Recently, on my day off, I was walking my dog over at Ft. Mason in the afternoon.  A fellow rode up to us on his bike and asked if I had seen his dog.  I did not know him or his dog.  He was obviously upset.  He was holding on to a leash that was still attached to a collar.  We talked.  He was looking for a lost dog, an eight-month old black Labrador puppy.  He had been walking his dog that morning.  Some people had shot off some fireworks.  It had spooked his dog.  His dog had jerked his head just so he slipped out of his collar and ran off.   He had been out looking all day.  Longing was all over this man.

 

            Just so, says, Jesus, God is looking for us.  Looking and looking for us, for you and me.

 

            This is the good news Jesus declares to us in this parable about the lost sheep and the two parables that follow it.  God is looking for us.

 

II

 

Jesus gives this good news after being challenged by the Pharisees and scribes.  It started when the Pharisee and scribes watched as tax collectors and sinners came to Jesus.  In the eyes of the Pharisees and scribes, these were no-account people.  They were not acceptable or admirable people.  Yet they were coming to Jesus and Jesus was welcoming them.  He was not just tolerating them or watching them.  He welcomed them.  To make matters worse, it was already known that Jesus was willing to eat with them.  In that culture, having a meal with someone communicated approval and acceptance of them.  The Pharisees and scribes were watching all this, and, in the language of the text they “grumbled”.  What a wonderful word “grumbled”.  We all know what this is about.  We all do it from time-to-time.  Some people seem very good at it.  We grumble about someone or something when we do not have the courage to speak up about something that troubles us.  Worse yet, we often seek out people we know agree with us that then we get a group grumble going.  We grumble about something somebody said or did or something some group did.  The Pharisees and scribes grumbled about Jesus welcoming and eating with these tax collectors and sinners.

 

It is easy to dispense with the Pharisees and scribes.  We know as we read through the Gospels that they were increasingly upset about Jesus and in the end conspired to kill him.  It is not easy to write them off.  But before we do that, we should pay more attention to them.  We should risk respecting them.  There is something going on in them that sometimes goes on in us.

 

The other day I received a card from my older brother Rob.  He had been on vacation in Clear Lake, Iowa.  For almost 60 years, my family had a cottage and then two cottages on Clear Lake.  Rob was back there visiting some life-long friends.  One day he was in a store and was looking at greeting cards.  He saw one which stopped him cold.  It was one of those cards that had a photograph on the front.  You could then open it up and put a message on the inside.  A local photographer had taken the photograph and it was entitled “Old Cabins – South Shore Drive”.  Old Cabins, my foot!  Those were our two cottages.  I had lived in those cottages.  I was afraid of storms in those cottages.  I grew to enjoy storms in those cottages.  I experienced storms in my family in those cottages and more times than I could ever number I experienced my family’s joy, laughter, love and goodwill in those cottages.  I waited for letters from girl friends in those cottages, letters that all too rarely arrived.  When I was out sailing, I would head for those cottages, especially when the wind was whipping up.  Those were not just two old cabins.  I had lived in them.

 

In the same way, people in the bible have experiences we have lived in.  If we look at them carefully enough, we can often see their experiences are like ours.  This is surely one of the reasons why so many people find the psalms so helpful.   Read the psalms and you will read about someone experiencing envy, someone else experiencing the doldrums of middle age, someone else experiencing the waning strength of old age, someone else struggling with an illness, someone else who is dying, someone else who is under attack, and someone else who has been betrayed by friends.  You can find a psalm or two or more that you have lived in.

 

Well, maybe, just maybe, you and I have lived in these Pharisees and scribes.  Give them credit; they were trying to protect the community of faith. They were trying to protect its rules and regulations, its rituals and beliefs.  They wanted the community of faith to retain its distinctive identity and integrity.  They did not want it to blend in with the culture around it.  They did not want it to absorb too much of the Greek culture or the Roman culture.  They were increasingly afraid that Jesus was bringing in some new teachings and maybe letting in the wrong kind of people.

 

What is going on between Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes is this basic tension between exclusion and inclusion.  It is about who is let in and who is kept out. 

 

Miroslav Volf is a contemporary theologian who has written a book entitled Exclusion and Embrace.  It is about this tension.  Writing the book was not an academic exercise for him.  He is Croatian.  He has struggled with just how on earth he would be willing to open his heart to Serbs.  He has the same kind of nationalistic and patriotic loyalties we all have for our country.  Yet he knows his highest loyalty is not to his country but to the Kingdom of God.  He knows he has to be willing to let Christ rule in his heart and life.  So he writes this book as an attempt to work out just how he and others might be able to open up to people they want to exclude from their lives.

