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September 16, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Jeremiah
4:11-12, 22-28, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10
“Hot Wind Bare
Heights Desert People: Seeking the Lost Right Where We Live”
We cannot be found without being lost. We cannot come home this morning
unless we have been away -- gone some place else. For only us sinners are
saved, as Paul puts it. There’s nobody here but us sinners saved –
recycled, set free, healed, made whole -- all by amazing grace.
Life, death and life again of Jesus Christ – “grace mixed with faith and love,”
“endless patience” flow from his offering for us -- making us remotely adequate
to do this work! To offer our own lives back. To be entrusted with
this ministry – such as we may find represented on the “Homecoming Checklist”
and in the Fellowship Hall after worship today.
Does it even matter where we are coming from
this Homecoming Sunday?
Where we have been? Who we have been? Who we
have been with? What we have done? Prison? Drugs? Addiction? Abuse?
Prostitution? Illness? Greed? Indifference? Overwork? Underwork? Harmful
work? Homelessness? Wealth? Paul says the only “credentials” he had when he
met Jesus were “invective and witch hunts and arrogance!” In the usual
translation -- blasphemy, persecution, and violence! If that is all Paul has to
offer, has to lose, who are we to be holding so dearly onto whatever’s so
“wrong” about us? Besides, it’s for being and even eating with folks like us
that gets Jesus in all kinds of trouble!
Let go! Turn around! Come home! Paul calls
himself proof that Jesus comes for us sinners – “Public Sinner Number One!”
What more can we say of ourselves? Is there anything we cannot “lose” of
ourselves this morning? Anything we cannot let the gracious and merciful God of
Jesus “find” in us, or find us in, again? Anything we cannot leave at the
altar? In the communion circle this morning? At the Homecoming Welcoming
Table? God only needs the “worst” in us for God to work with! Sometimes I
think our “best” does not even matter.
According to Jeremiah, there is plenty of
“worst” in us. If Paul is like a gentle breeze soothing and inviting our souls
to new life, Jeremiah is like a Nevada Sierra day in the dead of a summer
globally warmed -- like hot brutal wind scorching us with hopeless exposure on
barren heights of relentless desert. Does it not feel like that all around us
here? You guys are a lot more used to it than we are. But has this not been an
amazing blazing crazing summer? How preoccupied have we been these past weeks
with feeling lost in our own Attractive/resistant terrain? Talk about parables
of lostness! And prodigal searches to find us! What about the time -- effort,
treasure, talent, care, persistence, hope -- going into the search for Steve
Fossett. What kind of “hot winds” account for hundreds of planes crashed
around us? 340 in the past ten years? New wreckages revealed nearly every
day of this desperate search?
This is the “Washoe Zephyr” Mark Twain describes like a jeremiad – “It blows
flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like
sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the passengers.”
The “thermal drafts.” Shafts of hot air thrusting as many as 18,000 feet
into the sky! The drought, the dry sage, 300 mountain ranges, the valleys, the
rattlesnakes. “The Bermuda Triangle of aviation!” The paper just the
morning sounded defensive about this question – citing how other places can be
just as dangerous.
I wonder if that’s the only way to see the
question. What if this is a question of call and vocation for us in our unique
time and place? What if we are to be specially awake, alert, aware, attentive
to new and different dangers? Even dangers we bring on ourselves – as Jeremiah
portrays them? What’s going on around us? How does it reflect upon us?
Jeremiah says those who inhabit the barren heights are the front line, the
forefront, of those on the watch for signs and threats of destruction! Maybe
that’s us! Maybe “Burning Man” is like a growing sect of desert prophets among
us! A bunch of John and Joan the Baptists! Warning us of our barrenness and
vulnerability – calling us to put on (and take off!) sackcloth and ashes.
Treading where Jeremiah says the kings and officials, the priests and even the
usual prophets fear and fail to go.
(The call to confront catastrophe in the
perspective of Walter Wink –
“If catastrophe faces a people, a nation, a
species, and the sentinels fail to warn those under their care, the blood of the
people will be required at the hand of the sentinel. Perhaps the people will
not listen; then their blood will be upon their own heads.
“We live in such a time. Global warming, ozone
depletion, overpopulation, massive starvation, air and water pollution, topsoil
erosion, the death of the coral reefs and oceans, extermination of species, the
continued threat of nuclear radiation from leaks, dumping, and accidents.
“Catastrophes threaten us on every hand. Our
politicians are all but worthless, our president lacks conviction, vision, or
concern. At a time when every human resource should be trained on surmounting
these crises, torpor reigns!”)
