Losing, Finding, Risking

Today in our Adult Sunday School, we begin to examine the teachings of Jesus through Phyllis Tickle's compilation of His sayings in The Words of Jesus. In the teaching of Jesus that we just heard from Luke's Gospel, we didn't hear Tickle's introduction to this teaching of Jesus. To introduce His two metaphors of being lost and found, Tickle inserts verse 9 from chapter 19 of Luke's Gospel, which is the boiled-down essence of Luke's Good News about Jesus Christ: "The Son of Man has come to seek out and to save the lost."

Tickle also gives this headline to today's teaching moment: "The "Importance to Heaven of every repentant convert." So as we hear Jesus speak to is of lost sheep and lost coins, I would suggest that we should ponder what it means to be lost, and found; what we might need to risk and with what might we need to get reacquainted.

Two metaphors. One involves leaving, the other involves staying. In the first, a shepherd takes a risk, leaves his familiar field, his regular pasture, and ventures into unfamiliar territory to find that which is lost. Perhaps the shepherd might get lost himself. Or he might run into the same predator that has already eaten the lost sheep. So, perhaps the shepherd is risking as much as the sheep by his leaving the ninety nine sheep to search for that one sheep who wandered away. Indeed, it seems that in order to find the lost sheep, the shepherd must assume the same risks as the wandering sheep.

In the second metaphor, we are on familiar ground. We are in our own home, secure in our treasure of silver, or at least enough to get us through about 10 days. But do we really know as much about our home as we think we do? There are always unexplored corners, into which small coins fall. Which we take for granted until we can't find them. And so we turn our settled home upside down in order to find what is most important. And in finding our silver coin, who knows what else we might find, that we had forgotten we had, and can appreciate anew?

So one question that Jesus's first parable raises is about risk. What might Jesus be calling me, calling you, calling us, to risk so that those who are lost might be found? His second parable raises the question of reacquaintance. What nook, what corner of this house, the church, do we need to rediscover? What silver coin should we be looking for.

Jesus, it seems to me, calls us out into an unfamiliar territory, to find the wandering sheep. Maybe they've wandered away from here. Maybe they've wandered away from some other church field and need to find a new home -- maybe ours? Jesus also calls us examine our own house. Is there a silver coin that we've lost? What is that coin? Is it a part of our tradition that we haven't used for so long that we've actually forgotten it?

And if we are serious about our tradition, what riches might we find in our found silver coin? And if we are serious about our mission, what riches might we find in our found sheep?