Tenderly Searching for the Lost Sheep
- St. Luke's
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
The Rev. Sara Warfield
Today’s lectionary texts, or this proper in Episcopal-speak, have had me thinking all week about what it means to be lost. There’s a certain texture in these scriptures that suggest a certain loss of the self, a loss of the knowledge of who and how God made us. A wandering away from the purpose God gave us in creating us. And a way back.
“They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.” Jeremiah speaks to the people of Israel who have turned away from God. “The whole land shall be a desolation,” he says, looking towards the destruction of Jerusalem that happened in his own lifetime, and the exile of his people to Babylon. “And yet,” he says, speaking God’s words, “I will not make a full end.”
The Psalm today speaks to this same period of time, to the destruction and exile and those who have wandered away from God: “Have they no knowledge, all those evildoers who eat up my people like bread and do not call upon the Lord? See how they tremble with fear, because God is in the company of the righteous.” Come back, the Psalm says. Righteousness will be your salvation.
In his first letter to Timothy, Paul speaks from the other side of his own wandering away: “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.” I was lost, Paul says, but Jesus found me.
These scriptures speak not to those moments when life thrusts us into a wilderness we didn’t choose to be in: the disorienting grief when we lose a spouse or a child or a close friend, or the confusion and rejection of a breakup or a job loss, or the news of a devastating diagnosis. No, they speak to that wilderness that, maybe through a series of poor decisions, maybe in a bout of self-righteous indignation, maybe in the succumbing to hopelessness, we wander into, losing our sense of our createdness in God’s image, losing track of our call to love.
Because when you strip everything else down, when you get to the very core of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, they both boil down to love. First, in Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Chapter six. And then Leviticus makes it clear for the first time in the Hebrew Bible that holiness is not just about the relationship between humans and God, but also between humans and other humans: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Chapter 19.
And then, Jesus reiterates these two commandments across all four gospels, but as you know by now I like how he says it in Matthew best: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Of everything Jesus has ever been taught about his own faith, he says love is the foundation. It’s love at the center of all he himself taught. Love is how he lived. For the love of others, he performed miracles. And in the face of the religious fundamentalists and the Romans in power, it was love to which he held fast above everything else, including his own life.
So all this means: when you strip everything else down, when you get to the very core of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, sin boils down to the wandering away from love.
I don’t ever seek out to preach a particular political view. I don’t ever seek to tell anyone how they should vote or what kind of ideology should dictate laws or policy. I only ever seek to bring attention to those places where we as a community, as a country, as a world are either living into the gospel love that Jesus taught or where we’re wandering away from it.
It is a gospel act, to speak out against the strategic starvation of people in Gaza and Sudan, and to push those with power to stop it.
It is a gospel act, to speak out against the kidnapping of our neighbors off the streets because of the tone of their skin or their accent or the kind of work they do, and to do whatever is in our power to come to their aid.
It is a gospel act, to speak out against the murder of any person, but particularly the people with whom we disagree.
Because each of these is an example of how we’ve wandered away from the love Jesus taught us. Because there is a way to address conflict without atrocity. There is a way to enforce laws without cruelty. There is a way to approach differences without hatred. There is a way to do all of these things with the love Jesus taught us or, as our baptismal covenant calls us to, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.
And listen, those human beings whose dignity we need to respect include the soldiers ordered to enforce that starvation; the masked men ordered to steal mothers from their children; those leaders of nations who are giving those orders. They are lost, wandering from the fold, the flock, of God. Which is our fold, our flock. And if these, who are also our neighbors, are lost, then we are all lost. As Israel was. As Paul was.
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Today’s gospel from Luke reminds me of one of the most powerful biblical interpretations I learned in seminary. We were talking about Genesis 3 when Eve eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and shares the fruit with Adam. Suddenly, they both recognize that they are naked, and they feel ashamed, so they hide from God. God comes into the garden and can’t find the two of them. And God says, “where are you?”
Now I can’t speak for all of you, but I was taught that God asked this question like: “WHERE ARE YOU?” All angry and disappointed.
But what if, as my theology professor Jay Johnson asked, it was more like, “Where are you?” A creator worried about the safety and well-being of the created. Fear that something had happened to them. God searching for them tenderly. With love.
This is the God who is more in line with what Jesus taught: when the sheep or the coin is found, God gathers us together to celebrate, to rejoice, that the one who wandered away came back into the fold, into the love of God.
God is always tenderly searching for us. And if we are God’s hands and feet in the world, as St. Teresa of Avila said so beautifully, then we must always be tenderly searching for one another, for those who are lost, to bring them back into God’s fold, God’s love.
Not in that “WHERE ARE YOU?” way that says “I have the right answer so let me drag you back to the right place,” but in that “Where are you?” way that says, “I’m worried. I want to understand how you got here. I want to hear your story. And I want to walk beside you as we find our way back to God’s love together.”
Someone has been that person for you before. When you were lost, when you wandered away from the love of God. When you were close to hitting bottom. When you were hurting people, even if you didn’t know you were. That person took you under their wing, not without accountability but without judgment, and they walked beside you, at your pace. Or maybe they even took you across their shoulders when you couldn’t walk, and brought you back into the fold, into love. Maybe it took weeks. Maybe it took years. But here you are.
Who was that person who so tenderly sought you out? Can you see their face? God’s face looking upon you with concern? With love?
That’s who you are called to be in this world. That’s who I’m called to be in this world, and believe me, I’m always preaching to myself. We are called to search tenderly for those who are lost, the way Jesus searched for sinners and tax collectors. The way God searched for Israel, for Paul, for us. Amen.