At a place where a lot of people are at lots of times, things tend to get left behind a lot. Take church for instance. There’s stuff left here all the time. Those things often end up in a Lost & Found box or a spot in a church office cabinet so that they can be returned when someone realizes that they lost their glasses or their keys or their steel tumbler that usually gets knocked over onto the concrete floor at some point during the service!
Once you realize that you’ve lost something, you start to look for it. You eventually remember that you had it with you at church--either in the church itself, the fellowship hall, the courtyard, or wherever you attended a meeting. And so, you start looking around. If it’s important enough, you are relentless in your search. After a successful hunt, you might even tell a friend or family member, I knew I had it with me at church. Thankfully, I finally found it under the pews!
Jesus talked about this kind of thing in a couple stories he told things that were Lost & Found. The stories themselves don’t contain words that wound. They’re actually happy Lost & Found stories. They have a healing message. What can be wounding words come right after each story. Hopefully, the people hurt by those words at the time found healing in the stories. We might be wounded because of those words too, but there is healing for us in him and these stories that tell us about his love.
THE LOST & THE FOUND
Haters of the Lost and of Jesus
There were many religious groups active in Israel at the time of Jesus. A number of them are mentioned in the Bible. Members of two of them were watching Jesus closely, as they often did the Pharisees and the professional students of the Scriptures, the “experts in the law” of God. But they weren’t just observing, they were muttering complaints about 2 no-no’s of Jesus. First of all, you don’t hang out with notorious public sinners and disgusting tax collectors. If you eat with them, you’ve really crossed the line! This was too friendly with terrible people. That was simply not done not because God said it was wrong, but because it was the tradition that was followed. You can start to see the problem.
The Pharisees were notorious for feeling that they were pretty righteous because they kept ALL of God’s laws, along with all sorts of other invented rules and traditions. They even equated those with God’s laws, insisting that everyone else do those too. So…tax collectors who teamed up with the Roman government and stole from the Jewish people were high on their list of people they thought they were better than. And people that everyone knew lived godless lives… Well, all of this is what started those very religious men complaining about what Jesus was doing. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Their complaining tells you two things: what they thought of those people and what they thought of Jesus because he was willing to spend time with them. So, he was definitely NOT a religious teacher anyone should have been listening to! But he was about to make them listen.
The Sheep Story
Imagine the “sinners” gathered all around Jesus, listening to him, and then Jesus turning to look right at those complainers as he made them the subject of the first of the stories he told them! Did you notice that’s what he did?
“Which one of you, if you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them, would not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that was lost until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls together his friends and his neighbors, telling them, ‘Rejoice with me, because I have found my lost sheep!’”
That’s a happy Lost & Found story, isn’t it? And what he said is just what they would do. They couldn’t deny it. It’s what anyone would do. If a friend loses their phone somewhere at church and then finds it, they’re happy, and we’re happy for them. A phone for us, a sheep for them…if you lose something important, you search and search to find it. There is relief and joy when what was lost is found.
You may know that a parable is a story that has a spiritual teaching point to it. After this Lost and Found sheep story, Jesus explained what it meant: “I tell you, in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent.”
The lost sheep is a person who is lost in sin and facing an eternity of being lost hell. God doesn’t want that for anyone! He wants the sinner to repent. When that happens, the person rejoices in the forgiveness and grace of God. The rejoicing of the shepherd and his friends in the story is like the rejoicing of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and all of heaven when a sinner repents, when one who was spiritually lost is found. Jesus was exactly where he needed to be with those lost tax collectors and “sinners” because he wanted them found so that all of heaven would rejoice over their repentance and trust in him.
Any self-righteous complainers who didn’t feel they needed to repent, who felt they were better than those tax collectors and “sinners,” should have taken warning that they needed to repent also in order for them to eventually be in heaven and be rejoiced over. They should also have rejoiced like heaven rejoiced when a tax collector realized that cheating and stealing was wrong in the eyes of God. They should have rejoiced like heaven rejoiced when the prostitutes and thieves and all the others came to understand that, yes, the things they were doing were an abomination to the holy God. When any of “those people” repented and looked to Jesus for forgiveness, heaven erupted with joy!
“Or what woman who has ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, would not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says, ‘Rejoice with me, because I have found the lost coin.’”
10 coins—every one important. She needed them all—every one worth an entire day’s pay. You’d search for one if you lost it. Jesus didn’t even ask the cranky complainers if they would. They would have. They would have lit little clay oil lamps and searched the dirt floors of their windowless houses. A little difficult, but they would do it until they found that coin because it was valuable. The other nine really important. But so was the lost one. The woman in Jesus’ story naturally did what the shepherd who found his lost sheep did. She rejoiced with her friends when she found what she had lost.
The teaching point of this story was exactly the same as it was for the sheep story.
“In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
100 sheep, 10 coins. How about 8.2 billion? That’s the population of the world. I’m not sure we can take in, understand how important every single one of those souls are to the Savior who lived and went to a cross for every one. The complainers couldn’t even appreciate how precious every person within eyesight of them was. God’s love is so huge. We can’t even imagine. The grace of God his undeserved love is so clear where tax collectors and people with no morals and the devious and the loveless and perverted are concerned. But that same grace reaches out to those who don’t think they need to repent. This is why Jesus told them stories.
What about Us?
Sometimes we need these stories, don’t we? I needed them this week. Let me tell you what not to do. Don’t watch the video of a high-profile person being killed and then go looking for people’s reaction to the public murder. It is disgusting and horrible and will leave you angry and upset and sad and almost in disbelief that people can think and say and do the things that you see and hear. And then there’s the shooter.
It doesn’t matter if you have things in common with the person murdered or you liked him or didn’t like him—or, frankly, if you even knew who he was. It’s the other people. It’s the killer. It’s the people reacting in sick ways.
It’s so easy to think that you’re better than they are. It’s easy to think that there’s a special place in hell for people like that and they deserve to go there, and I want them to. Try to write a sermon when those thoughts and feelings come calling.
Let me be clear, this isn’t about the person who died or what he believed and said, this is about the unbelievably horrible celebrations by people who are beside themselves with joy that he was murdered as he spoke to a crowd of college students and others.
Does it hurt to hear that without God’s grace, which found you when you were lost, you are no better before the Holy God. It hurts me. I don’t want to think that. If you think that you’re somehow better than other people (especially really bad people) and more deserving of having God pay attention to you, you’ve missed the point of the stories.
But if you reflect a little, you may have to admit that there have been times and maybe you struggled this week times that you’ve felt superior to others or thought that there are some who are or ought to be outside of the kind of people God wants. But also reflect on this as you repent over your lack of grace and your misunderstanding of God’s grace—his grace is what brings you forgiveness through the One who welcomes sinners, who finds the lost in sin and rejoices over them. You are one of the Lost & Found.
And there’s something else. We need to pray that those who are lost right now will somehow, eventually listen to the Savior who came to find them too. We should aspire to a grace in our hearts not found in the complaining Pharisees and teachers of the law, a grace that is modeled after our Savior’s.
We don’t know if the Pharisees and experts in the law understood the intention of the parables or not or actually listened, repented, and found healing in Jesus’ words. We hope that their complaint, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” became an expression of joy over the fact that Jesus welcomed THEM even though they didn’t deserve it: “This man welcomes sinners like me!”
The question today is—do you understand now the reason Jesus told those stories…do you find healing in Jesus’ words and with joy and relief say, “This man welcomes sinners like me!”? Amen.
Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.