Sermon – “God’s Lost and Found”
“God’s Lost and Found”
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Preached by Dr. Laurey Murphey on March 10, 2013
The “Lost and Found” at church is always an odd assortment of that which was lost but now
found —a child’s navy sweater, a pair of trifocal glasses, a classy Montblanc fountain pen, a
matchbox racing car. You wonder how they got lost? Whose do they belong? When will they
be claimed? Doesn’t somebody miss them—like those trifocals….those are somebody’s good
glasses. Will they be forever forgotten? Discarded being of no use?
I heard a passing comment this week that “everyone who’s lost— deep down wants to be
found.”
Remember when you use to play hide and seek as a kid…and it was your turn to be it. You
could hear the others searching for you. But you hid so good in the dark they couldn’t find you.
Then they started calling your name telling you to come on out that dinner was ready. But you
knew better than to fall for that trick! So you stayed put…until finally you could hear them no
more. They had given up and gone on in to eat. And you realized how much you had wanted
to be found….to be made over…and back with the gang.
Nobody wants to be lost…Deep down, we all want to be found…and not forgotten nor
discarded as the unclaimed, the unwanted.
In today’s gospel reading, we see how different God’s “Lost and Found” is from our idea of it.
Jesus has quite an assortment gathered around him by now wherever he goes. There isn’t
anyone in the faith telling it like Jesus does. As his crowd swells, so do the snide remarks of
who’s in and who’s out, who’s good enough and who’s not; who’s always been there as God’s
faithful and who’s coming in last. Who did let these people come in —such sinners they be?
However in today’s crowd it is the preachers and the elders who are especially displeased by
the quality of the company whom Jesus is in keeping. We hear their grumbling: “He’s got the
sinners…the real sinners coming in—the very ones we’ve long given up on as being lost.”
Doesn’t he know who they are?
Who does he think he is?
Why he’s not only speaking to them but sitting down at the same table with them.
It was these ones grumbling that inspired Jesus to tell the crowd about God’s Lost…and Found
with three short stories that tell the unexpected.
The first was about a lost sheep and how the shepherd leaves the other 99 to still go after the
one…searching until he finds him. And by God, he does….even though he has ALL the others,
too. That one is just as special and belongs to the good shepherd, too.
And take the woman who has 10 coins…but loses one. What does she do but lights a lamp and
turns the house upside down searching for that one lost coin. She won’t give up searching.
For the lost. And when it is finally found, the woman wakes up all her friends and neighbors
rejoicing. So too with God’s lost and then found.
But now Jesus throws the curve ball with the next one that we all know so well, “There once
was a man with two sons…” It could be any family here even our family, this family. It could
be you, me, and the one sitting next to you on the pew.
The travel log of the young has been well documented of just how lost he was by thousands
of imaginative sermons. He treated his father like he was as good as dead, demanding his
inheritance; went off to the far country of big city lights, spending his very last dime on cheap
gin and bad women; came to his senses in the pig slop and decides it’s better to go back
home and face the music with his dad working as one of his hired hands. All the way home, he
rehearses the words he’s going to say, “Father, I have done wrong….no, no, no…Father, forgive
me….Father, I have sinned….Father, I have sinned against you….against heaven and before
you…I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
What is so unexpected is Jesus telling the listening crowd that while the son was still far off,
the Father sees him as if he had been looking for him and goes out to meet his son coming
back home….Giving him a heroes’ welcome, the Father gives him a robe—-his best robe, and a
ring…a sign that he is family, and sandals, too. There’s the smell of a roasting pig. The tunes of
a band warming up… Boy, we’re going to have a party to celebrate this son who was good as
dead but is now alive again…he was lost and is now found. With God’s lost now found…there is
to be rejoicing…not grumbling. Don’t condemn…celebrate!
But there the Father with TWO sons…the one who went off and was lost but now found AND
There’s the son who stayed home in his Father’s house…who obeyed and did his father’s will all
this time…but who also got lost.
The son who stayed home had his strengths for sure….but he, too, had his weaknesses.
The elder brother has a good eye for seeing the faults in his brother….why he could see even
the speck in his brother’s eye; but O how he missed the log in his own. Like with our own
family and if we are really honest like here in our church family— We can so quickly see the
shortcomings in other people but not in ourselves. Too often, we are the yardstick for the right
way to think. We are the measure for the right way to live. We are the way everyone else
should be.
In Enterprise, Alabama—not a car rental place but a town known for its great statue of a
bollweaval in the middle of it, there is a Presbyterian church known for a session meeting
which literally turned in to a fist fight. The retired army colonel who became a minister
was very rigid in his thinking… He was from the North and was going to educate these poor
southerners in the faith for them to get it right. One session meeting, things got out of hand
and the elders got fed up. I heard that it was something about how communion was to be
served and to whom. Voices were raised, words were said…four letter ones, too, but not the
kind like Hope nor Love. The preacher came across the table with his finger jabbing and a
punch or two thrown until it was a bloody mess. I guess that’s why they call the book we’re
suppose to follow…The Book of Order…but that night, there was no order.
The son who stayed home and did every thing by the book right is a reminder to us in the
church that while we remain faithful and committed—there is always the risk of becoming lost
ourselves.
Only the Father could save his two sons. Only the Father could give new life to them both—-
if the Father himself was willing to humble and fling himself so to speak at the feet of his sons
inviting them both…welcoming them both—–even begging the older son to come into the
father’s house. Love does not care how foolish it may look or how much it may cost. Neither
son has it in them to save themselves. So the love of the Father does that the dead may be
alive again and the lost be found.
This is the watershed of the Bible….either God loves like this or he doesn’t. Jesus is adamant
even with the worst of his critics that indeed this is the essence of the God and the gospel.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, let us rejoice! Celebrate! Amen!
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