 

This same struggle between exclusion and inclusion is expressed in a poem by Robert Frost.  It is entitled “The Death of the Hired Man”.  It is a long conversation between a husband and wife.  A man they had hired in the past had come back to their home.  She had let him come into their home.  She told her husband about it when he came home in the evening.  She knew he would be upset and he is.  He does not want the man around.  He had hired the man many times in the past and he had been unreliable.  He would often leave them when a neighbor offered to pay him cash.  He was tired of being disappointed by him.  Besides, he points out the man has a brother who lives near by.  They talk and talk about this in the evening on their porch.  Then they focus on just what home is.  This is how they talk about home:

 

“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die;

You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

 

“Home,” he mocked gently.

 

“Yes, what else but home?

It all depends on what you mean by home.

Of course he’s nothing to us, anymore

Than was the hound that came a stranger to us

Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

(He says.) “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in”. (Maybe he is thinking of the brother who ought to take him in.)

 

(She says.)”I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

 

Her language is awkward.  What she is saying is that home is not something you have to deserve.  Home is something given.  It is there for you.  There is no exclusion at home.

 

            This is a struggle we have all the time -- who to include and who to exclude.

 

            Jesus believed the Pharisees were too quick and too sharp in deciding who could be included in the community of faith.

 

III

 

            So Jesus tells these grumbling Pharisees and scribes this parable and then two others about a lost coin and about a lost or prodigal son. A shepherd has 100 sheep.  One wanders off.  Jesus does not say the sheep was foolish or sinful.  The sheep just wanders off, the way we sometimes do.  The shepherd then leaves the 99 sheep there in the wilderness and goes after it.  He searches and searches until he finds it.  Then when he finds it, he does not say to the sheep, “Well you wandered off, you can just as well walk back!”  He is so overjoyed at finding the lost sheep, he puts it up on his shoulders and carries it home.  Then, once he has the sheep back in the fold, he does not go home, plop down in front of the television and order in.  He invites his friends to a party, to share his joy at finding the lost sheep.

 

Just so, says Jesus, God rejoices when we are found.

 

Fancy that.  We so often talk about what God can do for us.  We too rarely consider how our actions affect God.  Here is something we can do, you can do and I can do, which will bring joy to the great heart of God.  We can let ourselves be found by God.

 

In describing how willing God is to come to us and seek us out, Jesus was not saying anything new.  In Ezekiel there is this description of how God is willing to be a shepherd to God’s people.  God will be the shepherd; God will seek and find.  Listen again to hear how personal God is about this:

 

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.

 

            God takes finding us and binding us up personally.

 

IV

 

            This language about letting God find us can be confusing.  We usually talk about how we are trying to find God.  The bible takes that language and turns it on its ear.  God is trying to find us.

 

When Jesus talks about God trying to find us, surely he does not mean that God is trying to locate us.  God knows where we are every moment of our lives.  What the bible means when it says God finds us is that God finds us when God finds in us an open heart.  God finds us when we allow God to come into and settle into our lives. 

 

            To repent, as this parable teaches us, is to quit trying to live on our own.  It is to quit running from God.  It is to let God find us and let God come home into our lives.

 

There is a painting the title of which I do not know.  I do not know the painter.  It shows a country inn.  There are people inside.  Jesus is standing at the door.  He is knocking.  The painting is evidently based on Revelations 3: 20.  Jesus says:

 

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.

 

The key to the painting is on the door.  Jesus is by the door.  Jesus is knocking on the door.  But there is no handle on the door.  Jesus cannot open the door.  If Jesus is to come in, the people on the inside have to open the door to Jesus.  The painter knew this about how God works with us.  God is coming to us, reaching to us but we have to open the door of our lives to God in Christ.

 

V

 

            I do not know if the man who was searching for his dog found it.  I hope he did.  I know what it is like to search for a lost dog.  When our three daughters were growing up, we had a little dog.  He was a mixed-breed, mostly Sheltie.  He had white tips on his paws and tail, so we called him “Mr. Tips”.  That name quickly evolved to Tips or Tipsy.  Then one of the girls, I think, called him “Tipsy Doodle”.  Soon we often just called him “Doodle”.  One day he got lost.  We looked all over the area where we lived at the time in Pittsburgh, PA.  I remember walking the road near our home, part of me hoping to find his body so I would at least know what had happened to him and part of me hoping not to find him there. Finally the police called.  He had been found.  We rushed down to the police station and they let him out of one of the kennels they had.  You could tell right away he knew he had messed up.  His ears were back.  He was walking low to the ground.  His tail was even bent low.  But he was still coming at us, as fast as he dared.  As he got close to us it was obvious he was filthy.  As he got closer it was obvious he stank to high heaven.  Yet, his whole being was saying, “Love me!  Love me!  Love me!” and “Take me back!!”  So we loved him, loved him, loved him.  And, of course, we took him back.  It was a joy for us.

 

            Imagine how much greater is the joy in God’s grand heart when we are found.  When we respond to God’s open arms with an open heart.

 

Amen.