Luke 15:1-10 "Lost Together"

Let’s play with the numbers in this parable.  What if not just one sad little lamb is lost and restored to the 99, but rather half the sheep are lost?  What does the shepherd do if only 20 sheep are in view, or 10?  How can you get the flock together again?  Now that would be a parable for 2016.  How will the flock hold together among the wolves, feeding on brown pastures, and worried about the Zika virus?  And what about the bees? How do we stop all the Zika carrying mosquitoes without killing all the bees?  No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, whether you are gay or straight, black, white or brown, male or female, you are probably worried about the loss of community, and wonder where you are going to feel welcome in the future. 

Is there a center to hold together?  It is scary even to go to the bookstore.  Here are the popular titles on social issues. 

• “The End of White Christian America” where Robert Jones looks at the first generation of American Protestants who are not a majority in power any more.
• “Hillbilly Eulogy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”
• “Between the World and Me” by Ta Nahisi Coates, who writes to his son and all of us, about being black in a country where it is considered controversial and inflammatory to say “Black Lives Matter.”
• This week Thomas Friedman wrote an article titled, “We Are All Noah Now” about living in a world of rising tides.

Feeling like a lost sheep is may be the paradigm for a cultural, communal and even planetary crisis.  Almost any institution you can name-corporations, political parties, churches, ethnic groups, governments- experiences a sense of displacement, loss and potential threat to its existence.  Here is one little detail in our parable that grabs my attention.  The whole flock is in the wilderness.  It does not say that the 99 sheep were safely in a barn, or grazing in a green field beside the still waters, while shepherd Jesus went to find the lost little sheep.  The 99 are in the wilderness too, and the only real safety you have in the wilderness is sticking together.  No one makes it alone. 

I made connections to this story of the lost sheep while on a boating trip in August.  This is the water version of being a lost sheep.  Every summer we visit Jeanne’s parents on the Delmarva Peninsula, where they live on a marshy salt water creek.  Life on Folly Creek revolves around the tides.  Before you make any plans for the day you have to look at the tidal chart on the refrigerator because you can only kayak or take the motor boat out to the barrier island beaches near high tide.  Since the timing high tide changes about an hour every day, you have to pay attention, or you can end up in trouble (more about that soon!)  The change is quite dramatic.  At high tide the view off the deck is of a beautiful river, 300 to 400 feet wide. But it is really a shallow creek and at low tide, it is about 40 feet wide, and the banks turn into a mudflat.  If you journey out to the beach, you have to get back before low tide, or you will be stranded in the mud flats or hit a sand bar on the way.  Been there, done that!  Every day on a salt water creek is like the second day of creation, where the waters are separated from the dry land, but they don’t stay put.  Life is always changing with the tides, and you literally have to go with the flow.

Global warming and rising sea levels makes this all the more complicated, altering the topography on an annual basis.  Last Sunday the front page of the NY Times said Norfolk, VA is one of the most threatened coastal cities in America, which is just one hour south of Folly Creek.  The rising tide is rising right into neighborhoods, flooding streets and threatening the docks of the largest naval base in the world.  The tides are a national security issue, and it makes our trips to the beach more perilous. 

We go anyway, because Jeanne’s mom is 86, and her great joy is being captain of the boat.  She can’t go alone anymore.  Its too risky with her unsteady balance and all the things that can go wrong, so we enjoy taking her out and being present so she can walk in the sand and go a little way out into the waves, and we help with the anchor, docking and so on.  But Anne is the one with 25 years of knowledge of boating on these waterways, the expert at steering and avoiding unseen sand bars.  We may be her hands and feet, but we depend on her skill and knowledge. 

The toughest trick at the beach is getting anchored properly so you can leave the boat and walk the beautiful and empty mile long beach, where you can see Pelicans and collect sea shells.  Remember you go out at high tide, so if you leave the boat for an hour or two, you can end up stranded if you miscalculate.  Which is what we did.

We stayed too long because it was a lovely day and the water was just right.  When we returned the boat had washed ashore, and was sitting on the beach with just the back end close to the water.  Jeanne and I pushed at the bow, but there was no give.  The next high tide was 9 hours away, at 2 AM, and thunderstorms were in the forecast for the evening.  We looked at our cell phone reception wondering if we could reach the Coast Guard.  Then we started to contemplate the physics of the situation (because we still believe in science.)  What if we could nudge the front of the boat sideways, because there is less resistance from the sand?  Maybe we could then get the front end into the water.  Jeanne and I pushed and shoved and moved the bow about three inches.  It was a start.  We dug in our feet to the sand and gave it our best push and this time we went six inches.  Only five or six more feet to go, but at that rate the tide would go out faster than we were pushing.  Then I thought, what if I lift the front end of the boat, just a fraction off the sand and Jeanne pushed?  Now we had a winning formula.  I lifted and Jeanne pushed and in a few minutes we had floated our boat, and ready to motor off the island.  All it took was a little physics and cooperation.  But we could have easily been lost.  If Jeanne was not strong, we wouldn’t have made it.  If I had attended a school that had cut the sciences, we would have been on Gilligan’s Island for the night.  If we had been out there alone we would have been lost at sea, just like that poor little sheep separated from the flock.

Here is my takeaway from nearly being stranded on the sand bar.  The church is the boat in our story.  The church is our vehicle that will carry to where we need to go in the future.  If we could get to where we wanted to be alone, we wouldn’t need this boat.  But to face the rising waters and changing tides we need this boat, and it needs a crew, an inter-generational, multi-cultural, diverse gender affirming, welcoming, spirit-filled, justice-seeking, praying congregation to keep it moving.

