Luke 15
A man I once knew was totally distrustful of banks. Instead of putting his valuables in a safe deposit box, he kept them in a small metal cash box. Wherever he went, he carried his cash box full of valuables. In his little box he had a large amount of cash, savings bonds and stock certificates that were to serve as part of his retirement. He also had birth certificates, and who knows what else. I told him it would have been a much more secure choice to get a safe deposit box.
Then one day it was gone. He had misplaced it on a road trip (he was an over-the-road truck driver) and couldn’t remember where he had put it, or left it. Or maybe it was stolen. Retracing his route proved fruitless. It was gone. Lost, never to be found. He was sick about it. I felt for him. I was severely tempted to say, “I told you so.” I may have given into that temptation.
Maybe you’ve lost something. Usually it’s small things, like keys, a wallet, a book, your glasses, your cell phone, or the TV remote. No matter how small or how important, just losing something is frustrating. Going through the process of trying to find something that’s lost is vexing. You retrace your steps, you look around the same areas over and over again. You throw up your hands. But if you find it, you feel immediate relief, to the point of celebration.
What I’d like us to look at, using Luke 15, is this whole drama of losing and finding the things that are valuable to us. As we go through each of these parables of Jesus, I’d like you to do something. Many of you have probably read through these parables many times. You’ve studied them or have heard at least one sermon about them. What I’d like you to do is to forget everything you know about these parables. Pretend this is the first time you’ve heard them. I would like you to take them at simple, face value. Don’t read into them any of the meanings you’ve heard before. Let’s just hear them as stories Jesus told, and hopefully find something new in them.
II
(Read Luke 15:1-7)
The first thing I’d like you to notice is that Jesus is putting you in this parable. It’s how he starts out: “Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep,” he says, “and you lost one. What are you going to do?” Jesus is trying to get you to feel what it’s like if you lost a sheep. Jesus didn’t say the sheep wandered off on it’s own. Jesus didn’t say it was the sheep’s fault it was lost. Jesus is saying you lost one of your sheep.
How could you have lost one of your sheep? Shepherds are supposed to be constantly alert. They are supposed to keep all the sheep in a relatively close area so they can all be watched easily. If one begins to wander away, you--the shepherd--are supposed to notice. You’re supposed to take out your sling and lob a rock at that sheep’s nose to turn it around and make it come back. It’s your job as the shepherd to watch over all the sheep. To know where they all are at all times.
Thus, your single sheep could have only been lost because you were negligent. You weren’t being watchful like you were supposed to. Because you weren’t paying attention like you were supposed to; because you were paying more attention to something you weren’t supposed to, you let something valuable become lost. And now that sheep’s life is in danger, because of you.
III
(read Luke 15:8-10)
In the second parable, Jesus doesn’t put you in the parable. He simply makes the main character a woman. She has ten coins. Each coin is equal to the amount of one days wages. She has lost one of her coins. She lost it. It didn’t just disappear. Someone didn’t sneak in and steal it while she was asleep. She was responsible for losing the coin worth an entire days wages.
She knows it has to be in the house somewhere. So what does she do to find the coin she has lost? She cleans the house. What does that tell you about the condition of her house? It’s got to be a mess.
I remember one weekend, back when I had cable, the A&E channel had a marathon of the show called “Hoarders.” Anybody watched that show? There’s a lady who drives by my house sometimes, in a red pick up, and it’s jam packed with trash, inside and out. I wonder what her home must look like. These people’s homes are jam packed with junk, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, room to room. Even spilling out of the house and into the yard. They just keep bringing in more and more junk.
I imagined the woman of the parable living in a house like that. How would you ever find a valuable coin in a place like that. Evidently the coin was more important than her mess, and she started cleaning. She picks everything up, she straightens, she sweeps, she dusts, she looks under the cushions, she lifts the couch, she wipes off the top of the refrigerator, she looks under the bed, she checks the dust lint catcher in the dryer.
She had lost the coin because she had allowed it to become absorbed by the mess of her home. All the clutter in her life that she lived with every day and had become used to, now became her enemy in her search. Every bit of the mess of her house is cleaned in an effort to find that valuable coin that she had lost.
