Mention the
word “lost” to me and I immediately register a sinking feeling. You might be talking about an umbrella, a
wallet, a piece of jewelry that slid from your neck or your finger. Or you might be talking about somebody’s
dying, or a relationship that crashed and burned, or a valuable address you
mislaid, or a job that is no more. They’re
not all the same, those losses. But even
the little ones leave you a little bit lost, I suspect, and I feel your loss
and your being lost because I know what it’s like.
When I push
myself to know whence comes my sadness around being lost or losing something, I
go back to a morning in the summer of my fifth year. Those were days when parents didn’t think
twice about letting a kid toddle off by himself, provided he’d learned to stop,
look, and listen at intersections and railroads. On a fine Sunday morning my parents agreed to
let me go to Sunday school at the nearby church. The place was somewhat new to me, as we were
staying all that summer not at home but in the beach house. But cousins of mine attended there and I had
on one or more occasions gone with them.
In fact, I was to meet some of them there that day. And so I did.
I had a great time, as much as one might in unfamiliar surroundings. Afterwards, I said goodbye, disappointed that
I couldn’t go with them to big church, but obedient to my parents’ instruction
to meet them at a designated corner when Sunday school was dismissed.
I went to
that corner expecting to see the black Chevrolet waiting for me.
It was nowhere in sight.
I must have waited all of a minute before it
hit me that I had been forgotten.
I was
alone in a strange place.
And suddenly
everything turned from glorious to frightening.
I might as well have been plopped down in the middle of Manhattan or
Tokyo, so alone and scared and lost I felt.
And I did what most five-year-olds know to do. I started crying.
Something must have told me I should be
ashamed as well as frightened, so I hid behind a big bush.
Just then a kind man was passing by and heard
my whimpering, turned to see me, knelt down and asked me what was the
matter.
At that very moment my mother
and father drove up.
I was all at once
grateful for the kind man who stopped, vastly relieved to see my parents, and a
little sorry about my tears.
I got in
the car.
My parents professed shock at
my being upset, as they couldn’t quite grasp that in my child’s life, two
minutes can seem like a day when suddenly you feel abandoned, lost, maybe
forgotten forever.
None of it is
rational, and rationalizing doesn’t really work to reassure a kid.
I guess I learned to be a bit more patient
and not to imagine myself lost so quickly.
But the scar was there.
And I
think my soul feels the wound beneath the old scab every time I’m standing on
some corner in my life wondering where I am and whether I’ll be found or
forgotten.
And, silly as it might be,
when I hear your tales of losing and being lost, some chime in me emits a little
sound of recognition and empathy.
These
people [Luke 15:1] in Jesus’ audience, these people who grumbled that the undesirables were
polluting the place, who were irritated that Jesus welcomed all manner of
outcasts and even shared table fellowship with them: were they never stranded, lost, scared that
they’d be forgotten? Oh, you’d better
believe that they had been. There is
hardly a way to be human and not have that experience once or twice in your
life. But you learn to swallow your
fear, to buck up, to ignore or deny your hurt.
And if you are a boy, you hear multiple voices telling you all over the
place that you’d better be brave, that you’d better show no hurt, that if you
let down your guard and snivel you’re a cry-baby, that if you let on that you
are scared you’re a sissy. Girls have it
easier in that department, though rougher in some others. And all of us, all of us learn to plaster
over our hurts. It is now common
parlance to tell somebody, “Get over it.”
Maybe we should. But maybe we
can’t. Not rapidly or easily at
least. Not all the time. But the fastest (if not the best) antidote
for fear or powerlessness is to make a nest right in the middle of the people
who you can trust never to desert you (if there are any such people). And the next best thing is to rank on
somebody who is less lucky than you.
That is what birds and mammals and some other species do. And we are right there among the mammals,
very close to our primate cousins.
Ranking on the helpless is the name of the game.
Oh, nobody talks about it much. It is even considered bad taste and even
inflammatory in this country to talk about class distinctions and
differences. We’re not supposed to do
that sort of thing. You tell me. Is there no such thing? And the scribes and the Pharisees were
grumbling, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Strike him off the list. Not socially acceptable. Radical.
Probably subversive. May even be a socialist. Who knows, a communist? Certainly he isn’t one of us, good rabbinical
education though he might have.
I’ve been hanging out with progressives and liberals for
years now. Many of them, including many
of you, are members of my tribe. We
like to believe that we accept everyone, we are open and affirming, we are the
people and the churches with a welcome mat for all. Well, that is true. To an extent.
But we find it hard to love the ones who are different from us, as much
as if they were on Jesus’ guest list and we were the etiquette police. Conservatives? Evangelical Christians? Holy rollers?
I don’t know who the out-group is for you, but I can promise you that
you probably have one. If you’re like me
it doesn’t take you ten seconds to come up with a group of people that get on
your nerves, that you’d just as soon never see again, people that when only
your closest friends are listening you’ll actually call disparaging names. Redneck comes to mind, but you know of others
as bad or worse.
And that is where Luke Chapter 15 comes in, with its parables.
“There were ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold,
but one was out on the hills away, far off from the gates of gold.” So runs an old hymn, never included, so far
as I know, in an Episcopal hymnal. What
is it all about? A single lost sheep? No. It
is about a shepherd who actually cares about the lost. It is about a loving
Presence, whom Jesus regularly called “Abba,” who is all about seeking and
saving every single piece of his entire creation, not stopping to evaluate the
monetary importance of a single dung-covered sheep that wandered off from the
flock. And the woman with ten silver
coins: quite a collection for a first-century Palestinian. Maybe she was counting them out when one
slipped away and rolled into a dark corner.
Tell her all you want that she has nine, so what’s all the fuss about?
And she’ll look you in the eye and tell you that there were ten and her
collection is broken and it came she’ll have you know from her great-aunt on
her mother’s side and whether or not you understand it or her, she will sweep
the entire house inch by inch until she finds it again. And by the way, would you happen to have a
match on you to light her candle? That,
says our Lord and Master, is a snapshot of what God is like when one of the
children is missing. And the story does
not stop with the discovery and recovery of the lost. Celebration follows. Heaven breaks into singing and dancing, for
the lost is found, the sick is healed, the estranged welcomed, the dead come to
life again, and the family together once more.
It could be that you have a place somewhere down in you that
is not so covered up with layers of denial and shame that you can still feel
what it is like to be lost, or to have lost something precious. Maybe you can even come to tears, it is so
real. Or it could be that such a feeling
lies buried far beneath your carefully coiffed and groomed exterior, tucked in
the dark and labeled, “Danger. Do not
touch.” Most of us have a little of
both.
God knows what it's like. The
immortal, invisible, God only-wise knows what it feels like to watch a son
tortured right before his Father’s eyes.
Knows what betrayal and denial and rebellion in the family are like, has
lived through it all, and still, still throws a dinner party every week at
which the blind, the halt, the deaf, the sinner, the self-righteous prig, the
bombastic know-it-all, the no-count lurker are all invited. Can be seen roaming the mountainsides looking
for a lost animal, can be seen combing through beaches and forests and jails
and hospitals looking for the lost and wounded.
The love that will not let you go only asks that you love
the same way. No one ever said that it
was easy.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016.
