I have a terrible sense of direction. Anyone who has ridden in my car with me can attest. I live with my GPS. We have a close personal bond. It is a GPS for dummies and it is perfect for me. You would never believe how many times I have to drive back and forth to a place before I know my way. It has been ten months since I moved to Jacksonville, and I still use the GPS religiously. I am a person who is easily lost.
There are many ways to get lost. Many of us get lost in our lives. We don’t know how to make the right decisions or who to ask for help. We make decisions sometimes that hurt ourselves and others. We go off in a completely wrong direction and only add to the brokenness and confusion in the world.
Take this crazy guy in Gainesville. How in the world did he come to the conclusion that burning the Quran would make things better on Sept 11th? And how in the world did the media get the idea that it would be wise to blow this all up out of proportion? Will he burn the Quran or won’t he? That seems to be the question. The media is selling loads of papers and everyone is watching as a furniture salesman gains the attention of the world, not through goodness, but through threats of book-burning.
Why do we pay attention to such craziness? Why are we buying papers or turning on our televisions? How could we have let our attention get so diverted?
20 million people are now watching a reality show that films pregnant teenage girls as they decide what to do with their lives and the lives of their babies. Viewers hone in, fascinated as families yell and scream, cry and blame. Millions of dollars are made from people’s pain. From watching the lost.
What does it mean to be lost? Spiritually, it means to have lost a connection to the compass of life that is God, to be going in the wrong direction. To sin literally means to miss the mark in the ancient Hebrew, so there is a sense that anyone who is hurting others or leading a life filled with mistakes is essentially lost from God, they do not know the way home so they wander in a land that is waste and misery, holding onto things that will not bring them peace. And the farther we wander from God’s presence, the greater the chaos and pain that we produce.
Why does the sheep wander away from the fold? It is not that the sheep wants to move away from the shepherd, it is that they become distracted, lured by a scent or a curiosity, and then they find that they have lost their way, lost their sense of direction. There are many things that can distract us from God, and hurt and hatred are among the most potent distractions.
Jesus ate with tax collectors. In other words, he dined with the IRS. And he dined with prostitutes and criminals. These were the people that scare us and make our skin crawl. These were people who we would think of as bad or even evil. He shared a meal with them, why? Because God does not abandon see the human soul as bad. God sees the human souls as the lost, God seeks them out.
Ben Clance is a deacon here at the Cathedral. Ben goes into the maximum security prisons here in Florida and he talks to the prisoners about God. Ben sees terrible things, things that I cannot mention in this pulpit, but whenever he sees a man mistreat his own body or try to hurt another man, he does not walk away or leave, he says things like, “How dare you treat yourself in this way? How dare you treat me in this way?” Ben is tough and Ben never leaves. He will visit the same men for months and years, and some of them still refuse his love, they still refuse his company, they want nothing to do with communion. But some turn around and begin to wonder, and others turn their lives around.
Ben calls prison The Belly of the Beast and for ten years he has been going in there, bringing communion to the lost. He seeks out the truth that lies deep within them. Is it still there? Is there some glimpse of God’s light that can be found in this man who has been locked up for life? Is there anything left to seek?
When a man is being executed, Ben goes and washes his feet. He seeks out their goodness, hoping to find some part of them that is willing to be found and to be forgiven.
But you don’t have to be in prison to be lost, and you don’t have to be half-crazy either. Sometimes we all are lost. Sometimes everyone of us wonders if there is any point to our lives at all. When I think back to Sept 11, 2001, I feel lost. I think of the people who joined hands to jump from the windows of skyscrapers and what it must have felt like to hurl through the air knowing that your life would end in a breath, and I feel helpless.
My brother is a surgeon and he rushed to the hospital in New York City that morning. He was ready to have some direction, something to do to help, and no one came in. It was empty. Because everyone was dead and he felt lost.
There are moments in all of our lives when we cannot see the way forward and we don’t know which way to turn. We wonder if the decisions that we have made in life have been the best decisions, we wonder where we would be if we had done things differently. And we don’t know which way to go.
The Psalmist writes You look for truth deep within me.
God actively seeks out the lost, searching hard. In fact, if the parables that Jesus tells us today are right, God looks harder for the lost than He does for those who are on the right track. To get lost is to ensure that God will focus harder on us, not to glory in our brokenness but to find us and help us find our way home.
If you feel at your wits end, saddened by the state of the world and unclear about how to help, God is looking for you.
If you feel aimless and unsure about your future, God is looking for you.
If you feel that there might not be a God, and maybe this is all a sham, God is looking for you.
With the intensity of a blood hound, God is moving closer to you in your darkest moments, the moments when you feel that God is nowhere to be found. There God is, searching.
And we are called to be like God, to search for the broken and the lost. When you look around this morning, when you go to coffee hour or offer someone the peace, look for the person who seems lost. Don’t just greet your friends. Find those who have no friends and let them know that you are there.
And when you wake up on Monday morning, walk in the steps of Jesus. Seek out the man who sits alone on the side of the road with no place to sleep. Even if you are afraid that he will ask you for money, say hello. Speak to him and look him in the eyes. Find him and see him, even if all that you can say to him is to give him directions to the shelter.
We Christians are not placed on this earth to just enjoy life. We are called to follow the Shepherd and that means walking into the brokenness of the world and offering food. That means looking for the lost and helping them find their way home.
This is your home. This altar here, where you are fed every week. This is your anchor, your resting place, so that you may go out into the world and do the work of the Shepherd. Each week you kneel down together, rich and poor and you are fed.
I have never seen someone more lost than the man who lost his wife of 50 years. We had to nearly carry him through the funeral, for he could hardly walk. He was like a lost child, like a baby, he could not hear a word I said, so I just put my arm around him as the coffin was lowered into the earth, and then I took him to get something to eat.
When a baby is lost and afraid, it cries. When it needs to be comforted, it will put something in its mouth. That is what God is doing here, God puts something in your mouth because when the rubber hits the road and we face death and the meaning of life itself, we are all lost. We are all infants, facing something so unknown that it frightens us beyond imagining. So God puts something on our tongues, God feeds us. God finds us. Again and again and again, God seeks you out and God finds you.
