Lost (Luke 15)
Lost (Luke 15)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 4C (March 31, 2019)
Tom James
What is it like to be lost? Coins don’t have any feelings, and so they’re not bothered by it, but I’m guessing sheep are. Animals that are accustomed to being in flocks like to be in flocks. There’s security in being part of a flock—when wolves are around, there’s “safety in numbers” of a more than metaphorical kind. Jesus tells these three parables about lost coins, lost sheep, and a lost son from the perspective of the one who has lost them. But what is it like to be lost?
It’s hardly worth asking the question, in a way, because we all know very much what it feels like. We’ve been lost in stores as children, lost in unfamiliar cities. We’ve felt lost in the middle of the night sleeping in unfamiliar places. We’ve been lost in our thoughts. Lost in our anger. Lost in our grief. We have many experiences of lots of ways of being lost. You might say that it is the most familiar thing in the world, one of the commonest feelings that human beings have.
Sigmund Freud taught that our feelings of anxiety are rooted in earliest childhood memories. As infants and small children, we feared separation from our mothers because they provided for our comfort and our nourishment, and we felt utterly helpless without them. If Freud was right, feeling lost goes back to our earliest days, and is one of the deepest, most abiding sources of the anxiety we feel today.
So, at a very deep level, we know what it feels like to be lost. Does the shepherd know, then, what it is like for the lost sheep? Can the shepherd empathize? Part of what makes the shepherd want to go after the lost sheep, maybe most of it, is purely economic: a lot of time, energy, and money are invested in the sheep, and so the shepherd doesn’t want it to fall into danger because it would mean a loss of investment. But part of it, I’m sure, is that the shepherd knows that a sheep is anxious; the shepherd knows that it feels helpless when it is alone. We mammals are equipped with the ability to feel and experience another’s pain, or joy, or grief. Have you ever had a dog nestle up to you a little bit closer after a bad day? Every pet owner knows that compassion across the species barrier is real. And so perhaps the shepherd knows what it is like for the sheep to feel isolated and alone, and maybe that is at least of part of why they leave the ninety-nine and go and search for the lost one.
We don’t know whether Jesus told these parables together or not, or whether he told them in the setting described by Luke or in some other. Perhaps he told them many times. The gospels collect Jesus’ sayings from several sources, and we often don’t know where they originally come from. But Luke situates these parables of lost things, as he often does, in a conflict with Jesus’ critics. The critics are denouncing Jesus for hanging around bad types: “tax collectors and sinners.” Tax collectors were really collectors of tolls or tributes that didn’t go to provide services for the people but to pay for the military occupation of their country. And those who collected to the tolls were not government officials, but private contractors who made their living by skimming a little off the top of their collections. Most often, these toll collectors were fellow Jews who therefore profited from their country’s oppression so you might imagine that there we viewed very negatively. “Sinners” is a word that could have meant lots of things. For a lot of reasons having to do with our Western culture, we tend to think of sexual sin when we hear the word “sinners”—or at least some kind of moral offense. But the word “sinners” could have been meant simply to indicate people in a permanently unclean condition—perhaps because of what they did to earn a living, handling unclean animals or dealing with materials that caused ritual defilement—these were the kinds of jobs that nobody wanted, the kinds that today only immigrants with limited opportunities will take. Whatever these words, toll-collectors and sinners, referred to, it is obvious that they are the ones who bear shame. They are those who are outcast from polite company. They didn’t belong to their communities. They are the ones who are “lost.”
These parables teach us that God has compassion of just such people—that God empathizes with them, that God rejoices when they are gathered into the fold. A question for us might be, do we feel anything for those who are the outcast, the despised, today? Can we empathize with them; can we feel their pain? Or, are we so caught up in our anger at them or the in the offense that they cause us, are we so focused on the stigma that is attached to them, that they are no longer people we can feel any empathy for? Have they become something less than persons—objects to be scorned, rejected, mocked, but certainly not people with whom we might share things in common, like a meal, or a home, or a life.
