Sermon - The Rev. Elise A. Feyerherm - September 11th, 2022
In April of 2013, the New York medical examiner’s office announced that it would resume sifting the wreckage of the World Trade Center for the remains of those who died in the bombing of September 11, 2001. The search for human remains had essentially been suspended since 2010. After years of relentless digging, sifting, and sorting, what was left to find? Of the more than twenty-seven hundred persons killed on that day, there are still more than 1,100 persons who have not been found. The families of more than a thousand of the dead are still, either literally or figuratively, searching for their loved ones.
But after they resumed the search in 2013, part of the landing gear of a Boeing jet was found, wedged in a narrow space between two buildings in lower Manhattan. And as recently as last year, of the remains that had been found new ones were still being identified. It seems, after all those years, that there is more to sift through, more searching, and more to find. This has always been true for those who lost someone on that day twenty-one years ago, but this new discovery reminds the rest of us that love can never stop searching until it finds what it is looking for.
My first year in divinity school, a third-year student named Sam Todd went missing in New York City during a party on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know Sam, but a number of my friends did. The whole scenario was perplexing, disorienting, even terrifying, to think that someone who was hoping to be an ordained Presbyterian minister, who cared deeply about social justice and who loved and was loved by his family and friends, could just disappear. His family organized a massive search; at some point about half the student body at the divinity school went down to New York to post flyers and hunt for Sam.
This was almost forty years ago. Sam has never been found. Some speculate that perhaps Sam did not want to be found, that he disappeared deliberately for any number of possible reasons. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause of his vanishing, whether he is alive or dead, I imagine his family is still searching for him. Even if the active physical search has come to an end, I imagine that their hearts still look for him wherever they go. They want Sam to be safe, to be happy, to know that they love him. Love can never stop searching until it finds what it is looking for.
Jesus told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”
Jesus is intensely concerned, throughout his earthly ministry, with those who are lost. It’s not just this parable that tells us this – over and over again, in all the gospels, Jesus seeks out those who have lost their way, or have been turned away, or locked out, or who have locked themselves out. He heals the sick and brings them back into community; he identifies with the powerless; he hangs out with sinners and tax collectors; he blesses the poor and the sorrowful and those who would make peace in the midst of war.
It’s clear from this catalog of searching that there’s not just one way of being lost, not just one kind of wandering sheep for which Jesus is concerned. But what they all have in common is the fact of being cut off somehow – cut off from others, cut off from oneself, cut off from truth, cut off from joy, cut off from God. And when you’re cut off, it’s very hard – impossible, really – to find your way back again by yourself. But luckily for the lost, love never stops searching until it finds what it is looking for.
Tax collectors and sinners – now, their way of being lost is more obvious, easier to spot. Tax collectors were known for cheating those from whom they collected money. They profited from aligning themselves with an oppressive regime; they inflated tax rates so they could skim their own share off the top. They lived off of the domination of their own people, and everybody knew it. They were lost the way payday lenders are lost today – pretending to offer help but essentially making it impossible to escape an oppressive system, and benefiting from this kind of cruelty.
Sinners, well, they’re the ones whose lostness is public, well known. In our own day, they’re the ones who have served time in prison, or have gone bankrupt or have been sued for negligence and everybody knows it. Jesus is not afraid to be seen publicly with them, to share a meal, to take them seriously, even though they are also the ones that no one else wants to be around. These sinners and tax collectors have been looking for Jesus as well, because they know on some level that they are lost. After all, love never stops searching until it finds what it is looking for.
The grumblers in this story, too, are lost, though they don’t seem to know it. They don’t know that there are many ways to be lost; they only see “others” as lost. Religiously and morally these folks are firmly on the path, with the flock, with the nine coins safely inside the woman’s purse. Religiously and morally they are not lost – they get the covenant, they get their own responsibility to keep their eye on God and love God. They care for their families and friends. They understand worship, and study. They get that God is in charge. They’re probably a lot like us, like most good and faithful people. So how can they be lost?
This particular group of grumbling characters in the gospel of Luke are lost also because they’ve forgotten the essence of the Jewish faith, which rejoices in love and the repentance of sinners: This particular group of folks don’t even represent the scribes and Pharisees very well, for it was the successors of the Pharisees, the rabbis, who wrote eloquently about God’s rejoicing over even a speck of repentance: "The Holy One, blessed be God, said to Israel: 'My children, present to me a single opening of repentance, small like the eye of a needle, and I will open for you entrances through which wagons and carriages can pass.'"
One way to be lost is to think that you’re not lost. At least when you know you’re lost, you can ask for help. But another way of being lost is to lack compassion for those who are wandering and who need to be found. If being lost is in part being cut off, then the good folk in this gospel reading are lost too. They believe they have no need of the coin lost in the dust, the one sheep stupidly wandering in the wilderness.
But love never stops searching until it finds what it is looking for. Jesus refuses to write off the good traditional folks at the same time as he goes in search of the fallen – that’s why he’s telling this parable! The parable is his way of saying, “You’re lost too, because you think you don’t need these lost folk. You’ve lost your way because you’ve lost compassion. But I’m here to bring you back, to lay you on my shoulders and carry you home.”
Love never stops searching until it finds what it is looking for. And when it finds what it is looking for, Love does not reprimand, or punish – it rejoices.
It’s hard to imagine why God would go to all this trouble. Imagine the rubble at Ground Zero twenty-one years ago, and imagine all the debris that is still wedged in unknown corners of lower Manhattan. Imagine the thousand families that still don’t have any kind of tangible remainder of those they love, and feel how easy it would be to despair, to give up. Imagine the bewildering maze of streets in New York City, or the overwhelming magnitude of the places a person could be in this country, and feel with the family and friends of Sam Todd how impossible it is to continue to search for him. And yet, Jesus says, love keeps searching, until it finds what it is looking for.
Why on earth would God do this, not only for those who are sinners but for us buffoons who would rather write off the lost? I think this is why:
Years ago I read an article written by a mother who trying to be intentional about saying to her children six simple words: “I love to watch you play.” When her daughters are in a swim meet, or playing the ukelele, or reading, or drawing, she finds herself moved to tears, simply because she loves to watch them. It is not about winning, or accomplishment. It is about gazing upon someone you love, and rejoicing.
This is why God goes in search of the lost – goes in search of all of us. She sweeps the whole house like the woman searching for her lost coin, and She will not stop until she finds us. At every moment of our lives, even if all we are lost in is the busyness and distraction of our crazy lives, or our own incapacity to care about those who are more lost than we are, Love is searching. Love is searching for every one of us, because, She says, “I love to watch you play.” Neither mountains of debris nor empty decades will thwart Love’s search. And for this we join in rejoicing.