1 Timothy 1.12-17, Luke 15.1-10
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 11 September 2016: Weston Bampfylde w Sparkford, Sutton Montis w Corton Denham
She had the whole restaurant on our knees, looking for it. The earring which had become dislodged somewhere between the entrance and her table, and had bounced away across the floor.
We had to find it, the other diners, because there were tears rolling down this young woman's face, there was great distress in her voice at the thought of losing this precious thing.
Now this didn't happen in an expensive eating place; we weren't the most sophisticated diners, and this was not a special occasion for anybody there. We were in a roadside service station, mostly eating processed food from cardboard containers in the middle of an ordinary day. I'd guess that most of us were just passing through, refuelling.
The earring was found by a plasterer in the corner seat by the TV screen, and those who gathered to watch him return it to the deeply grateful woman saw that this earring was very ordinary, nothing special at all.
The woman, wiping the tears from her cheeks, noticed our reactions and offered an explanation.
"I know it's only a cheap thing," she said unapologetically, "but it was my best friend's, you see. I was with her when she bought it, it cost her six pound fifty. But she loved it. It really matched the colour of her eyes. And she died last month. Cancer. But when she was ill she gave this to me. It means a lot to me.” [1]
This, for me, felt like what I’d call a ‘Kingdom of Heaven moment’. For it can feel like we’re never as close to glory as in those moments when we rediscover something precious we’ve lost, as when we share, with others, in the discovering of it.
If you know your gospels even just a little bit you’ll be aware that Jesus’ main message was about the Kingdom of God, this new way of seeing the world, this new way of being in the world, which he always taught through stories about little things, everyday things. He always saw - and encourages us to see - Heaven in the ordinary. He was interested in the precious interplay between lostness and foundness which is the human condition, about humankind’s eternal - and everyday - search for the elusive things in life which can complete us, heal us, help us on our way. About how we find heaven in those moments of illumination where lost and found collide.
Now what bothers most people most of the time are things like how to find the way back to the train station in a strange town, how to recoup the lost income from those weeks spent off work ill, how to lose - weight! and find - health and fitness! What most people are looking for daily are things like food and drink and shelter. More extreme, of course, if you are one of the world’s flood victims - after the catastrophic flooding in the U.S. state of Louisiana last month that submerged thousands of houses and businesses, many uninsured, the American pastor and hymnwriter Carolyn Gillette offered a hymn to support storm relief efforts which includes these lines:
When neighbourhoods we love are lost in just a day,
When homes and lives and livelihoods are swept away,
When all that we have left are precious memories,
O Christ, give healing, strength and hope in times like these. [2]
The characters in Jesus’ stories of lostness and foundness live in just the same sort of world as the homeless ones of Louisiana - and of course, those still recovering from the floods on the Somerset Levels of 2013. [3]
When I think of the widow on her hands and knees looking for that lost coin it reminds me of that other widow Jesus talks about in Luke - the poor widow who he saw put two small copper coins into the treasury, of whom he said, ‘out of her poverty she has put in all she had to live on.’ [4] Losing a coin - for a widow, that was a very big deal indeed.
And when I think of the shepherd searching for his one lost sheep I’m reminded of the modern-day Lake District shepherd James Rebanks who writes about taking his sheep down the lanes as being about ‘walking in the footsteps of my ancestors, and living a life they lived’. He talks about his three young children now sharing the work of the farm, each with their own sheep in the flock, ‘so that they can start to build up and learn about the highs and lows of farming.’ ‘The sheep are called Moss, Holly and Loopy Loo,’ he writes. ‘Who am I to argue? It was the same for me when I had two sheep called Betty and Lettuce. It goes on.’ [5] With so much at stake, losing a sheep is unimaginable.
“There is another world, but it’s in this world,” the poets and mystics of every age tell us. [6] Knowingly or unknowingly they’re following Jesus, whose descriptions of heaven are rooted in earth, whose take on salvation is about celebrating those moments where lostness gives way to foundness, moments we all know and feel from time to time. Jesus, who is always seeking redemption in the company of those who know they’re lost.
