Finding our way home while being found
Luke 15:1-10
September 12, 2010
All of us can probably tell at least one story about being lost. Perhaps even more likely we all have story about having lost something. I remember one time when I lived in Puerto Rico and had lost my watch. I searched and searched but couldn’t find it anywhere. Just as I was giving up the search I had something else to worry about, a massive hurricane was headed right for us. It was our first hurricane on the island and so we did everything that you are told to do to get ready which actually probably does more damage to your stuff than a direct hit. However in the chaos and upheaval of getting the apartment ready for the storm other things were lost but I found my watch. Usually it is the other way around. You lose things in the chaos. In this case, I found something. In this case the chaos turned up my watch. This is one way to find something that is lost though I don’t necessarily recommend it. There is another way described in the classic little Nasrudin story from the Sufi tradition: (Sufi (ism) is the mystical tradition of Islam. There are many Nasrudin stories which are more like riddles meant to awaken and enlighten the mind and heart and soul of the hearer.)
One day Nasrudin was searching in his neighbors back garden for something.
“What have you lost, Mulla”? His neighbor asked.
“My key,” said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the neighbor said, “where did you drop it?”
“At home”, said Nasrudin.
After a brief pause the neighbor asked Nasrudin:“Then why for heavens sake are you looking here?”
And Nasrudin’s reply: “Because there is more light here.”
Of course.
And who could forget the beautiful moment when Rabbit, Pooh, and Piglet tried to lose Tigger in the forest because he needed to be unbounced and end up getting lost themselves instead. At the end of that story is another way of finding your way home when you are lost. Our heros, under the leadership of Rabbit, have been walking in circles and always ending up in the same place (a sand pit) and Rabbit can’t understand why no one is thanking him for the favor of leading them on such a splendid walk when Pooh has an idea.
How would it be, “ said Pooh slowly, “if, as soon as we’re out of sight of this pit, we try to find it again?”
“What’s the good of that?” said Rabbit.
“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.
“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit.
Of course.
And Pooh actually agreed because, after all Rabbit is smarter than anybody but then Rabbit insisted that if he walked away from the Pit of course he could walk right back to it and find it again so to prove his point he did walk away and Pooh and Piglet said they would wait there and they never saw Rabbit again that day which turned out to be Ok because without Rabbit’s noise Pooh was able to hear his honey calling to him and they, well, they just got up and went home.
For those who think these are just silly stories I need to tell you there is here a profound insight into the spiritual life. Seeking God can be like finding our way home again and sometimes we try so hard to find God and coming back to the same place because we are lost, really, and, in the wisdom of Pooh, what we really need is to find something we weren’t looking for which could very well be God looking for us. In other words we have to be open to what we had not expected or assumed about where we are going even while we are going there. This drives us crazy because we want to be in control of our own lives at least, and know what is coming next, and who God is, and where we might find God, the very things that we have the least control of.
This may be why faith is so important to us if we really want to find our way home. Pooh is one, by the way, who is a prime example of faith. A perfect example of faith is the time he and Piglet are walking on a windy day, a very windy day, and Piglet, being the anxious sort is wondering out loud “what if one of these trees falls on us? And Pooh speaks this great word of faith: “What if they don’t?”
Do you see how our state of mind can change everything? Who is the happier, Pooh, who assumes the trees will not fall on him, or Piglet, who assumes they will? I believe the purpose of the Gospel this morning is to teach us about such faith, the faith that will give us peace and make us happy. We may feel that being lost and finding things is all so random yet in this little story Jesus tells it is not accidental that the lost sheep is found or that the lost coin is found. This is the Gospel: the lost will be found because God is looking for what is lost, seeking the lost, gathering all the beautiful and broken creation for the purpose of reconciling and redeeming all that has been lost. Faith is the gift of knowing that God is with us even when we don’t know where we are.
And let’s not kid ourselves. Much has been lost. Our world is broken. There seems to be no end or limit to the stupidity and the hatred that the people on earth are capable of doing and to each other. (I am not even going to begin to try and list examples from just this week. You pick one.) Why is this? Why so much trouble? Why are we screaming at each other? Haven’t you ever wondered why we can’t just get along? Well here is one possibility: we humans have lost our way. We are all lost. The whole world is lost. This is the plot of the Biblical narrative. God created life and people and people went their own way and are lost and God is seeking all the lost children of earth even those who do not know they are lost for this is the worst kind of lost. To be like Rabbit and to be so sure about everything, so sure that he knew everything, that he knew what to do, that he knew nothing at all, not even that he needed to know something.
This is a danger that we ourselves face. We become complacent in our comfort zone but each of us may suspect that whatever peace we have created for ourselves is fragile at best though we don’t want to face it until we have to. People get sick and die. Catastrophes happen. Trees fall down. On the very day that Piglet was worrying, sure enough the tree they were in, Owl’s home as a matter of act, came crashing down with them inside. Does this mean that Pooh was wrong about faith? Not really because trees falling or not he carries on peacefully and happily doing what needs to be done. Faith does not mean the trees won’t fall down on us only that if they do we will carry on anyway with good will and courage and peace and love believing in the goodness of God and that even the trees falling cannot separate us from the love that endures all things.
Faith is seeking and finding God but it is more than that. It is also God seeking and finding us and God finds us when we are most open to being found, when we are humble, grateful, unafraid of not knowing, of not controlling outcomes, liberated from making sure we get our own way all the time, letting go, even if just a little, and letting God, even if just a little closer, into our busy anxious lives. Maybe Nasrudin wasn’t so crazy to be looking where the light was better even if he knew that what he had lost was not there because it is in the light where we can be found and even if what we are looking for is not there we can see better.
We gather this morning to be the church. Let us be the church of faith, the church that is open to the gifts of this day and grateful for everything that comes, the church that offers itself to a broken world with love even it takes us where we had not planned to go.
We are alive in the world today (don’t take this for granted) and we have been given each other to find and to be found. May the good God opens the eyes of our hearts to see what we weren’t even looking for and recognize that it is what we always wanted but didn’t even know. (Maybe there is more to this God thing that we have yet imagined.) Finding our way home while being found, we may even catch a glimpse of that joy in heaven that Jesus is talking about when he ate with sinners and told them the good news.
