Luke 15: 3-10

Between being lost and being found

Things get lost in our lives and people get lost in our lives.  Some things we lose and do not even notice. Some people we lose track of and we wind up accepting their absence. Others we never stop grieving for in our own ways.  Things, people.   What they have in common is emotional attachment.  Without those things and people having no meaning in our lives, we cannot develop attachments to them.  There is a line in a (well-written but somewhat raunchy mystery) I have been reading by Sara Gran called Claire de Witt and he Bohemian Highway.  It goes as follows:” Constance helped Mick to see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don’t understand.  Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don’t recognize. “   We are not talking about taking sides, but there is some real meaning here.  Take the first part: there are “only things we understand and there are things we have chosen to pretend not to understand. “   Now this does not make complete sense, because there are certain things, like advanced calculus for instance, that some of us just will never understand.  But it is true that there are things I really value and I really want to know something about and there are things we don’t care enough about ever to understand.  In my case, there are certain languages I want to be able to speak better and others, or most, I have relinquished as a possibility. There are many mechanical things that are lost to me, like electrical matters and others like pool equipment and toilet levers and bathroom fans I have taken a keen interest in.  The same is true of our spiritual life:” all of you have certain things you wish to know about faith and the Bible and spiritual life like what Jesus means with the parable of the sower and other things you do not care that much like the names of all the kings mentioned in the books of Kings and Chronicles for instance.  That info is lost to you.

Friends, info, data, they are things we desperately want to hang on too, but we are worried we will lose our files in filing cabinet or on memory sticks or on hard drives.   So now we have the cloud.  You can save your data on the cloud or the internet.  That is what you are doing when you send an email to yourself.  But it’s much bigger than that. It means that you are letting someone else somewhere out there save your date on one of those big mainframes.  If we could only do that with our memories, that would be great, wouldn’t :  save them on the cloud so that they would be instantly accessible. We lose the data in our head that have to do with them and I hate to say it people lose data in their heads that have to do with us: what we’ve done, what we looked like before wrinkles, what good we have done, what accomplishments we’ve had and the details of our families.  This really concerns us.

Then there is the line in the book about people: “there are only the people we love the people we choose not to recognize.” Again this is a bit harsh.  The author must be young, because there are definitely people we don’t recognize, especially as we age and as the people. .  But also there is some truth here.   There are people we allow to fall by the wayside. This may not always be our fault only, but we do it.  God says to us: “I let no one fall by the wayside, I retain everything and if someone is lost I seek to find her or him.

Friends, we talked earlier about things and people that do fall by the wayside and we have talked about the texts.  The parable of the lost sheep tells us something about God: that every individual counts, especially the ones that need some extra help along the way.  We also learn that the act of finding, the act of recovering people is very dear to the heart of God.  The lost sheep, the lost coin.  So my question is: who among the people who have fallen by the wayside do you need to connect with?

Which one of the lost need to be found?  In addition, who do you need to be found by?  Heavy questions from what seems to be a rather easy passage, wouldn’t you say?

There are the people we no longer see but there is also the data about people we lose.   There the people who no longer see us and the data about us they are losing.  There isn’t all that much we can do about it other than writing things down and looking at old pictures.  But there is the good news that God’s heart has unlimited storage capacity.  If we have no faith, then all we can do is accept that things and people get lost, but with faith we forever stay part of God.  In a way God holds the cloud.  God holds us there indefinitely. God holds all our data there, God holds all the memories and the all the good acts.  More importantly all our data are connected to the data of other people whom God is also holding.  There are no lost data about God’s children.  Besides, all data is useful and all data is meaningful, forever, to be used for a greater purpose? That is good news. Thanks be to God. Amen.