THE PERSISTENCE OF GOB John M. Buchanan
Luke 15:1-10 Broad Street Presbyterian @hurch

September 21, 1980 Columbus, Ohio

Tt is not easy to talk about one's personal experience with God. The pitfalls are (5
real and many, not the least of whict is that the fine line between objective truth and,
wishful thinking fades altogether and the teller may say more than he intends and more
than he actually experienced and the poor listener will try to measure his own experience
on the basis of what he has heard. Invariably the conclusion is that the teller has
experienced something far more profound than I have. We do not speak easily nor success-
fully about religious experience. We are much better at discussing religious ideas.

One experience, however, is common to almost every attempt to talk about the
phenomenon, and that is the experience of being found. In a mystical wav, people of
extraordinary sensitivity testify that looking for God is evidence that one has already
been found hy Him.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite theologians, has written a fictional trilogy
featuring 4 strange hero, Lec Bebb, ex con, founder of the Church of Holy Love, head of
a religious diploma mill.

At the beginning of the third novel Bebb, now deceased, is speaking by way of a
cassette tape...and he says...
"The kingdom of heaven...it's like you're poking around in an old
junk shop, and inside an old humpback trunk with the Lid half stove
in you come across a pack of letters somebody's great granddad
tied up with string from a chum back home name of Abe Lincoln...
Now you tell me what a man would give to lay his hands on that
trunk.,.He'd give ten, twenty years of his life...and for the Kingdom
of Heaven. You know why? Why, because the Kingdom of Heaven, that is
what it is, {t's life; not the kind of half-baked, moth-eaten life
we most of us live most of the time, but the real honest-toe-God
thing. It’s the treasure a man spends all his born days looking for
no matter if he knows it or not,

"The Kingdom comes by looking for it. The Kingdom comes by not
looking for it too hard. There's times the Kingdom comes by it
looking for you," (Treasure Hunt, p.8, Frederick Buechner).

That's what Jesus said one day, when He heard that the Pharisees who were conscious
seekers of God's Kingdom, were critical of the company He was keeping. Jesus was seen
consistently in the company of people who simply didn't seem to care about the Kingdom

of Heaven.

They are called sinners. They are not, however, essentially bad people. They are
the common felk. They are not part of the religious community. They are the poor, the
outsiders, the nobodies. They have neither the inclination nor the sophistication to
be involved in institutional religion: its nuances bore them. They play a major role in
the New Testament, Jesus apparently got along with them very well. He liked them and
they liked Him. The Pharisees, on the other hand didn't like them at all, resented
them, regarded them as a threat, probably felt guilty about them and simply avoided them
as thoroughly as possible. They were "unclean": that is, they had not participated in
the religious rituals which made a person pure and acceptable. To be near them, to
break bread with them, therefore was to become unclean oneself,

-2-

When the Pharisees saw Jesus of Nazareth - who, more and more was presuming to
address them on behalf of their God, associating with these people, they were most un-
happy. That is the context, then, for a series of familiar parables. In the first story
a shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness in order to track down the one
sheep that has strayed. The subtlety of the story is that the shepherd did something no
real life shepherd could or would do. You simply can't leave ninety-nine sheep umtended in
the wilderness. If you did you might not have a flock when you return. The loss of one
sheep out of a hundred is serious But it would simply be unthinkable to risk the entire
flock of ninety-nine to find one. We may call this figure the 'Good Shepherd" but business-
men would call him foolish. The point is that Jesus was saying something radical about
God and something revelutionary about people. He was not, by the way, suggesting that one
lest sheep is more valuable that ninety-nine who are still together. He was saying that
God is not willing to cut his losses with one single individual. He was saying that
God will search and pursue until He finds. And He was saying that there is something very
precious, inherently precious, about the individual which warrants the search in the

first place, hey kuda + UMA ~ otk pertcads -

The second story is similar. The main character is a woman who has lost one of ten
silver coins, a drachma, worth one day's wages. Her percentage loss is more severe than
the shepherd's, but it is still not devastating. Some scholars think that the coin was
very precious, one of the ten coins on the woman's headband, the piece of jewelry which
marked her marital status, as precious to her therefore as a wedding ring is to some of
us. The point is not monetary value but intrinsic, symbolic, personal value. The woman
turned her house upside down until she found the coin and then was very happy. People,
Jesus was saying, are that valuable in God's sight.

The Pharisees called them sinners. Jesus, on the other hand, preferred to use the
category of "lostness'". It occurred to me again, while thinking about this text, that
our propensity, our preference, is more Pharisaical than Christlike. Particularly
people in the church seem more interested in categories of sin than in the condition of
being lost. In Jesus' stories, for instance, lostness comes as a result, first, of an
aimless, ignorant drifting. Sheep don't conspire to get lost. They simply walk from one
clump of grass to the next and before you or they know it, they're lost, The coin had
nothing to do with its condition. Someone else did the losing. And it doesn't take much
experience counseling and/or parenting to discover the existential truth of that diagnosis,
An astounding number of child abusers were abused children, An astounding number of
people with chemical addiction came from families in which a parent suffered from the
same disease. Sometimes lostness comes from someone else doing the losing.

But it's always easier to talk about sin, the occasional, intentional anti-social,
immoral, or illegal act. It has always been our inclination to reduce our diagnosis of
the human condition to the least and simplest common denominator, and to propose ~ somehow
with a straight face - that it is of consequence to Almighty God whether people dance,
smoke, drink ot play cards. We Christians have always been better at labeling certain
acts as sinful than in dealing with the complexity of the human condition, We have walked
through the ethical wilderness of our generation clutching our simple moralisms to our
breasts and it's no wonder that few people are listening to us any more, It is simply
irrelevant to respond to an epidemic of teenage pregnancies, and venereal disease, and the
new common practice of co-habitation prior to or instead of marriage by declaring that
pre-marital sex is a sin and people who do it are sinners. Nobody's Listening to that.

