Our God of Lostness
April 29, 2012 | Edna Froese | Luke 15: 1-32; John 10:11, 14

From Adam and Abel and on to David and Absalom, from the ancient Oedipus who slew his own father by mistake to the modern Harry Potter who would have given anything in the world to have actually met his father, we have heard many stories of fathers and sons, parents and children—and just as many stories of loss, for the two themes often appear together. It is as if we know instinctively that family relationships are both fragile and precious, even sacred. And at the very heart of our faith is the dynamic picture of God the Father and God the Son—both of them, as we shall see, losers and finders.

Even apart from the three parables of lost items—the sheep, the coin, the son—, we know Jesus as a seeker of the lost. He spotted Zacchaeus lurking in the sycamore tree; he defended the woman caught in adultery, known in Victorian parlance as a lost woman; he even arranged a post-resurrection meeting with Peter, who was temporarily lost in his self-blame. In fact, Jesus typically hung out with those lost to all good behavior, according to Pharisee categories. There is something appealing in Jesus’ affinity with lost things, lost people. Some of us probably still remember George Beverly Shea’s classic song about the “Ninety and Nine that were safely in the fold” while the Good Shepherd was out looking for the one hundredth sheep.

That has always been a powerful image, emotionally and theologically, but this morning, I want to ask some unsettling questions, because I need to find a new way to place myself in these stories. And I begin with the act of losing.

You see, what I completely missed until recent years is the way that these parables identify God not only as the seeker of the lost but, by implication, as the lose-er. Remember that the woman who searched for her coin is also the woman who lost the coin in the first place. We are not told that the coin was stolen after which she diligently recovered it, maybe in some back alley where the thief dropped it. Nor did the coin itself turn rebellious and roll away out of her purse or knotted handkerchief, like some miniature, metallic gingerbread man. No, she lost it, dropped it, forgot where she put it. Why else did she sweep her house until she found it?

The sheep might be another matter, I suppose. We do tend to think about all those sheep as if they were human, and then blame the one sheep for being such a stupid sheep, such a willful sheep, that it didn’t follow the shepherd. But are we reading too much into the story? After all, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the shepherd is at fault here? If we can speak of losing something as a fault. It is the shepherd’s responsibility to look after the sheep. He has lost one of his sheep, through distraction perhaps or the complexity of the route. Who knows? What matters is that he lost it.

This happens. We lose keys, glasses, wallets, books, cameras, earrings, watches, jackets, boots, mittens, cell phones, even cars in large parking lots. Sometimes our responsibility in the loss is obvious; we were inexcusably careless. More often, the loss is simply in the nature of things. As Elizabeth Bishop puts it, in her poem “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (1-3).

As I ponder that art of losing, I wonder if perfect attention to all details at all times verges on obsessive compulsion, not normal behavior. Very likely, if I’ve never misplaced anything, then I’ve missed out on some important human relationships; some precious moments, when I could have truly listened to and looked at someone with loving attention, didn’t happen because I was clutching my keys and hanging onto my jacket instead. So I’ve kept my jacket but lost something else that might well have been far more valuable. 

So am I seriously suggesting an analogy between the woman’s careless loss of a coin and the father’s loss of the son? Surely the art of losing applies to coins, maybe even to sheep, but a son? Sons have wills of their own, after all. Yes, they do, but before we leap too quickly into interpretation here, can we take the time to imagine the family setting?

The younger son—poor lad. He’s usually castigated as the fool who ran off with his inheritance before he had any right to it. What a willful idiot! So I still remember my shock the first time I heard someone ask why he might have wanted to leave home, wondering whether he might have had reason to leave. What?? Doesn’t the father represent God? God can’t be at fault. But wait a minute. Jesus is known for his earthy, realistic vignettes about the working habits of farmers, the manipulation of dishonest accountants, the self-interest of vineyard laborers. Before any parable can be given theological meaning, it is a story with practical details that Jesus’s listeners immediately recognized.

Suppose, for now, that this is a realistic family with the usual misunderstandings and cross-purposes, with ordinary sibling jealousy, with failures in communication, and now with a heart-broken father who probably did the best he knew but things still went awry. First, he’s estranged from one son and then from the other. Is it likely that he was completely blameless here? When relationships go south, have not both parties contributed? Oh, often not equally, most often not intentionally, but rarely is one person all right and the other all wrong. That’s not how human estrangements usually play out.