The tides are shifting dramatically around us, and sometimes we don’t even recognize where we are. We will need to stay awake, flexible, adapting the all the changing tides.  Sometimes we will miscalculate, and find ourselves stuck on the beach.  These are the times that it is all hands on deck, and we dig in together and push until we are floating again.  We may get fearful, but doesn’t mean we are going to drop anchor.  We may not know exactly where we are, but we aren’t lost, we are exploring.  This is not a church content to sit in the safe harbor, and there are no safe harbors in today’s world of climate change. 

This has been an adventurous church for 350 years.  In the 18^th century, we were part of the Great spiritual awakening in the days of Jonathan Edwards, in the 19^th Century we were early abolitionists, in the 20^th century forerunners in inclusion and GLBTQ welcome and affirmation.  What will be in the 21^st century?  That’s our journey this Fall, to explore the future together and set a new course.  And it will not merely be a journey to institutional survival, but to being the people God calls us to be.  We will be the church, we will be bold, we will keep this boat off the sand and moving.  All aboard!

Luke 15:1-10 "Becoming a Good Loser"

You can lose a lot of things.

You can lose your mind, your memory or your marbles.

Your confidence, self-esteem or your mojo.

You may lose your way, your place or you can even lose face;

Your reputation, self-respect, manhood or virginity.

You can lose sleep, time or your prime.

You may also fail, suffer defeat or take and licking and keep on ticking.

You can lose an argument, a game or a war.

And if you lose your wealth or your health, you then lose hope.

You can be lost in space, lost without your love,

Jesus said, You can lose your life to save it, or save your life only to lose it.

You might even lose your faith…

We seem to be real losers.

Poor little sheep who have lost their way.

No wonder there is so much joy in heaven when we are found.

Apparently the one thing we can’t lose is God.

Losing is an important part of life.  Our culture is too obsessed with winning, and the attitude of football legend Vince Lombardi who said, “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.”  We are a winner take all society, some social scientists have said.  What is winning really?  Its just a game, its fun, we get a charge out of it.  But in the end, so what if you are the best at throwing a football, shooting baskets or sprinting to the finish line.  Most of life doesn’t have clear wins and losses.  The important things-teaching or raising a child, friendship, building a house, growing food, feeding the hungry or making peace-don’t have clear winners or losers.  You share and support, care and give, nurture, plan and create.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but in most of life you are not either winning or losing, just living. 

The excessive emphasis on winning creates a lot of problems, like income inequality in our economy, or an inability to seek common ground or compromise for the social good.  If you want a good marriage, you have to decide if you want to be right or you want to be loved. Sometimes in life we have to let go of something in order to have something else, because we can hold it all.  Learning to lose and let go is an important skill, more important perhaps than winning, because most of us will do more losing. 

Losing is a big part of self-development.  Our first lost occurs when we leave the womb.  You never have it so good again, warm and safe and protected, no major worries or stresses, and never alone.  It’s a loss and we cry.  And if we don’t the doctor gives us a whack to make sure we are alive.  But without that loss we never will take our first steps, draw a picture or maybe even cure cancer someday.  Later we may lose our innocence and we find out how hard life can be, how ruthless and hard-hearted people can be.  It’s a painful loss, but then who wants to be naïve, living with an unrealistic view of the world and missing what is really happening.  When we lose our innocence it is a chance to become wise and resilient.

I remember a book title by Judith Viorst called “Necessary Losses.”  Its fallen out of my library and apparently much of memory too, but the title really says it all.  The subtitle of the book is “The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow.”  Necessary losses indeed!  How many people do you know who go through life thinking that life owes them something.  Some look for love in all the wrong places.  Then they find they were really looking for love at all, but for someone to take care of them, when they really needed to learn more about taking care of themselves. 

Losses and how we respond to them shape us, but it do not make us losers, it makes us searchers.  We become searchers because we want to feel whole again.  There are all kinds of searches, Ahab had his whale, Percival was on a quest for the Holy Grail.  There was an entire time of history we called “The Age of Explorers” as Columbus, Hudson and de Gamma searched to find out what was out there in the world.  They weren’t lost, they were just exploring. 

One of my all time favorite songs is by U2 “I Still Haven’t Found what I’m Looking For.”

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you

I have run 
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

The last verses say:

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it

The song ends with four last, forlorn calls “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  That song has such appeal because much of life feels like that.  Searching and feeling like what we want or need is just beyond our grasp.  We keep thinking that the right job, relationship, experience or accomplishment, self-help book will finally be the thing.  Augustine understood this, the theologian who wrote the first real self-help book in his “Confessions.”  He came to the conclusion that most of our fruitless searching was really because we do not realize we are ultimately searching for God.  Until we know that we are dissatisfied with even the good we find.   Augustine believed we have a God shaped void inside, that nothing else can fill and said, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” 

It is not easy to be restless.  Jesus said, “Seek and you will find.”  But he did not say when or how long. But it is in the seeking that we find the growing. 

Here is what is most profound and surprising in our Gospel lesson this week.  God is also a seeker.  God is restless too, eager to find us and welcome us home.  What is God like?  Like a woman who has lost her coin-not just any coin-but one of the ten that completes her headdress that shows she is a married woman.  She will not rest till she find it because it is like going out without a wedding ring.  So too God does not rest in a search for us.  God is not content just being satisfied with the righteous who are in the fold.  A good shepherd knows that you don’t leave even one lamb out away from the flock, thinking you have 99 others.  For if you leave one lamb every day you will soon have no flock.  So the good shepherd searches out every single one when they are lost.  I like this image of the restless God that searches for us. 

In a way it turns upside down the way I think about my faith journey and my searching.  The great joy of faith is not so much when I finally catch my great white whale or find my Holy Grail, the right whatever I thought I wanted.  The great joy is that when I felt lost, I was found.