These gospel texts call us to be losers – in
more ways than one! We know they call us to find ourselves among the lost, the
homeless, the sinful. We know we are the sheep who stray from the flock -- the
coins who break and roll from the necklace. We know, this Homecoming Sunday, we
find ourselves far from where we want to be -- cut off from those we want to be
with. We know we need to be sought out and rescued -- brought home and partied
over. Don’t we? It’s not hard for us to identify with the lost. It’s a good
place to start with what we can find in ourselves to offer up for changing into
the very joy of heaven and earth!
But we are not only the lost! We are also the
losers! We are the shepherds. We are the women sweepers. Those who are lost,
of course, make the best losers. We become much more aware of the slightest
loss of others because it connects with the loss in ourselves. We are aware of
lost souls, lost peoples, lost jobs, lost communities, lost languages, lost
species. And those who are losers – who identify with the loss of others as
loss in ourselves -- make the best finders!
Why don’t we seem to get that? How those who
have been lost and losers themselves can be so changed by grace and mercy. Call
it reparation and restoration, rehabilitation and reconciliation. However they
get there, losers can become the best finders! Those who know loss in
ourselves, and identify with the losing of others -- we are the experts on our
own lives. That’s a later insight of Jeremiah – that God writes directly on
each of our hearts by our own experience, and we are the experts on that
experience. So no one has to tell another who has been on drugs, or homeless,
or in prison, or abusive in any way, what it is like to be that way. Those are
the people who should be counseling and pastoring others. Instead we seem
determined to lock ourselves into separate lives, separate worlds -- the gated
and the left out, the guards and the guarded – as in this past week’s film about
Susanville, “Prison Town USA.” The divided and conquered – the haves and
have-nots, natives and immigrants, -- all the different ways we say “damned and
saved,” “lost and found.”
Only the lost can be found. Only losers can be
finders. Only sinners can be saved. And we are not “saved” once and forever
out of our lostness. Rather, we become experts on both lostness and foundness
and how they are always within and among us. That is why though we are missing
just one sheep out of a hundred, just one coin out of ten -- we can have such a
feel for wholeness, for completeness that we know in an instant when even a
single small part of us has been lost! Like Jesus in another story -- when a
woman who has been bleeding for years barely touches the hem of his garment – we
often know in a flash when some part goes out to another. Our foundness
connects with their lostness.
As with the women in Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” that makes up our Call to
Worship and Responsive Benediction -- what is lost and missing lies deeply
within us. It takes the surrounding love and concern and shared presence
and power of sisters and brothers to touch us with a “layin on of hands” and a
“makin us whole” again. As we have said before about the life of this
congregation, we are a big “lost and found” mixed together. We are a place
for the lost and the broken parts of ourselves and our relationships. We
are a place where those who are lost and losing can come to seek and be found,
reclaimed, restored.
It may take a long time to do it, and a lot of
courage and trust, a lot of patience with failure and fear. It is not easy to
try to “re-member” our own true selves, to put ourselves back together again.
But that’s what we’re here for. That’s why we exist. We don’t have to “get
right” before we can come to church again. But if we come to church, and keep
coming, we may find we can “get right” again!
With time, with trouble, even with tears we may get to the point, along with
these women in the poem, where we “find god in our hearts” again, and “love her
fiercely.” And sing songs of joy – even as the shepherd and woman rejoice
when they find the one who is lost, the part who is missing from their own
wholeness.
For God is waiting to be found in us even now.
God wants us to find ourselves whole again. What parts of ourselves are missing
this morning? What have we lost, or misplaced, or even never really known about
ourselves? What are we here for? Especially what are we looking here for? How
do we need to be found? How do we need to come home? How do we need to be
whole again?
God does not wait or expect us to find
ourselves, or even to now we are lost! These stories are all about God dropping
everything else to set out for us again.
By the grace, the courage, the risk of all-seeking God we are both lost and
found! No longer just I, but we! No longer just lost, but found!
That is, we are looked everywhere for! We are never given up on!
Remember? Someone always is looking for something, for someone – even for
you and for me. Have we not experienced that? Looking everywhere for
something, for someone, lost?
Lost earring? Lose shoe? Lost glasses? Lost
key? For me it’s always lost datebook! Not to mention, lost pet. God forbid,
lost child. Determined to seek, to find, to reclaim, to restore, to re-member
and to make whole again -- by the laying on of our hands, the fellowship of our
Homecoming, Welcoming Table Remember? Even now, each day, each moment, someone
is searching for someone! Somewhere to be found! Remember? How driven, how
desperate, to find whomever the lost?! Remember? . . .
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling
for you and for me;
see, on the portals he’s waiting and
watching, watching for you and for me.
Come home, come home; we who are weary come
home;
earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
calling, O sinner, come home!
Amen.
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