Norwegian scientist and adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl, wanted to test the theory that people from South America could have settled the Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific long before Columbus sailed to the New World. So, Heyerdahl took a small team of men to Peru, where they constructed a raft out of balsa logs. These logs were tied together with rope much as a group of native sailors might have done centuries before. Heyerdahl named the raft the Kon-Tiki. He and his crew of five set out on the Pacific from the coast of Peru on April 28, 1947. They sailed the raft over 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef in Polynesia 101 days later. They had accomplished their goal. Heyerdahl wrote a best-selling book about their adventure titled, Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft.
While the venture was successful, it was not without difficulties. During the three-month journey, the crew of the Kon-Tiki had little control over the direction of their small raft and had no way to stop its forward progress. They learned early on in the voyage that anything dropped overboard was almost impossible to recover once the raft had left it behind.
Two months into the voyage and thousands of miles from land, one of the crew, a man named Herman, lost his footing and fell overboard. The raft, driven by strong winds in heavy seas, moved ahead faster than Herman could swim. The five remaining men were naturally horrified. They tried to throw Herman a life belt on a rope, but the wind blew it back at them. In seconds, Herman was all but lost, out of sight in the massive of waves.
Suddenly one of the five, a man named Knute, grabbed the life belt and dove into the water. He swam back to Herman and wrapped his arms around him, holding his exhausted friend while the other men on the boat pulled them both back to the safety of the raft. All six of the men subsequently finished the journey unharmed.
As I remembered this story and thought of Heyerdahl’s friend floating helplessly in the angry waves, I contemplated these two parables in our gospel lesson for today, the lost sheep and the lost coin. When I feel lost or confused or alone, it feels as if I’m totally helpless and unable to make things better, falling further behind in the rough seas of life. And we see exactly that in these two parables. The lost sheep couldn’t have found its way back into the shelter of the sheepfold. It was distracted by the green grass and the open skies. It might not have known it needed any help until in a perilous situation, like maybe its leg got stuck in an outcrop of rocks, or it had fallen off a cliff, or found itself in the path of a predator. We often don’t know we need community until we need it. We often don’t know we need church until we need it.
And then there’s the lost coin. In the ancient Near East, when women were brides, the dowry usually included a necklace made of ten silver coins to commemorate the wedding day. The coin necklace was basically like a wedding ring. Can you imagine losing your wedding ring, or class ring, or your most sentimental piece of jewelry? Whether this coin was a special piece from the woman’s wedding necklace or if it was all the money she had to put food on her table, it doesn’t matter. Either way, this coin was valuable. Obviously, the coin, on its own, could not find its way back onto the woman’s necklace or into her purse. And don’t we feel like that sometimes, utterly misplaced and abandoned? We feel like both the coin and sheep. We feel as helpless as Herman floundering in the waves of the Pacific, totally dependent on his friends aboard the distant raft.
But we also need to remember that we are never truly lost when we are in community with one another. Dr. Donald K. McKim tells about speaking with a seminary student from another culture. McKim said that the student “pointed out that when reading these parables, North American culture tends to focus its attention on the single lost sheep or coin. The joy [actually] comes when it is found. The student said that his culture finds joy in the corporate dimension of the stories, in the fact that the community can now be complete.”
I know when I am lost, being in this community, with this group of people, is important. This congregation, Royal Lane Baptist Church, is like a lost and found collection. I mean, we have lost and found items in the church office. Lost and found items are a paradox because they are both lost and found at the same time. They are lost to their owners and can’t be used to their full potential, but they are also found to the church staff and have a place where they can be reclaimed and found again. I think we are all a combination of being lost and found. Many of us feel displaced and dislocated, expelled and exiled. Our schedules control us and manipulate us and make us think that we are too busy to do anything except go to that meeting or get our kids to practice or take care of a loved one. We feel lost to the world, lost to ourselves, and lost to God.
Yet, even in the feelings of lostness, we are indeed found. We are seen by our community and loved by God. At some point in your life you were found. That is why each of you are here in this room or joining us online. You were found by a community of faith. You were found by a God who loves you so much that a community wanted to bring you back into the sheepfold, back into a collection with all the other coins. Somewhere along the line someone or some church or some community told you that you were worthy enough to be found, that you were valuable enough to be treasured and cared for and loved.
But we don’t hear that enough, do we? We often don’t know that we are loved. It isn’t until we are plagued by illness or wounded by poverty or stung by depression or pained by a broken relationship that we realize the depth of God’s love for us. It isn’t until we feel lost that we understand the depth of love and commitment and care that we receive when being found. So, that is why I’ve titled this sermon, love is losing. As we move further into stewardship month and learn how to respond in love and live out our love in the world, we often find love when we are lost. We experience the compassionate and fervent love of God when we are at our lowest points, when we’ve not only lost ourselves, but lost all hope. Love is losing.
But in order for God’s love to be revealed in our world, those of us who experience and pursue the love of God must search for the lost, search for those who need to feel seen and heard and found. It is our job as the Lost and Found Collection of Royal Lane Baptist Church to search our city, to sweep the places where we live, to sit and simply be with those who are hurting.
Living out our love as a church means that we search, that we sweep up, and that we sit with those who need the love of God. So first, we search. We become like the Good Shepherd, Jesus, and we search for the one lost sheep until we find it. And I know, statistically speaking 99% is almost perfect and many of us wouldn’t even think about that one point on a test or that one vote in an election or that one dollar in the offering plate. 99% is great! But that’s not the love of God. God knows each of our names. God knows the one sitting next you. God knows every person that we shut out of our churches, out of our communities, and out of our minds. God knows you and searches for you and God knows our neighbors and searches for our neighbors. That’s who God is and that’s who we should be.