In this case, the father seems surprisingly compliant, almost as if he doesn’t dare to cross his son. The older son seems convinced that the father has favored the younger son too often already, even before the undeserved welcome home party. Enough seems to have gone wrong here that the father is bending over backwards to keep the door open to reconciliation, perhaps foolishly so. He agrees to an action that is completely appalling in the culture of the time. One can almost imagine the listeners’ eyes widening as they glance at each other – he gave the son the money? He’s crazy. And later he has to explain to the older son that he’s always had the privilege of entertaining his friends in his home. The son never understood that? He is obviously a young adult. He and his father never talked? But in families so much is taken for granted, on both sides, until the tipping point. That is the nature of families.

I imagine a well-intentioned but baffled father. Maybe he knows what has alienated his younger son, made him so desperate to leave that he’s prepared to cut all familiar ties. Maybe the father doesn’t have a clue what went wrong. Not with the younger son, not with the older son. His intentions were good. He loved his sons. And as much as was possible, with the knowledge he had and with experience he himself had received from his own father, he did his best. He thought he had done his best. It wasn’t enough.

It isn’t ever enough. The nature of human relationships is such that each of us brings into any new and continuing relationship the habits of the heart and patterns of behavior that we have learned in previous relationships, along with our limited understanding of how the world works. We can, I suppose, see the inevitable failures to achieve perfection as the result of wickedness in the heart of every human being – that original sin we all inherit and absorb with our mothers’ milk, not to mention our mothers’ distractedness and fatigue. Or we can remember that it is only through and in our very “fallenness” (if we must use that term) that we know what love means in the first place.

How is it that explain the core of our faith—that God loves us? Through the undeniable and inexplicable fact that love is extended and is known in the midst of lostness. I suspect that we have all felt distanced from some acquaintance who has it all together, who presents a polished surface of competence – until something cracks the veneer and then, precisely because of the vulnerability, that acquaintance becomes a friend. The prophet Hosea would have been just one more prophet preaching about other people’s sins had he not been instructed to turn himself into an illustration of God’s love, to “go and take to [himself] an adulterous wife and [her] children of unfaithfulness” (Hos. 1: 2). So he loved a “lost woman” and continued to love her, hopelessly and heartbrokenly, as David continued to love Absalom in the midst of a family feud turned into civil war. Why do we insist, in this post-Easter season, that Jesus loves us? Because he was willing to love, very practically, the lost—the ones who had lost hope in an unjust, occupied society; the ones who had lost, nay, sold their souls to the occupier in order to get their bread; the ones who sold their bodies to keep body and soul together. He continued to challenge the systems that created more and more lost ones, until those in power, who had lost their integrity in their search for security, had no choice but to do away with the threat of his love.

How is it that those who followed Jesus had learned to love him? I think that I have always assumed that it was an awed adoration of the one who gives and gives again. But I wonder now if they loved Jesus because they knew he loved them out of his own vulnerability—he, that itinerant holy man who had lost his home; who, according to his critics, had lost his sanity; who in the depth of the night prayed and wept for the fatherly assurance he seemed to have lost. Never mind that he has been ascribed the power of a thousand angels; in the end, he is as vulnerable – and helpless – as the bewildered father at the end of the road, sobbing that he has lost his son. Love means giving your heart as hostage and opening yourself to whatever damage happens, whatever damage you yourself might do. 

For the sad, and wonderful, truth is that relationships are not controllable or programmable, thanks to the divinely given right of every human being to say ‘no’ or ‘yes,’ to choose something other than was intended, even to hear something that wasn’t actually meant, or even said, not to mention saying something that shouldn’t ever have been said. The mystery of individuality with its simultaneous, unique solitariness and its compulsion to seek oneness, whether with the romantic other or family or God, is that there are no right answers, nothing predictable. Instead we are free to choose to love, like God, in the midst of uncertainty and vulnerability, regardless of cost. What we cringe from is the veritable certainty that sometimes our best, most loving intentions will have consequences that we would have done anything to prevent. What we experience as miraculous gift is that often, even in the midst of our most self-serving behavior, we are nevertheless loved. There are no guarantees in relationships, either way. The Good Shepherd has indeed laid down his life for the many, yet the sheep do not all enter the fold; in fact, if we listen to the news, we will know that some sheep are busy bombing whatever sheepfolds don’t seem to belong to the kind of Shepherd they recognize.