People sit up and take notice, I have observed, when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is
allowed to address the human condition with its own strong and honest love. You can
trust college students to give straight answers and honest responses. And even college
students will listen when the church starts addressing lostness instead of condemning sin.

4D

be
ay

-3-

It is, after all, the most Powerful contemporary cultural motif.in literature, cinema and
the desparate sense of abandonment in most Rock Music, our culture uses its artistic

media to document and sometimes celebrate its sense of lostness, aloneness, In William
Styron's Sophie's Choice, a superb novel about a Polish refugee from a Nazi concentration
camp, the motif of abandonment and lostness emerges with heart breaking intensity. The
heroine of the book has lost her simple Catholic faith. She, as is the case with millions
of others, has concluded that God, if He exists at all, has simply turned his back on
humankind and that we are alone in the wilderness, clutching for anything that will fill
the void.

To be alive today: ta be aware and honest is to know that feeling. It is to know
that the simple certainties of the past don't work any longer. It is to know the ex-
perience of lostness. And the relevance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely in its
daring promise that it is just in your experience of lestness that God will come looking
for you.

Professor John Knox has written..."The phrase, ‘man's search for God' is a misnomer:
no man seeks God until he has first heard the shepherd's call", (The Interpreter's Bible,
Vol, 8, p.265). That is the ancient experience which modern theologies force us to
confront. Tt is precisely because we sense the absence or silence of God that we know
He exists. It is precisely in our sense of God forsakenness that we know He has not
abandoned us. It is precisely in our despair that He chooses to disclose himself.

“Whither shall I flee from thy presence?" the Psalmist asked. "If I take the wings of the
morning, or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or lie down in the fires of hell
itselfi...thou art with me." Even in doubt, negation, God is the persistent pursuer. After

a life of alternatingly searching for God and trying to escape from him Augustine wrote in
the opening book of his classic "Confessions", "Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise;
for Thou madest us for Thyself, and cur heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." (p.1).

Pascal, l/th century mathematician, scientist and philosopher, was also a dogged
pursuer cf religious truth. In a bit of dialopue between God and man he wrete, "You
would not be seeking me unless you had already found me."

C.S.Lewis, after a pilgrimage through ali the alternatives, finally became a
Christian and as far as I know, never discussed the actual conversion except tantalizingly
as "Surprised by Joy". Malcolm Muggeridge, whose deep piety has occurred after a long
life of skepticism says simply that the Ged who had been pursuing him across the years

Found him.

That was the radical teaching of Jesus. The Pharisees never conceived of a God
like that. None of us dees, Their God was isolated across a chasm of religious purity
and righteousness. Other ancient dieties were remote, unconnected with life, uncaring,
unfeeling, distant, mystical, unapproachable. The radical word Jesus spoke was the
opposite of that, God is the persistent pursuer. He goes after the wandering sheep
until He finds it. He gets involved in human life. He is troubled by it. He gets angry
and sad. God ~ the Ged of Jesus - weeps with his children and laughs for joy, when one
of his people is found.

it is not easy to talk about one's personal religious experience. It is not always
appropriate. But may T have the privilege of suggesting some places where I believe He
is looking for his people? May I suggest that God looks for us, and finds us - gently,
carefully, creatively, precisely in our experience of lostness, that if He did not exist,
if He had not already touched our lives we would not be bothered by the experience of
his absence? If you are struggling with a moral question, an ethical dilemma for which

~4&-

there is no simple answer, may I suggest that your very discomfort is the evidence that
God is finding you? ['m not suggesting that He gives answers, but that his presence is
making itself felt in the discomfort of the question. If you are waging an intense
battle of conscience: if you are seriously concerned about your community and nation, or
your schools, or hospitals or welfare agencies, and can't quite decide where you are on
the issues, may I suggest that a God of justice is finding you precisely through your
discomfort? If you're doing lonely battle with addiction and with your own self image,
and if your pain is precisely in your unwillingness to give in...may I suggest that a God
who loves you like a parent, and whose love follows you into every far country, is
finding you?

And if you're struggling with reconciliation, if you're torn between your sense of
rightness and propriety and the love you feel for a spouse or child or parent who has
wronged you: if you want and love and need them and can't bring yourself to say it, may
I suggest that the God of reconciliation is the source of the pressure and the agony?

And if your intimate struggle is theological: if you know the language of despair
and the dark night of the soul: if the faith of your childhood simply evaporated some-
where between Auschwitz and Hiroshima and VietNam and Watergate: if you feel the pain and
emptiness of skepticism, then may I suggest that something very creative is happening?
‘May I propose that even as you flee, God, the persistent pursuer, is finding you?

One matter further, God's love, we believe, is eternal. So is his persistence.
The shepherd did not abandon the lost sheep. He looked until he found it. Many people
are bothered deeply by the fact that dear ones have died without ever publicly confessing
Jesus Christ as Lord. Somewhere along the line they learned that you had to do that to
get to Heaven, and even though it violates common sense they are bothered, rather deeply,
by regret and remorse. Jesus said that God is persistent. His persistence is eternal.
The Good News is that death is no longer the final word: God - and his love - is the
eternal and persistent word spoken about each one of us,

yy He will find us. Jesus said it long ago...

/ "When he has found (his sheep) he lays it on his shoulders,

1 rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his
\ ‘Nt friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for
My I have found my sheep which was lost’."

Thanks be to God,
Amen,

God our pursuer, do not give up on us. Keep pursuing through our conscience, our
struggles, our dearest loves. God, our shepherd, find us and lead us home. Through

Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen,