Here’s an article verbatim ~
On August 30th a group of tourists spent hours on a Sunday night searching for a missing woman near Iceland’s Eldgja canyon, only to find her among the search party. The group was traveling through Iceland on a tour bus and stopped near a volcanic canyon. Soon, there was word of a missing passenger. The woman, who had changed clothes, didn’t recognize the description of herself and joined the search. But the search was called off at 3 am when it became clear the missing woman was in fact, accounted for and searching for herself.
I'm not sure about you but when I first heard that story I thought, “what kind of idiot doesn’t realize that they’re searching for themselves?” But after this morning’s scripture, I have an entirely different take on it. The kind of person who does this is one who hears that one part of the group is missing and immediately drops what they’re doing to find them. Because the whole of the group is sacred and any missing piece becomes a loss. I don’t know how long they had been traveling together as a group, because it doesn’t say, it doesn’t say whether they were all very close, but I’ve got to think were not very close or else it would have been clear that one of them had changed clothes. Clearly no one was keeping an actual headcount, so I’m assuming the leader announced one was missing and the rest decided that was enough of a reason to go searching.
This is a great story not only because it’s funny, but because we can relate to getting so caught up in the search we forget ourselves. We can be swept away in the search for finding that thing, our wallet, keys, phone. We forget about the day because in those moments the day can’t go on until we find that thing.
Then sadly, and here’s an abrupt change of tone…Sometimes that thing we’re searching for turns out to be another person, in the form we once knew them. Like a loved one who is now suffering from an illness or an addiction. Whose personality is not what it used to be, so we go searching for some hint, some reminder that they’re still in there. And sometimes that works, and other times it feels like God has abandoned the process.
Other times it turns out the person you're searching for, like this woman, is yourself. Only in a different form. When you hit a certain age or a certain milestone in your life, and you no longer recognize yourself. This can be positive like you’ve grown and some piece of yourself you didn’t know you had in you comes alive. That’s a wonderful feeling. I remember feeling that way as a young mother at 3 in the morning with a sick baby and lack of sleep, and hours of crying baby, and my ability to be patient like I never knew I had in me. But I also remember not recognizing myself when that patience was so tried that I was the one crying louder than the baby, vomit running down my back, circles under my eyes and thinking, no one told me it was going to be like this. Then there’s the midlife crisis kind of search. The kind where you long to see the vibrant youthful person you used to be. This is when we’re most vulnerable to searching for the wrong things, those things that pacify but don’t really address the root cause of the longing, like buying a new sports car.
To be swept away in the search for wholeness, whether personally or for the good of the whole group, the whole community, is a search for God.
Becoming whole again, this idea of wholeness, is what we mean when we say the word shalom. Shalom usually interpreted as peace, but it’s also about becoming whole again. It’s a sense of well being, in communion with God and others. And it’s always a blessing, a manifestation of divine grace.
And when that wholeness is felt, when it returns through God-given grace, it’s time for celebration. Each of these parables and the prodigal son (which you didn’t hear today) ends with a party.
I do wonder whether the search party in Iceland had much of a party at 3 am when they realized the woman had been with them all along. I imagine instead they probably got annoyed with her, and grumbled. You can just hear them grumbling……”what a waste of precious sleeping time. Stupid woman. I can’t believe she didn’t realize it was her we were searching for” She ruined the whole trip.”
Grumbling. That what the scripture tells us the Pharisees and Scribes did. Those are the elite, the educated respected folks in Jesus circle, they’re the insiders of the religion, they’re in covenant with God. And they’re grumbling too. Why? Because Jesus is concerned with the whole of the group. Only his group extends beyond the neighborhood, beyond the synagogue, beyond the assisted living facility into circles that threatens the covenant in the eyes of those who help keep a roof on the temple. Their whole way of being, they perceive as threatened because the new guy is inviting tax collectors and sinners into the whole.
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Can you hear them? Can you see them? Just some good God-fearing folk gathering over a pot luck after worship. There’s the jello mold with a dollop of mayonnaise, the punch bowl is out because it’s a social occasion, there are candles because that’s exciting….and there is meaningful conversation and some excellent teaching by a local rabbi. Some call him the Messiah, others call him a great teacher, others have called him a prophet. When it was time to eat, the ones who paid for the party begin to grumble…”He’s letting the tax collectors in? I know that tax collector. I got into it with him just a few months ago. Every year he takes my hard earned cash and what do I get out it?” Another grumbles back, “look at all these sinners. That one cheated on his wife, that one just got released from prison, and that one follows no dietary laws at all, he’s eating gluten for God’s sake. Disgusting.”
Then they grumble as a group. Our traditions matter, and our codes and our covenant matters. They’ll hurt the integrity of everything we’ve built.” In other words, “there goes the neighborhood.”
And the teacher, the rabbi, the prophet, the messiah… hears them grumbling, because God hears everything, including our grumbling. And He pauses and smiles in that way He does, just before He’s about to have a little fun with them. He picks up his chalice, tosses back his long hair, and tells them a story about a lost sheep and a lost coin and a lost son. All lost, all found, with a party to follow.
Only maybe the story isn’t about who’s lost as much as it is about noticing who is missing. Perhaps its the ones who have the most who fail to see what’s missing.[1]
Don’t you see, the teacher says, the peace of God, shalom is achieved when wholeness is returned, and that includes all who are lost, all who are missing, including those who are blinded by their own privilege.
As followers of Jesus Christ, we are the ones who should be searching for the lost, for the missing. We are the ones who are now concerned with the wholeness that awaits all of us through the grace of God. We can’t do that in ivory towers through glass windows. We can’t do that by holding onto the past and wishing it was like it used to be. God is always doing a new thing and welcoming and inviting new people in. It takes empathy and grit. It takes diligence and perseverance. And most importantly it takes prayer.
One of the scribes mutters “nonsense" and walks away and moves to Norway. Another revokes his membership from the temple and decided to join the other temple down the street that ascribes to his views, where the preacher only preaches to the choir.
But another just sat there, stared at this teacher, and exhaled. He slowly picks up his cell phone and creates an app that employs a search party to go out into the streets and invite every beggar, every prisoner, every single and widowed mother, every leper, every weirdo, every pain in the you know what….into his life….because it was time to celebrate as they had never celebrated before. Why, because he had been lost and now is found. Lost in his judgment and critique of the other. Lost in his self-righteousness, lost in all that he had, unaware of what was missing.
What would it be like if we all celebrated every time we saw someone who hadn’t been here to the church in a while. What if we all had searched them out. What if it was also a celebration that each one of us made it again for another Sunday. I see you welcome one another and that makes me smile and feel good all over. But what makes God smile is when we search out who hasn’t been here, who is suffering, especially the ones you don’t know the name of.
We talked about this in our Deacon meeting. We named all the ways that this can feel awkward when you don’t know someone. Some may not want to attend. Some way want even to be left alone. But no one begrudges an invitation. I’d love to take you to coffee sometime. Good to see you again, remind me of your name? Can I share a cup of coffee with you after worship? Tell me your life story in the time it takes to eat a donut. Some may not like the attention. God smiles when we try. There is perhaps no one in our congregation better at this than Ara, who will take credit for every single new person's attendance. Because that’s the way he lives his life. And he lives it that way so much, he reminds me of how a woman can be so swept up in the search for one missing part of the whole she doesn’t even recognize it’s her they’re all searching for.
That’s a joyful kind of mistake. because it’s born in the concern for the whole. Concern for the other. Concern for the one I don’t know.
And if you’ve ever listened to Ara celebrate his accomplishments as an evangelist, there’s such joy in his voice. He celebrates his own accomplishment to be sure, but it’s born out of his concern for the whole, the whole church.
That’s the kind of concern God calls upon us to have for the world. We are more than one nation. We are more than one county or one city. We are human beings first, called up by Christ to seek out who is missing, who is suffering, who is in need, and maybe, just maybe, at the end of that search, you’ll discover it was you had been searching for all long.
Amen.
[1] Any-Jill Levine, Short Stories of Jesus