IV
(read Luke 15:11-24)
In the Middle Eastern culture it would have been a gross insult for a son to ask for his share of his inheritance when the father is still alive. Ken Bailey was a Presbyterian college professor, teaching in Lebanon and Israel for a number of years, and has done extensive cultural research about the parables in particular. He’s learned that if a son asked such a thing of his father, what he was telling his father was, “I wish you were dead.” How else can you inherit something unless someone has died? What an awful slap in the face, then, for a father to hear his son basically say, “I wish you were dead; just give me what I would inherit when you die, now, so I can get out of this house and as far away from you as possible.”
What a terrible son, you might be thinking. But my question is what had the father done that would have caused his son to insult him so deeply? In looking at the story, we have always felt sorry for the father for having to deal with such a belligerent and incorrigible son. But in the real world of fathers and sons, I have seen a large number of fathers who deserved the belligerence they got from their sons. It is always a two way street. Jesus, I’m sure, was aware of that reality.
If we are going to be fair, and stay in the real world, we have to ask the question: what did the father do that pushed his son away so severely? When sons run away from home they may be running toward something they desire. But they are also, at the same time, running away from something they just can’t abide anymore. We know what this younger son is running toward. But what is he running away from that had particularly to do with the father and their relationship?
Too many fathers are overly stiff, demanding, negative, perfectionistic, humorless, or emotionally distant and detached from their sons. They starve their sons not only with lack of time, but also with lack of praise and encouragement. Too many fathers can’t, or won’t, say to their sons, “I love you.” They think their sons are just supposed to know that, or pick it up via satellite, or on Twitter.
The father in this parable lost his son. The son wasn’t abducted. The son didn’t wake up one day and decide he hated his father. The hate had grown over a long period of time from having to deal with a father who refused to be emotionally connected to his son. On that eventful day, when the father finally saw the hate in his son’s eyes, and heard the tone of voice when the words were spoken (“I wish you were dead; give me my share of my inheritance now.”) it was like a wake up call. But it wasn’t enough of a wake up call for the father to tell the son he was sorry, and get him to stay.
In the days that followed, the father realized his part in pushing his son away. The parable tells us that the father probably searched the horizon every day hoping against hope to see his son coming back. He looked down the road every day because he longed for another chance to be a father. To show his son that he did love him, and that he wanted to be a father differently. If only he could have a second chance at fatherhood and not lose his son for good.
V
So, if we are taking these parables at face value, as parables, then what’s the point? To get to the point, these parables will force us to ask some fairly important questions. These parables compel us to examine our life and figure out some answers. What have been the “valuables” we have lost along the way? These parables demand that we look for, and accept the responsibility we have in losing the sheep, the coins, and the sons from our lives. These parables ask us to sit down and make a list of that which has been lost by us and how we lost it and how we’re going to find it.
In the parable of the lost sheep, the shepherd could only have lost the one sheep by negligence and inattentiveness to what he was supposed to be doing. If we’re going to stop losing what’s valuable then we need to start paying attention to that which is right in front of us.
In the second parable of the lost coin, we discovered the woman lost the coin because it had become absorbed in the messiness of her everyday life. If your home--that is, your individual life--has become so messed up and disorderly, how do you expect to ever keep track of the valuable coins of God’s gifts? How can we take the precious things of God and then just turn and toss them on the pile with everything else? Those precious things of God need to motivate us to create an environment in our lives so they can always be seen, always be at hand, always clearly in their place of prominence.
In the third parable of the lost son, the father may have alienated his son by a long acted out rigidity and cold indifference. He had pushed his own son to the point of desiring, more than anything else, to run away. How can we continue to take a gift from God on the level of a son, and push him or her away, push him or her away, push him or her away? How long will the way we are choosing to live tell God that we don’t care much about what God has brought into our lives? What will it take for us to finally get the wake up call of how we have, for so long, through stiffness, negativism, or lack of emotional connection, pushed that which is of God out of our homes, out of our lives?
VI
Doesn’t all that sound sad to you, and more than just a little bit scary? Think of all that has been lost. Now it’s time to find it. Now is the season to come to our senses and find that which is God-given valuable. To find what we have lost.
Let’s use these parables to figure out what we need to do to find them: paying attention; avoid being negligent; clean up the messes in our lives; let the people close to us know in every way possible that we love them; quit pushing away. In this way, we will create an inseparable and unloseable bond between ourselves and that which is of true and Godly value.
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