Lost & Found

Jeremiah 31: 31-34 & John 12: 20-33

Roger Lynn

April 2, 2017

5th Sunday in Lent

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

“Lost and Found!” Every elementary school has one. Every church camp has one. Lots of churches have one. We all know about the lost and found. At one time or another most of us have had something in the lost and found, even if we didn’t know it. And sometimes it feels like life has left us in the box, knowing that we’re lost and wondering if anyone will ever find us. Lately it has felt as if the whole world were lost and waiting to be found. We know about lost and found.

Our faith tells us that God is in the business of finding us when we are lost. But the problem is, we’re not always very good at remembering that, and even when we do remember, we’re not always very good at maintaining the kind of relationship with God where we can appreciate being found. When the Psalmist writes, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Psalm 51: 10) we understand that longing. It is a clean heart which we need, because relating with God requires that we speak the language of the heart.

There are lots of reasons why our relationship with God seems so often to take a back seat in our lives. And there are lots of examples that would illustrate just how pervasive the problem really is. You can preach that sermon just as easily as I can. We don’t really need anyone to tell us that the world is frequently a messed up place. We don’t really need anyone to tell us that all too often we participate in messing it up. We already know that. Dwelling on the bad news is something we’re already pretty good at.

The good news is that God isn’t going to dwell on the bad news. We can if we want, but God has a better idea. On our own we frequently manage to make a mess of things when it comes to relating with God. Not always, to be sure, but often. The entire Bible, the history of the Church, and our own personal experiences are filled with examples of God’s people fouling up their relationship with God. But that is never where it ends. When it comes to relating with God, we are never left to our own inadequate devices. The first word in covenantal relationship between God and human beings is always God’s. And the last word is also God’s. God takes the initiative and God provides the means to maintain and sustain what God initiates. Put simply, we may feel as if we’ve been left in the lost and found box, but God refuses to leave us there. There is apparently no limit on the lengths to which God will go to bring us into the covenantal relationship which God desires, nor are there any limits on who God will go to those lengths for. God calls everyone and God keeps calling, in new and different ways, until finally everyone has been found and healed and transformed.

The prophet Jeremiah speaks to a people in exile – a people who have wandered so far away from what it meant to be a covenant people that they forgot how to find their way home again. Jeremiah proclaims that the time is coming when even that situation will be changed. God will make a new covenant with God’s chosen people (which, we find out later in scripture, turns out to be everybody) in such a way that they will never be able to forget it or turn away from it. It won’t need to be told and re-told as a story. It won’t need to be written down in books. No one will need to teach it to anyone else. No one will be in a position to lord it over anyone else. The basis for this covenant will be inscribed on the hearts of everyone, from the least to the greatest. No one stays lost when God chooses to find them.

And just in case we might miss the point, we find the message again in John’s Gospel, stated even more explicitly. At the end of a discussion about the suffering which was to come for Jesus, we find him declaring that, “when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to me.” God’s will is for all of creation to be restored. God’s Love will gather in the whole world!

So, how do we begin living into this covenantal relationship with God? What does life look like when we start to see ourselves as found instead of lost? It is as complicated and involved as the whole of scripture and it is as simple and straightforward as the second half of Jeremiah 31: 33. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” It means worrying less and trusting more. It means believing that God loves us enough to keep God’s promise to be with us always. It means enjoying the amazing gift of community in which God enables us to participate.

We know about the lost part of “lost and found.” May we also remember the “found” part. May we learn to believe it, and live it, and share it.