Lost (sermon, Sept. 12, 2010)

Luke 15:1-10
Exodus 32:1-14

When I was in the sixth grade, my class had the opportunity to spend three weeks in London. One day, thirteen of us, two teachers and eleven students, set out to go sightseeing, which involved riding the subway. We waited a few minutes on the crowded platform for our train, and when it finally arrived, we pushed ourselves on, the teachers bringing up the rear. But when only half of our group was on the train the car simply ran out of room and before the rest of the students and the two teachers could get on, the doors began to close. For a moment, as the train began to pull away, we were terrified, and our teachers looked panicked. Then one teacher began frantically shouting, “Get off at the next stop! Get off at the next stop!”

We got off at the next stop and waited for the rest of our group to catch up, which they did within ten minutes. For years, I kept a framed picture in my room of those few minutes we spent on the subway platform, waiting. My friends lounged on a bench, with expressions on their faces that revealed the delicious sense of freedom we felt and the total absence of fear or worry. When our group was together again, the teachers made it clear that from then on, if we got separated, we were to stay put, and wait to be found, since to do otherwise would just get us more lost.

Not long after the Israelites escaped their life of slavery in Egypt, their leader, Moses, received the Ten Commandments from God and passed them on to the people. The very first commandment was this: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

Seems pretty straightforward, right? But God has a few other things to talk to Moses about, so shortly after Moses delivers the Ten Commandments to the people, he disappears again up Mount Sinai, leaving the Israelites waiting...and waiting...and waiting for his return. And the longer they wait without Moses, their leader, the one who represents God for them, the more they feel hopelessly, profoundly lost. But instead of staying right where they are and trusting that Moses would return to find them, they start looking for ways to feel like God is right there in their midst again.

Last week, just in time for all the back-to-school excitement, the New York Times published an article called “Forget What You Know about Good Study Habits.” As the title suggests, science has shown that most of the assumptions we have about good study habits are, in fact, wrong. The researchers also learned something surprising about tests. It turns out that tests aren’t just a way of assessing how well a student has learned the material, they are also a powerful tool for helping students retain what they’ve learned. When you sit down to a test that challenges you and makes you think hard, all that information gets more deeply anchored in your mind and you have a better chance of recalling it later. Tests are some of the best tools we have for learning. (1)

With Moses back up on Mount Sinai with God, the Israelites face a test for which they feel woefully unprepared. Without their leader, without their representative from God, they begin to think that maybe God isn’t with them anymore, that maybe God has in fact abandoned them. They feel utterly lost.

When we feel lost, creating idols is one of the first things we do. Sometimes we substitute something else for God, usually something that makes us feel good, that masks the fear we feel when we sense that we are lost and alone: money, food, alcohol, and work are just a few of these things. The other way we create idols is more subtle, but no less dangerous: we make God into something God is not, often something that looks like what we think God should look like. Sometimes we decide God must look just like a certain person, a spiritual mentor, whether a pastor, parent, or teacher. Sometimes we associate God too closely with a beloved tradition in the church, like a particular style of worship. No matter how we do it, though, the outcome is clear: we distort God’s image and begin to worship something that is not God.

Most people who read this passage believe that what the Israelites did was the first thing: they took something that was not God and worshipped it as a god. It’s no wonder we make this assumption, since the text says that after Aaron made the golden calf he brought it before the Israelites and proclaimed, “These are your gods, O Israel!” But in Hebrew, the original language of the text, the word for gods in the plural is the same as the word for the one true God. So it is just as likely that Aaron said, “This is your God, O Israel.” In other words, it’s not that the Israelites are trying to replace God with the golden calf; instead they’re trying to create something that can represent God for them while Moses is gone. (2)

It’s an understandable mistake. After all, they were on a long journey, far from home, even if home was slavery in Egypt. They want God to stay with them, to be a tangible presence. As long as Moses was around, they had that. But they soon forgot that it wasn’t Moses who had brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, even though Moses was their leader: it was God! Remember the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt...” The Israelites were not unlike the four year-old who says to her friend, the pastor’s daughter, “You’re so lucky that your daddy is Jesus.” It’s an understandable mistake for a preschooler, but the Israelites are supposed to know better.

