Trinity 13 – 15 September 2019 – Gospel reading: Luke 15, 1-10.

St. Paul’s Athens  (Canon Leonard Doolan)

 

There is an idiom in English that goes like this: ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers. ‘

You find a €20,00 note on the pavement. Maybe you look around to see if anyone has a prior claim to it, then you bend down, pick up the note and pop it into your pocket. The feeling is good, but then you think, if only it was a €50,00…..

‘Finders keepers, losers weepers’.

Today’s gospel is all about being found. ‘There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety nine righteous persons who need no repentance.’ (Lk 15, 7)

‘There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’. (Lk 15, 10)

Each one of us has lost something important or precious. We know what that sinking feeling is like. It is not the same as having something stolen – that is a harrowing feeling; we feel helpless because someone else has committed an unsolicited act against us, so we feel personally violated. However, when we lose something the reaction is different, because we also feel angry with ourselves for not being careful enough. ‘How on earth could I have been stupid enough to have done that?’ We all know that feeling.

Recently I lost my passport. On analysis I am fairly sure how I did it. I was having one of those ‘clearing out’ days at my desk, and the passport, which is not normally lying on my desk, because – yes, you guessed it – I normally look after it really carefully – must have been caught between some of the papers I was throwing out. I was really furious with myself for having been so careless. I was also deeply anxious because a week before flying to the Archdeaconry synod in Budapest is not a clever time to lose your passport.

In passing, may I say, the Consulates here and in Malaga, where the paperwork is done, were magnificent in processing an Emergency Travel Document. You can imagine the relief when I knew that I would be able to travel, especially as I am leading the three main bible studies at Synod.

So the passport is lost and not found by me. I was so anxious though that I can simply imagine how ecstatic I would have felt if I had actually found it somewhere. The feeling of loss, and the joy of finding, are feelings we will all be able to share together.

Jesus tells two stories about loss and discovery. The stories have woven into them the initial feelings of loss, the hard work done in searching for what is lost, and the sheer joy that is experienced when the lost item is found again. The shepherd and the woman rejoice over finding a lost precious possession.

Imagine what that feeling is like – magnified many times – when we as human beings feel completely lost, but then suddenly know that we are found again.

 

While thinking about this gospel on Friday night I was watching an English TV programme which, of course, was sub-titled. One actor was playing the part of an anxious brother – anxious for his sister who, in Greek  Χανήσε το δρόμιο της, has lost her way. Surely this is something we have all experienced, and when that lost way is spiritual it is deeply damaging to us, corrosive of the soul.

Jesus illustrates his theme of being lost and found with good everyday examples, but he is telling in parables the profound need that we all have, to be found – to make our way back home. In St. Luke’s gospel Jesus builds up his stories with examples of a sheep and a coin, but he is preparing us for his piece de resistence. He is about to tell the parable of the prodigal son, illustrating as plainly as you could get, the joy of the father, when his son returns home. ‘I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’. In essence these illustrations of being lost and being found are the very heart of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This lies at the core of the mystery of the cross. Through and by this mystery we return home, home to our original paradise, home to God. Each of us has this story to tell, and each story is unique, and uniquely valid.

Yesterday the Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican traditions celebrated a discovery, of something being found. The discovery was of the True Cross by Empress St. Helena in Jerusalem in the 4th century. Exhausted by the rigours of working hard to try and find the cross, and by the equally rigourous disciplines of Lent, Helena has a dream.

In her dream someone appears. He describes himself as a shop keeper – a salesman of incense in fact, which was burned at all of the shrines and in the temple. One day he recalls that a prisoner, carrying a cross, fell just by the step outside his little emporium. These are the words put into the shopkeeper’s mouth by the novelist Evelyn Waugh in his lovely little book called Helena (Evelyn Waugh, Penguin, 1963, p149)

‘He came right past the shop the day he was executed. Stumbled just on my doorstep. He was all in. They had to get a man to help with the cross after that. Mind you I didn’t hold with crucifying him. Live and let live, I say. Still, I couldn’t have him on my doorstep, could I, so I moved him on quick. “Come on”, I said “none of that now. This is no place for the likes of you.” He just looked at me, not exactly a nasty look, but as if he wanting to be sure of knowing me again. Then he said “Tarry till I come”.

It is this man who appears in the dream, and who remembers where they crucified him, and where they threw the bits of wood afterwards. Helena awakes and begins immediately to retrace the locations in the dream. The wood is found – wood for three crosses, so what to do to establish the True Cross? Trying different variations of this jig-saw, they find someone who is ill, and when placed on the correct configuration of bits of wood, there is a miraculous healing.

This is Helena’s legendary story of finding what she was searching for – we each have our own ways of journeying towards God through the mystery of the cross of Christ.

Some may have a sense of having arrived, of a home-coming, others may still be trying to orient themselves through the often confusing pathways that lead to home, but home awaits us, and when we arrive there just imagine the sheer joy of our home-coming, our joy, and the joy of God our Father.

‘Amazing grace- how sweet the sound – that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.’