The interesting thing about these “lost” stories in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke is that if we read them often enough, over time we begin to envy those who are lost. Why? Because so much attention is paid to them. Those who already found, we begin to suspect, are, like the older brother, those who set themselves against Jesus’ mission—indeed, they seem to set themselves against everything that Jesus stands for. They are the ones who are judgmental and overly confident in their own goodness. We may even begin to feel a little judged if we are among the found. We may get the idea that Jesus is searching us out in these stories, and finding that our foundness is actually a problem. We may not ever stop to ask, what is it like to be among these lost, but we perhaps we may wish a little that we were among them, because they are the ones that inspire so much effort, and, when they are finally found, so much rejoicing.
Michelle and I have become fascinated with British cop shows. I don’t know how this came to be exactly, but we are sure that the British are just better than us at that particular type of show. One of the ones we binge-watched a year or two ago is called “Happy Valley,” and it follows the late stages of a policewoman’s career while she battles her grief over the death of her daughter. The drama is that the person whom she believes murdered her daughter is just out of prison and is wreaking further havoc in her town. At any rate, we find that her life has really been torn apart by her grief. Her marriage fell apart, and she has been on barely speaking terms with her son. In a particularly emotional scene, her son confronts her with the way she has idealized her daughter’s memory, and it is only then that we find out that her daughter had been a troubled young woman with a long history of bad behavior, while her son had been a model citizen. Sound familiar? Somehow, in spite of this, perhaps because of this, this troubled young woman was her mother’s favorite, and we learn that the reason the policewoman fell out with her son after her daughter’s death is because she had said aloud to him that she wished he could have been the one to die instead of her.
It’s a dark twist of the same dramatic arc that we find in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Somehow the lost are favored, somehow they evoke empathy from us, or at least from some of us, like mothers, like Jesus, like the prodigal father, though in real life it seems that it does not always turn out that they are found in the end.
But I wonder if we have got this right, we who have divided up the world between the lost and the found. Are there really people who are found? Are there people who are secure and stable, self-sufficient and responsible, worthy of admiration and respect? By outward appearances, of course, there are. From what I can tell, most of us in this sanctuary fit that description. But are outward appearances all there are to the matter? Freud’s researches suggested that all of us are plagued from time to time with separation anxiety. We have deep fears of being isolated and alone because we know in the end that we are helpless creatures, all. No matter how self-sufficient we have become, no matter how successful; no matter what empires we have built, deep down we are vulnerable, and perhaps a little fearful. And you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see Freud’s point. All you have to do is be a reader of Scripture, and you will learn that all of us are fragile, weak, limited in our capacities to sustain ourselves. All of us are sinners, worthy of scorn to the scornful, worthy to be judged to the judgmental. But where are the judges, in the end?
In these stories, the kingdom of God seems to be made up of the lost, not of the found. But the good news is that none of us is really among the found. We pretend to be all the time, and sometimes in our pretending we separate ourselves from those who don’t make the grade, who are judged to be bad company, people we should shun, avoid, perhaps lock up, or somehow punish. And in our pretense we bring these stories from the Gospel down on ourselves; we invite judgment on our self-righteousness. But the good news is that the lost coin and the lost sheep are not representations of the bad behaving daughter who gets all the attention, but of all of us. The lost sheep, the lost coin, is humanity itself. God’s love is like the grieving cop, the mother whose heart went out to her wayward daughter, but the truth is that all of us are the wayward daughter. If you have ever been lost, you know that you don’t always know that you are lost. So, just because we sometimes forget our fragility, just because, like Jesus’ critics, we forget that we are judged with the same judgment that we sometimes put on others, doesn’t mean that God isn’t still seeking to gather us in, ending judgment once and for all.
The reign of God means the solidarity of all God’s creatures, all God’s children. Solidarity as beloved creatures of God, solidarity in vulnerability, solidarity in sin, and solidarity in grace. We all belong to a God of grace, and thus we share in the destiny of being found in the end. In the name of God, our creator, and our redeemer. Amen.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!