Saints of Lost Causes (Rob Gieselmann, September 16, 2007)

Searching high and low, across meadow and knoll, behind hill and over rock ledges. Miles, perhaps five, perhaps ten, the shepherd walks and calls; cuffs his hands at his mouth, and calls. The sheep know his voice – he lives with them, day and night, sleeps under the stars with them. So they know him, and he searches and calls, until at last, he finds the sheep who has strayed. The lost one, is now found, and there is great joy.

It is so, also, with the woman who has lost her coin in her bungalow. She would have found it eventually – in a year or two it would have shown-up, beneath a cushion, in a corner, behind the washer. But she refuses to wait; she sweeps the house clean, searches every corner, finds the coin, and spends the coin on a party to celebrate its recovery.

God is both shepherd and the woman seeking that which has been lost. God refuses to suffer loss glibly or patiently. Others might say, don’t waste your time – it’s only one sheep, one coin. God ignores these comments, instead crossing meadow and hill, or sweeping the house clean.

All on a recovery mission, finding the lost.

But I’m wondering, What does it mean to be lost? What is God looking for?

Calvinist puritan Jonathan Edwards interpreted lost as the sinner in the hands of an angry God. God saving just in the ‘nick of time the human soul destined for sulfuric flames.

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire.”

Is that what lost means? Is God dangling Pharisees or Scribes, or Californians, as a spider over the flame, abhorring? I must confess, that God I do not know, and that sense of what it means to be lost, I do not know.

But I do know what it means to be lost. I have been lost before, and maybe you have been, too. There is a way in which being lost means being human. Or is it that being human means being lost? Not the spider over the flame. But one seeking recovery.

The person I mentioned last week, still tied psychologically to parents long gone, unable to become a mature individuated adult – that person is lost, unable to find his own way.

The person fooled into thinking money is the end and not the means, that person is lost.

The parent whose child has run away, or dabbled in drugs or alcohol, that parent is lost, just as the child is lost.

The man whose wife has left him – by divorce, or even death –

And the person who has lost her job – Lost, unsure of the path forward, for her the forest is dark.

Life, you see, is full of loss, and people are lost.

It can be so hard to find the way home. To become un-lost, to become un-stuck.

And, of-course, people are not the only things lost -- Causes are lost – there is even a patron saint of lost causes, St. Jude – when all seems hopeless, you ask Jude to intercede.

Sometimes God is lost, and people are trying as the desperate widow to find him.

Lost people, lost causes, lost God.

Again, life is full of loss, and in the deepest chasm of the human soul, the sense of loss can be as broad as the Golden Gate. It is that sense of loss that the shepherd is trying to assuage, that the woman sweeps so frantically to rectify. Loss and grief and holes in the soul.

We’ve come to accept loss ever so passively, but your loss disturbs Jesus. Violently disturbs Jesus. Violently to the point of the Cross. For the mission of Christ on the Cross is to recover the lost. Easter is Lost and Found day, when all that is lost is recovered.

Not restored as it once was, but transformed. Life begins anew, new hope, new beginnings. The place of deep sorrow, the mine-shaft that sees no light. For you, always the hope of new life.

**But recall – now listen to this – we began with your being lost, which is God’s deepest loss. The irony of loss is this: God experiences the deep pain of loss that you experience.

God suffers loss, with desperate grief. We somehow imagine God to be static, unfeeling, but we are wrong. God is person, always person, feeling acutely the pain of loss, the pain of all those souls that are lost. Those who have turned away. Who have imagined there is no God, there is no hope, there is no future.

I don’t know how God does it, continue to suffer the loss of love from a lovingly made creation. The human who no longer believes, or no longer loves, how does God do it? Except, perhaps, that in God there is hope, that God continues out of a constant faith that loss is redeemable.

That God explodes into action, as both shepherd and woman, searching and sweeping to recover. Imagine that, a God who seeks to find the lost because he hopes, and because he loves.

I am wondering, this morning, at the purpose of being church in a world shrouded by loss, being church in a world where so much has become lost.

Except, that is, to assume God’s mission. To explode as a passionate God to action, becoming both shepherd and woman, searching and sweeping to recover.

Episcopal priest Kit Carlson once said, church exists for the person who hasn’t found it yet. Not for you, not for me, but the person who hasn’t found it, yet.

We have the absolute honor and privilege of helping a world replete with a sense of loss, grieving over change, helping that world find a way home. All are welcome – our sign says – and indeed, all are welcome.

The question is, are all invited? Are you and I beating the bush traversing hill and ledge in search of the one, in search of that treasure?

Amen.

Copyright 2007