LOST AND FOUND

Ryan D. Neaveill
Sunday, July 13, 2003
Grace United Methodist Church
Decatur, Illinois

PRELUDE: GETTING LOST

One of my wife’s talents is that she can do a lot of different things at the same time. Maybe some of you guys out there also have wives like this; because I have heard that women tend to be “multi-task” oriented; which means that they are very good at doing different things simultaneously. I think it has something to do with the fact that women have a larger corpus callosum—that’s the part of the brain that allows the right and left sides of the brain to communicate. For example, my wife can sit at her desk working at the computer and at the same time she’s talking to someone on the phone and at the same time she’s talking to me and at the same time she’s keeping her eye on our two children and at the same time she’s listening to the radio. It blows me away. She is like a human switchboard with all these signals coming in and going out.

Now, I am the opposite. I can really do only one thing at a time. This is because men have very small corpus callosums and the two halves of our brains hardly speak to one another. I prove this over and over again whenever we are driving somewhere. You see, there are two things that I just cannot do at the same time and that is drive and talk. But of course, my wife loves to talk to me when we are driving, especially when we’re cruising down a long stretch of the interstate. So usually she will pull me into a conversation, but as soon as my brain switches into talking mode, it switches out of driving mode.

But I suspect that I have some kind of automatic pilot when I drive, because I am able to stay between the lines on the road; however I lose all ability whatsoever to read and pay attention to exit signs. And of course my wife, being highly multi-task, notices everything and so usually as I am driving passed the exit she will pause long enough in our conversation to ask, “Wasn’t that where you were supposed to turn off?” And I say, “Why yes dear, that was very helpful.”

So I usually spend a lot of my driving time looking for those spots along the interstate that allow you to cross the median. You know, the ones that usually say “no u-turns, authorized vehicles only.”

Now, this is where my talent comes in. Being a man, of course, I have very good spatial intelligence which means I am very good at putting things together by looking at diagrams and I am very good at reading maps. You see when men drive, our spatial intelligence is always hard at work. It’s kind of like we have an imaginary camera mounted high up in the sky, a mile or so above our car, and it is constantly taking aerial snapshots of the road we’re driving on and the surrounding terrain. So no matter how far passed an exit I might drive, I can always find my way back by simply taking the photographic image in my brain and reversing it.

Unless of course my wife starts talking to me while I’m trying to manipulate my mental photographic images. If that happens, then my brain experiences overload and I become the proverbial and clichéd man who is lost and won’t ask for directions.

LOSING THINGS

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to get lost does it? Think about the last time you got lost. If you are new to this church, you might get lost just wandering around this building. I know I did a few times when I first came here.

It’s easy for us to get lost. And it’s even easier for our things to get lost. I have a number of things that I usually carry with me: my sunglasses, my Palm handheld computer, my cell phone, and my digital camera. And hardly a day goes by when I don’t at least momentarily misplace one of these things.

Now, it is interesting because one way we can determine the value of something is by how much time we spend looking for it when it is lost. For example, I lose pens and pencils all the time. I’m sure you do also. But when we lose a pen or a pencil, unless it is one of those really nice ones with our initials engraved on it, we’re not going to spend a heck of a lot of time looking for it. I usually look in my pocket and if it’s not there, then I get a new one.

But if I lose my glasses, or my cell phone, then that’s different. Those things are more important to me; so I wouldn’t give up looking for them so easily. I would look until I found them.

Jesus told three stories about some things that were lost. And we find all three of these parables in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 15.

Jesus told the Luke 15 parables in response to the Pharisees who complained that Jesus welcomed and ate with sinners. So what Jesus did in his parables was to present a new way of thinking about God: He taught us that God is not just the God of the righteous, or of those who are religious and go to church; but that God is the God of everyone including prostitutes, thieves, adulterers, and all those people whom we label sinners. And Jesus presented a new way of thinking about sinners: That sinners are not just bad people who should be punished, but that they are lost people in need of being found and redeemed.

Luke 15 is sort of the “lost and found” department in the bible; because it is there that we find the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the lost (or prodigal) son. What I find interesting is the way Jesus told the same story each time, but changed the thing that was lost.

THE PARABLE OF THE LOST COIN

Let’s revisit the scripture we read this morning from Luke 15:8-10, the parable of the lost coin:

“...suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ’Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Now, I have here a silver coin. This is a silver bullion, which is one ounce of fine silver minted by the U.S. Treasury. It’s not worth a whole lot of money, but more than your average coin. The face value says it is worth one dollar. Although, depending on the price of silver, it’s usually worth somewhere between five and ten dollars. But the silver coin that was lost in the parable was worth probably about a day’s wages.

So I’d like you to think about some object in your life that is fairly valuable to you. Something that equals about a day’s worth of your wages. That is your silver coin. Now think about how you would feel if that object were lost.

