Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 12, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Sometimes God just doesn’t make sense, the God, that is, that Jesus tells us about in his parables. Jesus’ parables are often his way of telling us about who God is, and those parables about who God is sometimes leave us saying: "Huh?" The more I thought about the two parables in this morning’s lesson, the more I thought: "Huh?" When you look at them closely, they just don’t make sense.

Take the parable about the shepherd and the lost sheep. Recall how it starts: "Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" The way the parable is written leaves you thinking "of course! That’s obvious!" You think that, that is, until you stop and consider the matter a bit. The parable has you leaving 99% of your flock "in the wilderness." Not in some nice, safe, fenced off corral or in a locked barn. It has you leave them "in the wilderness," that is, in a place where they are exposed to threats from thirst, hunger, and above all predators. In other words, you’re leaving them in mortal danger. You’re leaving them in a situation such that you’d be lucky to find two-thirds of the 99 still there and alive when you got back. You’re risking far more than you would ever recover by finding the one lost sheep. If I’d been there when Jesus asked which of you wouldn’t leave the 99 to find the one, my hand would have shot up in the air, and I’d be saying "Well, me for one!"

Then take the woman looking for the lost coin. When you look at her story closely, she doesn’t make any sense either. She’s lost one coin. The Greek original of the word translated here as coin is "drachma." A drachma was a very small coin, about one day’s wage for a laborer according to my sources. Given the economic realities of that day, that couldn’t have been more than a few cents. A few cents may have been a lot to the woman to be sure. Laborers in those days lived pretty much at a subsistence level, and losing anything would be a serious loss. So you might think that what she’s doing here makes sense, but it doesn’t.

Take a closer look at the other details we’re given. The woman lights a lamp to help her look for the lost coin. That means she’s burning oil, and oil costs money. When she first lit the lamp she didn’t know how long she’d have to keep it burning before she found the coin, or even if she’d find the coin at all. There is a real possibility that in her search she burned oil worth more than the coin she lost. Beyond that, like the shepherd who so recklessly risked the loss of 99 sheep to recover one, the coin woman calls together her friends and neighbors for a celebration over finding the lost coin. In her culture that meant offering hospitality, serving food and wine; and that party certainly cost her more than the one drachma she lost. This woman’s actions make no more sense than do the actions of the shepherd.

Jesus could have told us a parable about losing and finding that would make sense to us and to the people of his time. For example: Many of us here are parents. Many of us have, at one point in our lives if not presently, had small children; and some of us at least have had the experience of losing a child for a time. Maybe we’re in the grocery store or at the mall. We have our young child with us. All of a sudden we look around and the child is gone. Missing. Lost. And we panic. We have nightmare visions of the worst that could have happened. Probably the child has just wandered off a short way following her curiosity or attracted by some colorful bauble on the next aisle over. Still, we panic, and w search frantically, looking everywhere, caring about nothing but finding our lost child. When we find her, we may act angry at her for wandering off, but our hearts are filled with joy at having found our beloved daughter safe and sound. A story like that as a parable about God we’d understand.

Jesus, however, didn’t tell that parable. He told us parables that make no sense about a reckless shepherd and a foolish woman--reckless and foolish in the eyes of the world that is. He did that, I believe, to make a point. A parable about a parent losing, looking for, and finding a child we’d understand; but that parable would make God only human. It would make God’s love for us nothing more than human love. By telling parables that make no sense in human terms, Jesus is saying: God’s love, care, and concern for us so far exceed human love, care and concern that to us they make no sense. God’s love for us transcends anything we can comprehend. It is not of a human scale. It is absolute, and it transcends human love absolutely.

The truth is this: God will not let us go. We can separate ourselves from God, and we do all the time. We do it by living as though God had no claim on us. We do it by refusing to spend time with God. We do it by whoring after idols--idols of wealth success, and nation, for example. We are like the lost sheep who got lost not because the shepherd drove it away but because it wandered off alone into the wilderness. God doesn’t so much lose us as we run away from God into our own wildernesses of our own making.

We run away from God, and God comes running after us. God comes running, and God keeps running and running and running after us for as long as it takes until we stop running away and let ourselves be found. God comes running after us even when to the eyes of the world it makes no sense for God to do that. The world may look at a person and say: He’s lost. She’s beyond redemption. Surely God has given up on that one. Surely God has rejected him, condemned her. That’s the world’s way of thinking. Jesus’ nonsense parables tell us, however, that it’s not God’s way of thinking. God’s exuberant care for us is such that God seeks us even when doing so makes no sense. God isn’t limited by petty things like reason and human concepts of merit, punishment, and reward. God just keeps seeking us until we are found, and nothing we can do will deter God from that quest.

Friends, we may fervently be seeking God. I trust that we are. The good news of the Gospel is that God is even more fervently seeking us, and that is very good news indeed. Amen.