Searching For The Lost. With Love

LUKE 15:1-10 1 TIM 1:12-17

It was a black Ford Anglia, registration number XPO 84.

It was the first car my parents owned and every Sunday afternoon we would pile into it and go for a ride in the country.

I would sit haplessly in the back seat between my Grandma, all hats and handbags and my Grandad smelling faintly of tobacco with a copy of “The People” tucked under his arm.

It seemed that we pootled aimlessly around little country lanes, looking for somewhere to pull over in order to share out the contents of a flask of tea and a few rounds of strawberry jam sandwiches.

Inevitably we ended up getting lost most weeks and just as inevitably tensions would rise in that little car.

“Find a policeman son” Grandma would advise and Grandad would sigh as he flicked through the racing pages, marking off his winners with a blunt pencil.

I became terrified that we would get lost permanently.

That we would be forever rattling round little country lanes somewhere between Horsham and Reigate and would never, ever, be heard of again.

Lost and there’s nothing much you can do about it except hope for a signpost or a stretch of road that seems vaguely familiar.

There are times in our lives when we feel as if we’ve lost ourselves from God.

That there once was a close, holy relationship, where God seemed almost within touching distance, but now strangely elusive.

And we can feel as if the circumstances that have caused that are all our fault.

A result of our sinfulness. Our wrong choices. Our weaknesses.

We don’t know what to do to put matters right – we only know that we should do something.

If you ever feel like this – our Gospel reading brings salvation.

For at the beginning of this chapter Jesus is telling stories about lost things.

Namely sheep and coins – and there’s one thing sheep and coins have in common – they cannot really change their situation. If they’re lost, the chances are they will simply stay lost until someone else does the finding.

Sheep and coins do not have guilty consciences, do not know how to repent and say sorry. They are just plonked wherever they happen to be.

But in Jesus’ story there is a shepherd who cares for his sheep.

There is a woman who values her coin, and they point to the nature of God’s relationship with us.

They will search high and low until what has been lost is eventually found.

Similarly does Jesus search us out when we are hopelessly lost.

The onus is not on us being able to drag ourselves home by our own strength.

The onus is on the care God has for us and on the value he has placed upon us.

Because, however hopeless we feel ourselves to be sometimes – we have been made in the image of the Father, we are incorporated into the body of the Son and our hearts are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

We are His.

This is what Paul is trying to tell Timothy in our Epistle reading.

He was lost and far away from Christ. He was in fact, in actual opposition to his ways – and yet loving mercy was given in order to get him to the place where he needed to be.

We are not the same as sheep and coins.

We do have an inner resolve and a strength, a sense of right and wrong.

We can do something to get ourselves out of predicaments.

But sometimes that strength seems to fail us – and in those moments we need to have the faith to simply wait on his mercy – that it will seek us out.

Eventually we seemed to make it back on to the A24 somewhere.

The main road would suddenly appear at the end of the muddiest of lanes and we’d be back on track.

I was always so relieved because I did not trust that the adults really knew what they were doing.

It’s vitally important that we do not have the same attitude to God especially when His ways do not always appear to be our ways.

R  15.7.07