LOST AND FOUND

Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Exodus 32:7-154; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10]

Question: “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?”[1]  “Which one of you…?

The answer we have all learned, whether we have earned an MBA from the Wharton School or received our business experience from working the cash register at “Dairy Queen” – the answer we have all learned is if our losses can be reduced to 1% while we maintain 99% for the business at hand, our tendency is to write- off the lost one as a very manageable business expense.  As a rule, that’s what we do.  It’s practical, realistic, and (as I say) manageable.

But this is Jesus talking about sheep in a parable about a shepherd who leaves the whole flock of 99 – in the wilderness, no less – to go after the one missing lamb.  It’s a very sweet image, to be sure.  Yet, what’s the point of this parable?  What’s this have to do with us and the way we live and the way we think and how we order our lives?

“Which one of you…?”  Truthfully, not a single one of us or -- at best -- only the most-rare among us would do what the parable’s shepherd did.  But as with all of Jesus’ parables, this story is not about you or me.  This parable, as with all the others, is about God, what God is like, what life with God is like, and what God’s will is.

In terms of the parable’s shepherd representing the Holy One, our apparent choice is either to view God as foolishly impractical and, thereby, easily dismissed; or to see God as being onto something crucially important.  Folks like us want to believe that God is onto something crucially important, but – truth to tell – we’re not always so sure about this.

Have you ever been lost?

As I think about this question personally, what curiously comes to mind is the time in 1994, when I was concluding a three-month sabbatical in Britain.  In its last ten days, Bev had come to join me in Canterbury, from which we eventually made our way to the western isle of Iona.  After four or five days on that ancient and still fascinating island, we started our last leg of the sabbatical journey with a train ride to Glasgow and then to London and then a transoceanic flight home.

You may never need to know this, but because I care about you, I, nonetheless, want you to know that there are two train stations in Glasgow.

One station, the Queen Street station, ferries the trains for Scotland and the north.  The other, the Glasgow Central station, handles trains to England, London in particular.  This meant that Bev and I would leave Iona and head to Glasgow, arriving at the Queen Street station.  And as our well-planned itinerary noted, upon our arrival in Glasgow’s Queen Street station, we would need to make the walkable way to the Glasgow Central station to catch the London train.

Oh, did I fail to mention that we had about forty minutes between trains, and the way forward to the Glasgow Central station from Queen Street had yet to be discovered -- by us?  As Scotland’s’ own poet-son, Robert Burns, has famously penned: “The best laid plans of mice and men often times go awry.”  Indeed!

Getting off the train at the Queen Street station and pulling our wheeled suitcases behind us, we entered what I still recall as a stunningly beautiful, pedestrian mall in the center of the city.  Hundreds and hundreds of people were walking in the bright sunlight, moving along to conduct their business.  That our big cities don’t look like this caused me to stand still and gaze about, absorbing the scene.  But my main responsibility was to locate the street signs that would direct us to the Glasgow Central station.  With the clock running, I began to feel frantic about finding our way.  And then it happened.

Undoubtedly looking like a lost tourist, perhaps even like a lost American tourist, I suddenly felt a tapping on my shoulder.  Turning from my desperate search for signage, I saw a man, a bit older than I, who unobtrusively asked if I needed assistance.

Trying pridefully not to speak with the anxiety I was feeling, I simply asked the man how to get to the Glasgow Central station.  With helpful sincerity, the man simply pointed to our right, where, over the heads of the crowd, I saw the sign and its arrow pointing to the train station.  The relief that overcame me was instantaneous.  There was a part of me that could have cried for joy.  Being filled with an enormous sense of gratitude, I turned back to the man to thank him.  But he was gone!

To me, he was akin to the biblical angel of deliverance, but this unwinged man had immediately vanished into the pedestrian mass.  But the liberating truth of the matter was that I was – thank God -- lost and now was found.  Bev and I could go home!

When have you been lost?  What was it like?  How did you find your way back to where you needed to be, to where you belonged?

At this level, another question surfaces, and it is more difficult to face than the relatively simple question of not knowing how to find your version of the right train station.  The question is this: What deep within you is lost?  Moreover, after all these years, have we secretly forgotten about this one, personal sheep, and in paying more convenient attention to the “99”, ignored the need to find this lost part of who and what we are?

There is another application to these questions.  In light of the political assassination of Charlie Kirk and what it reveals about our country’s state of being, I think these questions also need to be addressed to all of us as a nation.  Something deep within the soul of our country is missing.  The frightening question is: Is that part of our corporate soul lost?  Moreover, which one of us will seek that lost “sheep” of our national life?

So, what I have to say about us as individuals I also want to apply to the common life our nation.

In some manner of speaking, many of us have a lost child deep within – a child who desires and needs reconnection with the “grown up” part of who we are.  This need to discover and reconnect that lost inner child not only involves the need to bring that kid home; but the grown up we have become also needs to rediscover and welcome the delightful, playful, unpretentiously curious young one we still need to know.

In terms of our national state, the “lost child” is the “other” in our midst, the one who is “not us”.  In terms both of our individual lives and our country, this movement is crucial if there is to be the healing that brings wholeness and new life.

Yet another question: Do we really want that part of us to be found?  In the reacquainting ourselves with the missing child in us and with the missing “other” among us nationally, will this returning action require more transformational change than we feel we can afford to make?  Is that the reason this part of us is lost in the first place?

One more story to close.

About 1980 or so, I read a chilling “Christmas” story.  It was “chilling” because it hit so close to home.  It was a story about a young student at Yale Divinity School and his family.  For a shared family Christmas, the various members planned to meet in New York City, in Manhattan to be precise, for a holiday reunion.  So it was on Christmas Eve that they all went to church together in what in my mind was a magical scene.  It was snowing.  The city was quiet and glowing softly in the winter night, almost with an anticipatory hush.  I forget the ensuing details, but the family members dispersed at some point that evening, hugging one another “goodbye” and looking forward to the next morning’s celebration.  Except that Christmas morning’s celebration never happened.  It never happened because the seminarian son disappeared.

The next day, discovering that something was terribly wrong, the family franticly made a search for the son.  The police were brought in.  Flyers with his picture were posted on light posts and handed out to passerbys.  Nothing.  Not a sign, not a hint of where that young man was or what had happened to cause his absence.

I remember reading about this tragedy in a magazine article.  The entire harrowing experience was laid out in print about how the family did everything imaginable to locate their loved one but to no avail.  I also remember how the magazine article concluded.  The article’s author told of one of the searchers, flyers in hand, coming upon a homeless man.  The searcher handed the ragged soul a flyer and asked him, if in his own wanderings in the city, those places where the “ragged people go”, if by chance he had seen this missing seminarian.  The homeless man shook his head, and with that the searcher moved on to ask others for help.

Yet, what struck me then and hits me now is that after this encounter, the writer of the article reported that the homeless man looked up forlornly and said: “I’ve been missing for twenty years, and no one’s come looking for me!”

“Which one of you…?”  Which one of us…?  Which part of us…is lost and needs to be found, so that in being found we may know that we are loved; we are needed; and we have been missed?

In this, the words of one petition in the “Prayers of the People” gains new life.  It says: “I ask your prayers for all who seek God, or a deeper knowledge of him.  Pray that they may find and be found by him – our nation, too.”[2]  Amen.

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[1] Luke 15:4

[2] Book of Common Prayer, Prayers of the People: Form II, p. 386.