We were talking in Book Group the
other day about adoption – it’s a subject I know something about, since I
myself am adopted. Some of the group wondered about how I felt about being
adopted. Their question were ones that are often posed to those of us who are
adopted. Did I long to know more about my birth parents? Did I ever search for
them, as the writer of the book we are reading had done? My answers were pretty
simple. I always knew that I was adopted, and that I was cherished by my
adoptive parents. I was chosen, rather than a product of a random act of
reproduction. I was, in fact, found.
That word found is an important one
as we sit together today in this place, because the readings really swirl
around the idea of “lost and found.” In Jeremiah, the people have lost their
concept of their creator and seemingly cannot find their way back to him. In
the Gospel, once again we have someone who is lost and must be found.
Are we lost? Are we found?
I’d contend that we are a little of
both.
In my own adoption story, my birth
mother gave me up. She could not take care of me as a single mother in the
1950s. My adoptive parents, who had struggled for years unsuccessfully to have
a child of their own, wanted a child desperately. I was lost, then I was found,
and thank God for that. I never felt the need to go find my birth parents. But
many years later, I needed to find out some medical history, and I reached out
to the adoption agency that placed me. The social worker wanted to know why I
wanted to contact my birth mother. Just medical history, I said. I had no need
for another mother – the one who raised me was plenty enough. If she wanted to
talk or correspond, though, I would welcome it. And so the social worker got in
touch with my birth mother, and I found myself wondering what would happen if
indeed she wanted contact with me. Would she expect me to treat her as my
mother? Would she want me to support her? What were my obligations, and what
would she be like? Eventually, the social worker got back to me. No family
history relating to the medical issue I asked about. No family medical history
information at all, and the birth mother did not want any contact. I was vaguely
disappointed – in a way it felt like she was handing me off again, as she had
many years ago. The social worker suggested I write a letter to my birth mother
to put in the file, in case she changed her mind. I did that, but never heard
anything more. I presume she is dead, since she would be almost 100 by now. But
the social worker did an interesting thing. She sent me some notes about the
circumstances of my birth and some information about my birth parents. Not
names, of course, since I was adopted in the time of closed adoptions. But I
found out a lot that was helpful to me in the sense that I started to know a
little about my heritage. What I found in that sharing of information was a bit
of what I had lost, and didn’t even know that I had been missing.
That’s one of the markers of losing
things. I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t even realize they’re
missing until something happens that calls attention to the fact of the loss. I
don’t know that I’ve misplaced the car keys until I head out the door and can’t
find them in my purse. I don’t know that I’ve lost my cellphone until I
remember I need to call someone. Does it work that way for you, too?
In the same way, we don’t realize we’ve
lost our connection to God – that it has slipped away somehow because of
distraction or neglect – until we need God, and we wonder where He’s gone to.
In point of fact, it isn’t God who is lost and in need of finding. It’s us.
God is always there. In truth, he usually
is the one who keeps looking for us, whispering in our ears, “hey, remember
me?”
Now there are times when we are not
really lost: we are hiding from God, just as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of
Eden when they did a bad thing and were ashamed. We have turned away because we
have done something, or have not done something, and we think that if we just
act like ostriches and stick our heads in the sand, God won’t see the rest of
us wiggling around in the air. We might hide. We might think that God can’t
find us. But he can, and does. So it is, perhaps more like being aware that he
is there than it is wondering about whether we can find him or he can find us.
In the parable, Jesus talks about the
persistence and even the foolishness of a shepherd being so concerned for one
of his lost sheep that he leaves the rest of the flock to go find the one gone
astray. This shepherd doesn’t say, “Boy, that’s one idiotic sheep! Let him go
find his own way home if he’s so stupid he got himself lost.” He may be thinking
about it, but he loves that dumb sheep enough to go looking. That’s what God
does when we wander. We’re busy saying “Where’s God?” when it is us who have
wandered. We’re going looking in all sorts of ridiculous places when he is not
only looking for us, he has already found us. We’re the ones who are hiding
from him, and that’s just foolish.
Remember
the Psalm from last week, Psalm 139? The Psalmist says “O Lord,
you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying
down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.”
If the
Lord already knows us completely, even when we do things that are contrary to
his will, even when we are like the Israelites in the passage from Jeremiah,
where the Lord says “my people are foolish, they do not
know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding,” even when we
forget his love, God loves us and seeks us out. He knows us, and still loves us
in all our flawed selves. And that’s why he keeps looking for us, reaching out
for us when we aren’t reaching out for him. He desires to be in relationship
with us. In modern language, he wants to hang out with us, to be viewed as one
who loves us, not as a distant and unknowable judge. That’s why he sent us
Jesus, to help us know him as intimately and as concretely as he knows us.
Will we be perfect followers of
Jesus? Most likely not. We will try and will occasionally fail. We will be
embarrassed when we realize how imperfect we are, and will try to fail. But the
God who made us loves us so much that he will not let us hide. He will insist
on finding us wherever we have wandered. He draws us in and says “why did you
run away? I want you here by me.” He heals our broken hearts and redeems our
sins. No need to feel lost. We are already found.
Amen.
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