What then can I take from these parables of lostness? I want to return to the reader’s task of identification. Sometimes I do need to identify myself with the lost. Whether I have, like the younger son, just given up on a situation and headed for the hills, or whether like the coin, through no fault of my own, I have ended up in the ashes in the backside of the fireplace, I need reassurance that love is there, that someone else will diligently wait or sweep until restoration occurs. 

However, this time I’m more interested in identifying with the father, and I see that identification working out in two ways. In the first place, I am comforted by the father’s deep humanness. He isn’t perfect; he doesn’t always know what he should do next; he’s vulnerable to the core of his being. Yet he loves, loves foolishly, and does not cease loving. That is a face of God that I can look into and not flee from. Perhaps this says much about where I have journeyed recently, but neither the transcendent Judge of All the World nor the supernaturally, flawlessly loving, self-contained God—that idealized version of the Good Shepherd—meets my heart’s needs. But I can imagine relationship with a Person who is also vulnerable, equally at the mercy of the choices of the other. I do not seek certainties and everlasting promises right now; it is enough to imagine sharing bread and wine with Someone who is prepared to keep working at the roller-coaster business of getting to know one another. Someone who loves in the midst of inevitable woundedness, his and mine.

The other aspect of this identification with the father is equally surprising and comforting. Let me return to that tense relationship between father and son. What if, just what if the father was culpable? At least to some extent? What if somehow things had been said that hadn’t come out quite right? And the misunderstandings just couldn’t be cleared up? And that idealistic youth, who imagines the world, still, in black and white, with himself always in the white space (for sure, in the white space), gives up on his father and leaves. Demands his rights as he has a right to do, he thinks, since the possibility of being a true son to a true father has now evaporated. Might as well put that “truth” in the open and act on it with integrity. Oh, he has principle on his side, very likely. So too does the father, except that for him, the principle is all mixed up with complex emotions. He knows, too well, that he hasn’t done everything right. No parent ever does, but the son hasn’t learned that yet. So he leaves, ripping out a part of his father’s heart on the way, not noticing that he has ripped out part of his own heart, too. That happens, God knows, as we blunder our way through to greater wisdom. Or not, depending on how long we can stand looking in the mirror.

By all accounts, such scenes are messy, and sometimes killing the fatted calf and serving the banquet doesn’t make it all better, or not for long enough. Nevertheless, Jesus offers us this realistic scene and, in the midst of it, points out the presence of the God of Love, all the more moving for being situated so completely in the heart of the wounded, helpless father. Furthermore, although Jesus does not point this out explicitly, the younger son himself also opens up a space for divine love. He does return, after all, with hope. If we identify the father with God, then it stands to reason that the son has some affinity with Jesus, who has also left home to journey to a far country, taking some of his inheritance of goodness and purity and power with him, yet he will eventually dare to return to the Father with some degree of humanness now an integral part of him.

For me, the parable has now lost its edge of condemnation, has become more comforting and more mysterious. If, in the middle of the worst messes that we sometimes create, the very presence of God is evident in our most helpless and useless acts of love, then all is not lost, after all. I am, in fact, called to recognize the face of God in the faces of the baffled, well-meaning fathers; of the frustrated, equally well-meaning, albeit not yet clear-thinking sons; of the inadequate mothers still unwittingly playing out the left-over expectations of their own mothers; of the stubborn, struggling daughters, seeking more freedom to be themselves without knowing yet what that might mean. And all of them, in their love, laying down their lives—not in the sense of throwing themselves in front of an external onslaught of poisoned arrows, but in the ordinary, holy sense of laying open their hearts to whatever metaphorical arrows may fly, letting themselves know and be known, with all the ache and joy that that brings. Of such is the love of the Good Shepherd, evident here among us if we are ready to see it.