If we become concerned for those who are lost in this city, not just spiritually, but physically, emotionally, financially, then we might do better spending more of our time in coffee shops than in meetings. We might do better spending more time at the border than in our gated neighborhoods. We might do better filling cardboard boxes with food at the Food Bank for that one person rather than going to an expensive restaurant. For you see, the love of God through us realizes that even though we are ninety-nine safely in the fold, we must value that one who is lost, that one who has nowhere to turn. We must search for and value that one who society doesn’t see. We must search for and value the one child killed by a gun. We must search for and value the one immigrant who gave up everything to get to America. We must search for and value each individual who is lost in the abuse of a system that only cares about the powerful and not the weak. We must search this city in order to discover where the lost are living and help them to be found.
How else can we live out love in this stewardship season? We sweep. Granted, you are all welcome to actually come and sweep my house or sweep the floors in Vickrey Hall, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Remember the woman who had ten silver coins and lost one? She lit a lamp, swept the house, and searched carefully for the lost coin. She did some spring cleaning, shook the covers, turned over the furniture, swept up the hay and the straw in her little stone and mud house.
Maybe stewardship season, this month where we live out love, is the perfect time to do some cleaning. We, as a church, could always us a good house cleaning. Often, we get sluggish and stuffy and stuck in our normal ways of doing things. And as we’ve talked about with Jesus’ healing and helping on the Sabbath day, sometimes our rituals turn into our religion and our customs become our creeds. As we think about the one, the lost or lonely, the hurt and depressed, we need to realize that we, ourselves, are lost many days too. We need to clean up our own lives and this church to find out if anyone feels left out or abandoned by faith. If so, how will we go about cleaning things up? How might we think more about making this place a harbor of love on a turbulent societal sea? We must, every now and then, sweep through this church and our institutional religion and make sure that we aren’t actually more in love with the dwelling place of God than with the dwelling presence of God.
At other times, as we live out love in this city, we might simply need to sit and wait. We didn’t read the third parable in this lost and found collection of parables. The story right after the ones about the sheep and the coin is the prodigal son. We all know the story. The son goes to his father and asks for his inheritance and to be out on his own. He thought he knew better than his father, knew better than God. And so, he set out to live a bountiful life. But he squandered his money and became destitute, poor, and alone. He thought that he had no one that loved or believed in him. But he did. His father still loved him and was waiting for him, eager to throw a party, eager to lavish love on his lost son.
That’s the thing, when the son ran away, he had no reason to think the door would be left open for him, that there was a loving invitation for him to return. The son had no reason to believe that the father would be eagerly and excitedly waiting for his homecoming. There is power in simply waiting in love for those who have nowhere to turn.
I remember when I was a teenager and could drive, I would spend a lot of time at friends’ houses, sometimes right up until my curfew. The way I would get in my house late at night would be through the back door, right next to the garage. My parents would always leave that door open or unlocked so that I could find my way back home and into a place of love, regardless of how late I was out or what shenanigans I was up to. Maybe that’s what we as church should do. Let’s leave the light on for those who are lost and need love. Let’s leave the door unlocked so that all people can find their way into this space of forgiveness, community, and yes, even a party. Maybe sitting and waiting with people can help them realize that they aren’t alone or lost, and that they have a home in this church and a home in the love of God.
When I attended Wake Forest University for divinity school, there were several times I was privileged to hear Dr. Maya Angelou give a lecture. Dr. Angelou had a long history with Wake Forest University and was named Reynolds Professor of American Studies in 1982. I remember her calm and powerful presence as she metered every word with her rich, deep voice. I have thought about her a lot since her death five years ago. I remember this one meaningful story:
Dr. Angelou was an active member of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco. She wrote that years earlier when she first came to San Francisco as a young woman she became “sophisticated.” She said that was what you were supposed to do when you go to San Francisco, you become sophisticated. And for that reason, she claimed that she became agnostic. She thought the two went together. She said that it wasn’t that she stopped believing in God, just that God no longer frequented the neighborhoods that she frequented.
Sometime later, she was taking voice lessons when her teacher gave her an exercise where she was to read out of a religious pamphlet. The reading ended with these words: “God loves me.” Angelou promptly finished the reading and put the pamphlet down. The teacher said, “I want you to read that last sentence again.” So, she picked it up, read it again, this time somewhat sardonically, then put it down once more. The teacher said, “Read it again.” She read it again. Then Angelou described what happened after that. She said, “After about the seventh repetition I began to sense there might be some truth in this statement. That there was a possibility that God really loves me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew if God loved me, I could do wonderful things. I could do great things. I could learn anything. I could achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person, with God form a majority now.”
Friends, you might feel like the lost sheep, the lost coin, or the prodigal child. There are many people in this city who feel just as you do. You are not alone in feeling lost. But what you have is that you are part of a Lost and Found Collection. You have a community in this church that loves you and wants you to grow and thrive. You have a community that reminds you that you are loved by the Most High God, the God that came to earth as a person, so that you could know that the divine was right here searching for you. And many people in this city find it unbelievable that God would know them, that God would love them, that God would know each of their names. When people feel lost, they don’t know, as Maya Angelou says, that God would really love them.
But God does love them and God loves us. That is the gospel. That is the risky law of love. God is a part of this Lost and Found Collection, and whether you are in San Francisco, in Mumbai, in Instanbul, or right here in Dallas, God is searching, sweeping, and sitting, never giving up until you are found. May we be called to be the presence of Christ in this city, doing the exact same thing, not giving up until every last person is found, now and always.
Amen.