September 11, 2016, Sermon – God Who Seeks

Sermon for St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, Iowa, for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost.

This week’s lectionary readings are Luke 15:1-10 and 1 Timothy 1:12-17. 

The picture on the left is Lost Drachma, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot. Source here.

This sermon also draws from David Lose’s writing at his blog, In the Meantime.

If someone asked you about God’s character, what would you tell them? If you had to tell someone what God is like, where would you start?

You might begin at the beginning in Genesis with creation, the story of God forming the world out of nothing, molding people out of the dust of the earth. Or, to describe God, you might start with the church, the body of Christ, and begin with how we worship God.

Or you could start with a philosophical argument about God as the spark of the universe, or supreme moral being.

In today’s readings, Jesus tells a couple parables to illustrate God’s character. In these parables, we learn that God is a God who seeks the lost, who cares for individuals. That’s not a bad place to start if you’re trying to describe God’s character.

Jesus tells about a shepherd who has a hundred sheep, but one has wandered away. Instead of abandoning this missing sheep, he leaves the other 99 and goes to look for it. When he finds it, he has a party to celebrate.

If that describes God, as Jesus says it does, then it’s good news for us, because we all wander away.

We’re the sheep in this story. Sometimes we’re the 99 who are faithful, but incomplete because one is missing, and at some point, each of us is the one who wanders away.

This story shows a God who searches for you when you wander. No matter how far you’ve strayed away from God, God still searches for you. Not to punish you, or to trap you, but to put you on his shoulders and carry you back where you belong.

The interesting thing about these parables is the question Jesus asks at the beginning. Which of you, if you were missing a sheep or a coin, would leave everything else behind to find it?

Well, most of us probably wouldn’t. 99 sheep is still a pretty good flock, after all, and you wouldn’t want to risk them.

I’d been picturing the shepherd leaving the 99 safely locked up in a pen, or maybe trusted to a neighboring shepherd. When I read the story more closely, I realized the shepherd really is taking a risk here. Look at verse four. Do you see where he leaves the 99? In the wilderness. The shepherd is willing to risk everything for the sake of the one who is missing. That’s powerful.

I would probably spend a few minutes searching for a missing coin, especially if it’s 10% of what I have. But when I find it, I’m hardly going to have a party. The woman here probably spends as much on entertaining her friends and neighbors as she saved by finding the coin!

What does this tell us about God? It tells us that God rejoices over each one of us. God’s love is extravagant and irrational.

These parables say that you matter to God. It’s really easy, sometimes, to get so overwhelmed by everything going on in life that we think we have no significance.

How many people do you think have lived in the last 2000 years? Take a guess.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but the estimates I found were somewhere around 55 billion people who have lived in the last 2000 years. There are about 7.5 billion people alive today.

And among those 7.5 billion people, among those 55 billion in history, God cares about you.

God doesn’t need you to wear a name tag to remember who you are; I might need to, but God knows your name. God rejoices over you.

In these stories, Jesus uses ordinary people, normal life, to describe God. A shepherd missing a sheep and a woman missing a coin are mundane examples. Maybe that’s because God’s seeking often comes through normal people.

15 years ago today the United States was attacked. Some of you weren’t born yet, or were too young to remember, but for many of us, September 11, 2001, is a touchstone moment, a day marked in our memories.

I was 12 years old, and I remember it was a Tuesday morning. I’d spent the night on Sunday with my grandparents after going to a Packers football game in Green Bay.

Monday turned into a half-vacation day from school as I came home (remember I was homeschooled), and then on Tuesday morning, I remember we were eating breakfast when the choir director at church, called and said we needed to turn on the TV. I remember we had lunch that day at Taco Bell, because we didn’t know what else to do, or what to make at home for lunch. I think my mom just wanted to be around other people.

We’ve all seen pictures and video from that horrible day. Maybe you know people who were directly affected. Those attacks changed the course of our nation’s history and the world’s history.

As time has passed since then, though, we’ve found inspiration from September 11. Out of the fear, sorrow, and anger have come stories of heroism, of ordinary people risking and giving up their lives for the sake of others.

On this 15th anniversary, we remember the firefighters and police who gave up their lives in the line of duty, and we remember the other stories of heroism that emerged, inside the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and on board United Flight 93.

From these parables, we know that God seeks out the lost. On that day, we can find stories of God using ordinary people to find people who were lost. We can see God working through people like Welles Crowther, an equities trader working on the 104th floor of the south tower, who led a group of people down the stairs to safety, then went back up for more, and is credited with saving 18 people before dying when the tower collapsed.

When we look at this tragedy through the lens of these parables, we can see God at work. The attacks were absolutely not part of God’s plan, or anything like that, but in all things, God can work for good. We can see God at work in the people who went in to help, people who didn’t set out to be heroes, but whom God worked through.

In stories of heroism and rescues that we know, and in stories that only God knows, we can catch glimpses of God literally seeking the lost.

In the other reading from 1 Timothy, we also see God seeking and saving. This time, we see it from the perspective of the one who’s been saved. This section is part of Paul’s testimony. He describes himself as a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. He’s lost. He’s strayed from God.

But God didn’t give up on him. Instead, Jesus sought him out on the road to Damascus, and instead of punishing or smiting him or something, he forgave him.

Paul writes, “The grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

The Bible and the history of the Christian faith are full of stories of God not giving up on people, not losing them in the crowd, or writing them off after they’ve done something horrible, but pursuing them to forgive them and redeem their lives.

God works through ordinary, forgiven people. Sometimes it’s obvious, like in a time of disaster, or when someone who persecutes the church becomes its greatest missionary. But often it’s through smaller things, through normal people in everyday life.

What’s your story about this God who seeks the lost? Maybe you have a dramatic story of God seeking you and finding you.

Maybe God has used you so that others may be found, maybe even in ways you don’t even know yet.

Or maybe you need to hear today that God hasn’t given up on you, that God is still seeking you. God will never leave you alone in the wilderness. You matter to God.

Robert Robinson, a pastor in the 1700’s put it like this, in a hymn you might know:

Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.
Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be;
Let that grace now like a fetter bind my wand’ring heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above.

Let that be our prayer as well.

Holy God, thank you for seeking us. Thank you for not abandoning us, even when we wander. We ask that you would bind our wandering hearts to you, because we are prone to wandering, to forgetting your love for us. Bring us back to you, and use us to find others who need to hear about your love. We pray in the name of the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord.
Amen.

Our next hymn is another person’s story of encountering God’s grace. We sing together number #448, Amazing Grace.