Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

that can carry many shades of meaning.

Sometimes it’s just a simple statement of fact.

"My glasses are lost," means just that;

they aren’t where I thought they were,

and now I’m going to have to look for them.

We don’t intend any implication

that our glasses are undependable or immoral

because they’re lost.

They’re just … misplaced.

End of discussion.

But consider, in contrast,

the following scene:

Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Person have set out to drive somewhere,

but they aren’t getting there.

Mrs. Person says, "Dear, I think we’re lost;

why don’t we stop and ask directions?"

Now she may mean that as a statement of fact:

We’re lost … like a pair of glasses.

We’re not where we thought we were.

But as we all know,

Mr. Person isn’t going to hear it that way.

In those two words, "We’re lost,"

he’ll hear implied

doubt as to the trustworthiness of his memory,

or aspersions cast on his navigational ability,

or some such.

In this case, "lost," to him, is not a fact;

it’s a value judgment.

Which is kind of how the church

usually uses the word most of the time.

When we refer to the "lost," if we do,

we don’t mean those who turned too soon

and ended up at the Cliff Temple Baptist down the street a ways

instead of at Trinity!

We mean it as a kind of a value judgment.

The "lost" are people who

aren’t where they’re supposed to be.

They’re in a wrong place, or a bad place,

instead of a right place.

"Found" is good; "lost" is bad.

And sometimes, that may well be true.

But I’d like for us to think about it

a little differently today.

I’d like for us to try to suspend

the value judgments we usually assume.

Because what so often happens is that

when we define "lost" as somehow "bad,"

it practically guarantees that we will

do everything we can to define ourselves as among the "found."

We will presume that we are among the 99 in the fold,

and that it’s someone quite different from us –

the proverbial "black sheep," if you will –

who has gotten lost.

In fact, frequently it gets turned so far around

that we’ll come to believe

anyone different from us is therefore lost.

The church through history has done way too much of that,

and still does.

So to help us reframe our thinking,

I’d like for us to turn the whole thing on its head.

I’d like for us to think about,

what does it mean when God gets lost?

Now that question is experiential, not theological.

We know, theologically speaking,

that God doesn’t get lost;

God is always there.

But from the point of view of our own experience,

it does sometimes seem that God is lost.

A feeling of "God, I know I’m here,

but where are you?"

Sometimes it might happen in times of prayer

when we wonder if anyone is listening.

Sometimes a whole string of things goes wrong in our life,

and we fear that God has abandoned us.

But whatever causes it,

almost any of us,

if we’re on a serious faith journey,

is going to experience those times

when God seems lost.

Or at least, lost to us.

And what do we do then?

Traditionally, the church’s answer has been:

if God seems lost, it’s really you that’s lost,

and you’d better get back on the right path pretty quick,

or you won’t like the consequences!

Now that answer has a lot of truth to it,

and it’s where we do need to begin looking,

if God seems lost.

Have we strayed from the flock,

even if only accidentally?

If so, then getting found ourselves

will lead us back to God.

But it doesn’t always work out like that.

Sometimes God seems lost

even when we’re safely within the fold.

Sometimes we are at our best

and we do live the way God has called us to live,

and even then, God seems remote.

How are we to understand that?

It doesn’t seem quite right, or quite fair.

Yet I think these two stories Jesus tells us,

these two analogies,

of a lost sheep and a lost coin,

may give us a clue to understanding.

Suppose that, at least for the present moment,

we are among the 99 who didn’t stray,

or among the nine coins that didn’t get lost.

If God seems lost even then,

I think the stories suggest

we should quit worrying about it.

In a way,

that’s actually how it should be.

Because in the fold, with one another,

is where we belong.

And outside the fold, on the path,

looking for the lost ones,

is where God belongs.

I don’t mean that God is always going to

ignore those of us in the fold;

nor do I mean that we should never leave

to help God look for the lost ones.

But our text for today

doesn’t deal with those aspects.

Today’s lesson seems, in a way, to reassure us.

If God seems lost,

perhaps it’s because God has decided

to trust us on our own for a little while

and to go off in search of those who are truly lost.

Now I realize that,

unlike a human shepherd,

God can be in more than one place at a time.

So if you stretch the analogy too far, it breaks.

But up until that point, it’s helpful, I think.

Some of those times in our lives when God seems lost,

it’s not because we’re the ones who are really lost.

It may be that we’re in exactly the right place,

and God has, for a time,

turned God’s attention in another direction.

And if we accept this understanding,

it’s may be hard not to be a bit resentful.

Why would God waste time on those losers

when God could spend time with us faithful?

Don’t we deserve more of God’s attention?

Isn’t there some kind of reward for being faithful?

And of course there is,

but it’s not always what we would expect.

And it seems that God is always more likely

to give attention to those who need it

than to those who are on the right track already.

God wants everyone to be in the fold.

And if that means those on the outside

get more time and attention

than those already inside the fence …

well, that’s just how it has to be.

The acid test for us is,

whether we can make the shift

to seeing the world in God’s way.

Whether we can learn to feel okay about

God being "lost" to us at times

so that others may be found.

Whether we can learn to rejoice along with the angels in heaven

when one of our "lost" brothers or sisters

makes it back to the fold,

instead of resenting the time God spent with them instead of us.

Whether we can summon up the courage

to leave the safety of the fold ourselves every now and then,

and go seeking along with God.

Does God seem lost?

That’s all right.

It won’t be for long,

but it will be for the good.

Amen.

©2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org