Gospel: Luke 15:1-10
Grace and Peace to you from God our Loving Creator and Jesus the Shepherd of us all, Amen
I said this a couple weeks ago, and I’m gonna say it again. Happy Palindrome Sunday! Yep. It happened two weeks ago when it was 9-1-19, and it happens again today on 9-15-19. Here’s to all the racecars and radars out there. Do geese see God? Was it a rat I saw?
Okay, now that I’ve got you lost in your own heads for a bit, we can talk about lost sheep and coins. Which one of you, having lost a remote in the couch, doesn’t dig and dig and dig for the thing, only to discover that it was on the table next to you the whole time? And then upon finding remote, rejoice with a renewed sense of security. For a little bit at least. Or maybe you’ve lost your keys, and discover them in your pocket after all. Or your wallet, or any other number of things that we frequently lose track of… How much relief and security is felt when we discover that lost item. How much joy… Don’t even get me started with phones… at least we can call those… as long as they’re on, and not on silent…
I lose things constantly. Mostly because I have ADD and when I happen to just haplessly put something down for no apparent reason, my mind decides to remember whatever I was thinking about at the time, rather than the actual placing of the object. My house is filled with half-done projects and “I’ll do that laters” and “Sometime soons”. As they say, I would lose my own head if it weren’t attached to my neck.
Even God seemingly forgets people and things now and again. Okay, so in the Bible it occasionally says, “And God remembered…” whatever, and you kinda just have to wonder…. Does God forget? Does God lose things? People?
If God is all knowing and all powerful and all, well, everything… then how does God lose people? If Jesus is throwing around today’s parable about God and people, and God represents the shepherd and we the sheep, or God the woman and we the coin… does God lose people?
Have you ever felt lost? Out of place, out of sorts with God? Lost in your own muck and mire of life, and seemingly detached from God? Or lost in reality, in your own world, in your own mind? In order to be lost, you had to have been found at some point in your life.
In order for an object to be lost, it had to have had some sort of function at some point. What if people decided that people from one area, didn’t belong in another, and asked them if they too were lost? When I lived here in Saint Paul for two years, I felt lost. Out of sorts with the world around me. I would drive by the U of M Saint Paul Campus, next to the fairgrounds on Larpenter, just to look at the empty farm field to the north. Pretend that there was nothing beyond it. For a few seconds of my drive, I felt like I was home.
But I grew up in rural western Minnesota, where the farm fields roam free. So free, they’re free range! The rolling prairies are dotted with small country churches with long Scandinavian and German names, like Kongsvinger and Sverdrup. These congregations at one point were full of people, with giant families that filled the Sunday School rooms and Confirmation classes. In the height of the American Lutheran Churches in the 50s and 60s, the giant families of the 30s and 40s had children and these children then attended Luther League and Confirmation and everything was peachy keen. But over the years, these small country churches that at one time were the centers of community went the way of the family farms. Smaller and smaller, and slowly closed their doors. Luther Seminary has an archive of many of these closed churches, and keeps relics and records from them when they close. Of the nine regions of the ELCA, Luther holds the most records and archives for these midwestern regions. When these congregations start to look at dwindling membership, less money in the offering and no longer enough money to pay a pastor, they might feel lost as to what to do. So much history and so many memories are built into the walls of these churches. And some do eventually close after looking at these decisions for a long time.
But just as Jesus reassures us that the sheep and coin are not lost, so also the congregations of these closed churches are not lost. In some cases, it makes financial and ethical sense to close. In other cases, congregations could look at altering their ministry. For instance, in recent conversations around immigration, rural communities that have been struggling beyond church membership but in community resources as well… might look into being more open and welcoming to recent immigrants to Minnesota. This conversation was even mentioned by one of the presidential candidates the other night in hopes to revitalize rural communities.
Sometimes when we’re feeling lost, God finds us, but maybe places us where we don’t necessarily expect. Smaller congregations in these communities with changing cultural demographics could do well to modify their outreach, and some have. They may feel lost in their problems of membership, but find new life in welcoming people they wouldn’t have originally expected into their worship spaces.
This reality in rural communities is of course not limited to rural communities, as you very well know and live yourselves. When I was in seminary, it was intriguing to me for me to be from these rural areas with shrinking congregations, and then witness a similar story play out in urban congregations. I studied Christ Lutheran on Capitol Hill when I was in my first year. Blocks from the capitol. Shrinking membership.
People can say that we are lost, that other people are lost, without God. Some Christians claim that people who identify a certain way, interact with the world in a certain way, live their lives in a certain way - may be lost and need to be found by God.
In these parables that Jesus throws around, we are told that God will find us when we’re lost. But what happens then? What do we do once we’ve been found? What does God call us to do? What do these congregations do that are found by God and God’s people?
God calls us to act on that finding. Congregations live into the welcoming of the stranger, and as people of the ELCA, we have been called to live into being a sanctuary denomination. God calls us to love our neighbor. To hold onto the freely-bestowed Grace that has been given and in turn share that Grace with our neighbors. We become proactive, and engage the world around us in continuing to find the lost and broken with God’s help.
When the shepherd finds the lost sheep, when the woman finds the lost coin, they react with such overwhelming joy at the finding of their lost ones. What immense joy there must be for these congregations that are struggling to be found again, to know that God’s Grace comes in all sorts of forms, but that God will see us through.
As was, is and always shall be - God’s got this. God’s got you.
Amen.
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