In the children’s book The Kissing Hand, a raccoon who is afraid to go to school gets a kiss from his mother on the palm of his hand so that all day during school, he can look at his hand and know that his mother’s love is with him. (3) Children need these reassurances that their parents are near, even when they feel alone. This is why so many children have special blankets or stuffed animals from which they become inseparable. Because without these tangible representatives of their parents, they feel scared. They feel lost, alone. Only over time do they understand and truly believe that when their parents say goodnight or leave the room, they will eventually return.

At this point in their salvation history, the Israelites have not yet learned to trust that whether they can see, feel, or sense God, God is still with them. It’s a difficult lesson for all of us. We all tend to revert to our childlike fears when we face a time of confusion or doubt, and it is incredibly tempting at those times to make God into something we can handle, something that makes sense to us, something that is predictable, that we don’t have to fear.

When God sees what the Israelites have done, God is furious -- furious enough, in fact, that God is ready to to give up on the people altogether. But with a little reminder from Moses, God does remember, and God’s love for the Israelites overcomes God’s anger. Wronged by a fickle, fearful people, God refuses to let them stay lost. God refuses to abandon the people God loves and instead commits once again to pursuing them, to doing whatever it takes to find them, no matter how lost they are.

This is the God Jesus describes in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. He tells these parables because the Pharisees and the scribes, the ones who thought they had figured out exactly what God was like, were infuriated that Jesus, this prophet, this God-representative, was hanging out with sinners, those who were utterly lost. So Jesus asks a question, “which one 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 answer? Well, sorry, Jesus, but none of us would do that. I mean, if we were shepherds with a hundred sheep and one went missing, would we really leave ninety-nine sheep alone to find the one? To do so was to take a huge risk that another sheep would get lost or, worse, eaten by a wolf. No decent shepherd would do that. And Jesus knows it. No, you wouldn’t, Jesus is saying. But God would. (4)

The same logic holds with the woman who lost a coin. Yes, we would probably all do what she did and search the house for a lost twenty dollar bill, but would we then turn around and spend a hundred bucks on a party for our friends and neighbors to celebrate? No, of course not. But God would. God has promised to be our God. God has promised that we are God’s people. And God will find us. No matter what it takes, no matter how lost we have gotten ourselves. God will find us. Every time.

My friend Amy has terrible eyesight. Without contacts or glasses, she can barely see this far in front of her face. As a child, she loved to go to the beach with her family and play in the ocean, and she would inevitably stay in the water longer than anyone else, usually drifting with the current far from the family blanket. Since she couldn’t wear her glasses in the water, when she would come back onto the beach, she couldn’t see her family. The only way she could find them was to get as close as she could to the people lounging on their beach towels. That method never worked well and was always embarrassing. So Amy finally learned that the only thing to do when she came in from the water was to stand on the beach and wait for her family to come to her and lead her back to their blanket. And they always did.

On this journey of faith we all have times when we know Amy’s momentary sense of terror, as we wait, vulnerable and afraid, wet and cold, utterly alone, completely lost, wondering if this time God really has abandoned us for good; waiting and hoping against hope that God will see us standing there and claim us and take us home. In those moments may we remember, may it be imbedded deep in our souls, that very first commandment, “I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” And may we trust that our God -- who has already claimed us in the waters of baptism -- will search high and low until every lost soul is found. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Benedict Carey, “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.” The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2010. Online here.
2. Thanks to Rolf Jacobsen for this interpretation, found in his commentary on the passage at Working Preacher. Online here.
3. Audrey Penn, The Kissing Hand. Tanglewood Press, 2006.
4. David Lose suggests this interpretation in his Dear Working Preacher column “Desperate” for September 12. Online here.