Human beings ask many questions. According to the Bible, God also has questions to ask. Can you recall the very first question of God? It comes in the third chapter of Genesis, God's first question: "Adam, where are you?"
It's a question in the wake of catastrophe. God's human children have lost their way. They have broken a trust and spoiled a paradise. Shame takes hold of them. They cover themselves, they hide. God was in the custom of enjoying their company in the cool of the day. On this evening, as always, God comes for them, but they are missing. God looks for them, but they have made themselves absent. So for the first time a question is torn from God's throat: "Where are you?"
What a strange notion – God searching for us. I can think of nothing like this in any other religious tradition. When humans think of Deity, we think in terms of great creative power and a vast intelligence – rightly so. Religious systems vary on the question of what and where Deity is. For some, Deity is mostly remote, something like a rational principle or a cosmic force, serenely beyond us all. For others, Deity is everywhere, alive in everything. But whether God is viewed mostly as remote or mostly as everywhere present, religion on the whole is about how humans are to go about seeking God or conceiving of God rightly or conforming to the divine way.
And here is the Bible making this very odd counter-claim: the Deity is seeking us. God, who is inconceivably beyond us, moves and probes and reaches for us. God, who is everywhere present, does not wait to be discovered but launches passionate initiatives to arrest our attention and take hold of us. We humans may rightly go asking after God: "Where are you?" But our quest is preceded by God's asking, "Where are you?"
There are modern thinkers who assume that this biblical view of God is primitive projection. "Anthropomorphism," they call it – making God out to be like us. But please remember that Israel was surrounded by religions that did exactly that, worshiping gods that were petty like us, capricious like us, sexy like us, greedy like us, letting humans appease them and serve them and seek their favors. That was primitive religion, and still is. When Israel construed God as questing after human fellowship and partnership, that was revolutionary, and it still is.
Jesus is that revolution embodied. We call him God's Word made flesh; he was certainly God's question made flesh. In him, God's cry to us, "Where are you?" walked the earth on human feet. He not only enacted God's passion to reach us, he spoke of it often. Many of his parables paint vivid pictures of God's extravagant initiatives to find us. According to Luke, he told two of the clearest of these back to back, and he started them each in the form of a question.
Here is the first. "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he's found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. Arriving at home, he calls to his friends and neighbors: 'Rejoice with me! I've found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is more joy over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous who need no repentance."
The shepherd Jesus describes is quite ordinary in a way. In other ways he's a bit peculiar. It's expected of a shepherd if a sheep is lost to go looking for it. What's odd here is how consumed this shepherd is with the missing one. To find it, he's willing to leave the ninety-nine he's got. Where does he leave them? An old hymn says, "the ninety-nine lay safely in the fold." Jesus doesn't say that. He says this shepherd leaves them out in the wilderness. Well surely he leaves them with another shepherd, or at least with a sharp-eyed old sheepdog or two? But again Jesus doesn't say so. All he says is that this shepherd, intent on the one, leaves all the rest in the wild. Sounds risky, even foolish, but that's how absorbed he is in his hunt for the missing one.
And he is relentless. Did you hear how Jesus told that part? The shepherd goes searching "until he finds it." It's nighttime, most likely, since sheep were counted in the evening, and the shepherd is ranging through wild terrain, rocky and rough, in the dark where dangerous predators are lurking. And he keeps searching – not in hopes of finding it, but until he does. And when he does, how does he feel? Does he bawl out the dumb sheep for causing so much trouble? "You woolly little twerp! Buddy, you are lamb chops!" No, he is jubilant – lays the sheep on his shoulders, heads back rejoicing, and arriving at home, calls to friends and neighbors: "Rejoice with me!" In the Bible, "Rejoice with me" means "Let's have a party!" He actually throws a party, so thrilled is he, having searched like mad, to have found one sheep.
Jesus holds up this gleaming picture of a laughing shepherd, relentless in searching and exuberant in finding, and says: this is your God.
Then he turns right around and shows another picture. Again, a question: "What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she's found it, she calls to her friends and neighbors: 'Rejoice with me! I've found the coin I'd lost.' Just so, I tell you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
Again, this woman is ordinary and she's also peculiar. Clearly, she is poor. These ten coins of hers aren't worth much and they're apparently all she's got. When one gets lost, she has to go hunting for it. Look how diligent she is. She lights her little clay lamp with the oil in it and goes peering into every corner. Like the shepherd, she's having to search in the dark. And her little lamp isn't enough. She gets her broom and sweeps under the furniture hoping to hear the scrape of a coin, sweeps across the cracks in the floor hoping to roll it out of hiding. She ransacks her house and keeps at it until at last – "Ha!" she says. "Found you!" Then does she put it back where it belongs and make herself a cup of tea? Not her. As fierce was her search, so fierce is her joy, and out she goes to friends and neighbors: "Let's have a party!" How on earth can a woman so poor she searches like crazy for a single coin turn right around when she finds it and host a neighborhood party? Her joy – like her search – is fiercely outreaching.
And Jesus lifts her up, this laughing woman, relentless in searching and exuberant in finding, and he says: this is your God.
Two parables – what do they want with us? They want us to understand that we are ardently sought by God. Now here you are in church, which may well indicate an interest on your part in seeking God. The Scripture today means to startle you with news of how fiercely God seeks you. You expect to hear in a place like this that God is the One you need. Today hear this: you are a need of God. Your life is an ache in the heart of the Holy until you are fully, fully at jubilant home in God. Until you are found in that fullness, God is pursuing you.
Will you consider how this may be so? The ache in your own spirit, your restlessness, that scratching of discontent at the back of your brain, is it just you, or might it be God like a woman drawing a broom across your life to draw you fully into the light? When some new longing stirs in you to live a truer life, to fulfill a better purpose, or when something that you hear or see – a child, a sunset, even a scene on television – brings unexpected tears to your eyes and a welling up of desire that you can hardly name, pay the closest attention to it and allow that it may be the holy shepherd bearing down on your position, calling your name.
I'm sure you noticed that after both parables Jesus spoke of heaven's joy over one sinner who repents. We think of repenting as our initiative to turn our lives toward God, and so in a way it is. But as these parables show, God is moving, probing, reaching for us. Our turning to God is our miniscule part to embrace all the reaching of God for us. The cry of God over your life and mine is to lean into the joy of being found.
And one thing more: the cry of God is also for us to share the passion and the joy of God's quest. To share Christ's vision of God is always in the end to share Christ's mission with God: the passionate reaching for others, the exuberant welcome of all who are found.
According to Luke, Jesus told these stories precisely to religious folk who wouldn't join his search and wouldn't join his party. He was banqueting with prostitutes and street people and extortionist tax collectors, people his love had found and cheered. The fact that some upright folk would have none of it, were embarrassed and irked by it, is what prompted him to draw pictures of God as shepherd and as woman wholly given to the search for the missing and the celebration of the found. Which is to say, you and I can't may well see ourselves as a sheep carried home or a prized coin reclaimed, but a very different role awaits us. Christ is passing out brooms and little lamps and shepherd's crooks. His hunt and God's hunt for the missing is our hunt too. To be the church is to be in the hunt for the missing, to take it up with passion, to keep at it with relentless outreaching love – to feed the poor and befriend them, to do justice, to love mercy, to forgive those who have hurt us, to speak good news and to be good news for our neighbors, to see them all as God, to our amazement, has seen us: irreplaceable, recoverable, worthy of infinite joy.
Let's be such people. Let's take our own part in God's passionate search for the missing, and take our part, too, in God's great-hearted joy for all that will at last be found.
