of slavery, he felt dirty and corrupt for being a participant in the degradation of his fellow human beings. He looked upon this part of his life as being lost and he spent the rest of his life trying to eradicate slavery. John Newton felt that could not have been found, except for the amazing grace of God, as we prayed in today's Collect: "O God, because without you we are not able to please you."
Now you and I may not be in the same league of the great all-time sinners like Paul or John Newton, but that is not a requirement for membership at All Saints. All sinners are welcome here whether their sins are large or small. We may not feel as the psalmist, "I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother's womb," but we each have our own unworthiness and unresponsiveness to God's love. We can all pray, "Create a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."
Whatever our sin might be, so great is the mysterious love of God that we are never written off as lost or hopelessly irredeemable. God loves us with the perseverance of a loving parent, loving us completely and unquestionably, without limit or condition.
III
It's like the mother whose teenage daughter became increasingly rebellious after the mother's divorce. It culminated late one night when the police called to tell the mother that she had to come to police station to pick up her daughter who was arrested for driving while intoxicated.
Mother and daughter did not speak until the next afternoon. Mom broke the tension by giving her daughter a small gift-wrapped box. Her daughter nonchalantly opened it and found a small piece of rock. She rolled her eyes and said, "Cute, mom, what's this for?" "Read the card," Mom replied. Her daughter opened the envelope and read the card. Tears began to trickle down her cheeks. She got up and gave her mom a big hug as the card fell to the floor. On the card, her mother had written: "This rock is more than 200 million years old. That's how long it will take before I give up on you."
God never gives up on us. God's love is endless and God's forgiveness is eternal. God always seeks us out and offers new beginnings, second chances, and clean slates. As Moses and the Israelites discover in their Exodus experience, as the apostle Paul recounts to his brother Timothy, as the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin celebrate, the love of God is there for us even in our darkest days, when our despair and feeling of alienation from God and others is at its most acute, when we are angriest at God and the things of God. All God asks of us, in return, is to try and love and forgive one another as God loves and forgives us. Amen.