In the parable it says of the woman: “Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” That illustrates the value of the silver coin. The woman doesn’t search for an hour and then give up. She doesn’t look in one or two places and then quit. This wasn’t like when we lose a pencil or a pen. The silver coin is valuable. She searches until she finds it. So, what is the silver coin in your life? What has enough value to you that you would not stop looking for it until you had found it?

Do you know what the silver coin is in God’s life? It’s you. And it’s me. It’s all of us. We are valuable to God. And when we are lost, God does not stop looking for us until we are found.

THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SHEEP

My guess is that a lot of you probably have some kind of a pet at home. A dog, a cat, a bird maybe. We do, too. Ours is part beagle and part beggar. I try to explain to our dog that she is indeed a dog and not a human being. But she won’t listen to me. She just sits in my chair and looks at me with her big soulful eyes.

On the first Tuesday of every month at ten o’clock, our dog practices her singing. As you know, that is the time when communities test their warning sirens; but our dog thinks the siren is her cue to begin warming up her voice. And when she’s not howling, she is usually busy wearing a path around the perimeter of our backyard. And what grass she hasn’t killed on her guard duty, she has done in with her digging.

But for all the trouble she causes, we wouldn’t trade her for anything, I guess. Well, I probably would. But then my wife and kids would put me in the doghouse.

A couple of weeks ago, a piece of the fence around our backyard broke off; so there was a hole about this big at the bottom of our fence. Now our dog is about this big around her belly—bigger than the hole in the fence, or so I thought—so I didn’t worry too much about the hole in our fence. But I’ll be darned if that dog didn’t squeeze herself right through that hole. Fortunately, the hole went only into our neighbor’s backyard which is also fenced in. So after she left our neighbor a couple of presents, she squeezed herself back through the hole and into our yard.

That’s about the closest we’ve come to losing our pet. But some people aren’t so lucky. Maybe you’ve had the terrible experience of losing your pet. Perhaps one day it got off of its leash or somehow climbed over or crawled under the fence in your backyard. And it was gone.

Now to most of us, our pets have great value. They are worth more to us than just a silver coin. Pets are companions and friends and so when our pet is lost, we sacrifice a lot in order to find it. We spend days looking. We offer rewards.

Maybe that’s how it was in Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep. For Jesus said that if a person loses one of his sheep, “does he not go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep.’”

You see there is a lot more emotional attachment at stake when we lose our animals then when we lose some inanimate object like a camera. You know, the camera might be really nice, but it can be replaced. But our pets are irreplaceable. They are unique.

And you are irreplaceable to God. You are unique and special to God and he offers a great a reward to bring you back home.

THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SON

But now let’s take things up a notch. We’ve talked about losing our things. We’ve talked about losing our pets. But what is the absolute worst thing you could ever lose? What would you give anything and everything to get it back if it were lost? There is no question about it for me. There are two things that I just cherish and love and I would die if I ever lost them. And they are my two children: my little boy, Levi, and my little girl, Lena.

I don’t know how many of you have kids, but one thing you learn quickly when you have small children is to hold on to them tight and not let them out of your sight, especially when you’re out at the grocery store or the mall, or any place where there are masses of people. Because there are monsters in this world. The thing that I hate more than anything else is to open up the newspaper and read about some poor child who is missing. So few of those reports have happy endings.

We were at an auction a couple of months ago. It was held in a high school gymnasium and it was very crowded. Somehow our little girl got away from us and before we knew it, she had run all the way across the gymnasium and out the door. I cannot describe the panic I felt. Luckily, we caught her before she disappeared.

Now, when our first child was just learning to walk, I used to have nightmares about losing him. I think that was probably just the normal anxiety that most parents feel about their children. But I can remember one dream in particular, because it spoke to me on a spiritual level. My son’s name is Levi. He’s almost five now. But when I had this dream, he was around two. I dreamed that Levi and I were walking down the sidewalk in some neighborhood. It was dark out, probably around 9:00 or 10:00 at night. I had his hand in mine as we walked along, but then—I don’t know how—he was gone. Nowhere in sight. I ran up and down the streets screaming his name continuously like this, “Levi! Levi! Levi” without breathing, because I didn’t want there to be one second when he might be within earshot of me and not hear me because I paused or took a breath. This went on for a few horrifying moments and then finally, I heard his little voice say, “Daddy?” And I saw him and ran and picked him up and hugged him. I was sobbing with joy.

And then I woke up and was just bawling my eyes out. And as I laid there in bed with tears running down my face, this thought crystalized in my mind so clearly that it was like someone speaking to me saying, “that is how God feels about you.”

That is how God feels about you.

POSTLUDE: GETTING FOUND

Jesus devoted not just one or two, but three parables to this “lost and found” idea. The sheep, the coin, the son. It’s like he really wanted us to find something there that we could relate to so that we could know God’s love for us.

So, what is the “silver coin” in your life—that which you would never stop searching for if it were lost? What is the “lost sheep” in your life—that you would give a great reward to get it back? What is the “lost son” in your life—the one thing you hope and pray you never, never lose?

That is how God feels about you.

Copyright © 2003, 2007 Ryan D. Neaveill