Now the religious people facing Jesus in their self-righteousness want to separate out the lost and the found; they drive a wedge between the spiritual and the physical, the holy and the profane. But Jesus is having none of it, for he never does. He knows - as we know from our own lives, and his self-righteous critics would know if they only allowed themselves to admit it - that every single person is sometimes lost and sometimes found, and sometimes in that holy moment where lost and found collide and a hint of heaven flashes forth.
Would it be true to say that the older you get the more able you can see this? For life brings us losses, and they build up over time. The loss of a job; the loss of a home; the loss of the use of a limb or an eye; the loss of a loved one. And with those losses come those searches for foundness, the challenge of having to start over, in a new working environment, in a new place, learning how to be, physically, after a stroke or with the onset of Parkinsons; and, perhaps most painful and challenging of all, facing life without the lifelong partner by your side.
Where is Jesus in all this? It’s the cry of many people’s hearts at times such as these. Well here he is, on his knees alongside the widow on her kitchen floor looking for that elusive coin; there he is, hacking through brambles on the hillside with that sweating shepherd searching for the one lost sheep; he is right here with you, the lost one, looking for a way out of your lostness, searching for that heavenly moment when you’ll be found again.
But ‘lostness’ affects us all, of any age. Listen to the young girls telling the Childrens Society they’re unhappy with their lives; in The Good Childhood Report, published last Wednesday, more than a third of the tens of thousands of young girls polled - 34 per cent - said they are unhappy with their appearance.
One girl told the Children’s Society: “We’re expected to be perfect, like Barbie dolls or something, and if we don’t then we get bullied.” The report suggests that emotional bullying, such as name-calling, is twice as commonplace as physical bullying, and much more likely to be experienced by girls than boys. [7]
Maybe part of these young girls’ sense of lostness is caused by our living in a society which has come to accept - even celebrate - that once precious things are easily disposable. ‘Loss’ loses its deeper meaning if you can immediately replace that old lost thing with a bright shining new one. Don’t we ‘lose’ something precious if rather than seeking after the thing that is ‘lost’ we merely, without a thought, replace it? Disposability is a curse of our overheated, over-consuming society.
The theologian Gil Bailie says,
When you find the lost sheep, you find more than what was lost. If someone comes up to this shepherd and gives him an extra sheep, is there rejoicing? No, there’s just one more sheep. It’s the lostness and the being found that is the source for joy. The process of conversion. Robert Frost says in his poem “Directive,” “Are lost enough to find yourself?” This is not finding yourself as much as being found. A life of righteousness - as some of us know who have occasionally given it a shot - is filled with sinfulness. All Jesus is saying is that ‘You can’t get there from here.’ You can’t get to righteousness by trying to be righteous. [8]
Or, in my words, you have to know you’re lost before you can be found. Loss and lostness may be painful, challenging, draining, but embracing our lostness is the first step towards our rediscovering ourselves, our, if you like, redemption.
God values the lost. And considers no loss insignificant. Even seemingly small losses, in the most ordinary places, God knows are important. If we look we’ll find Jesus, out here, on this lost earth where the lost things and lost people are, find him looking with us for those moments where lost and found collide and we get a glimpse of heaven.
Notes
[1] One of my contributions to the compilation Wise Traveller: ‘Loss', also included in my talk Heaven in Ordinary, Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham, 26/8/2007.
[2] Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, When Waters Roar and Foam: A hymn to support storm relief efforts. Copyright © 2012.
[3] Wikipedia: 2016 Louisiana floods; Winter flooding of 2013–14 on the Somerset Levels.
[4] Luke 21.3-4.
[5] James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District. p.37.
[6] Geoff Dyer, in his Foreword to Annie Dillard, The Abundance, p.xxi, attributes this quote to Éluard or Yeats.
[7] Tim Wyatt, Looks making a third of girls unhappy, Church Times, 2 Sep 2016.
[8] Gil Bailie, The Gospel of Luke audio series, tape 8 (side B), “The Poetry of Truth”. Notes taken by Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year C, Proper 19C.
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