Sunshine Cathedral Sermons

by Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral (Dec. 27, 2009)

Never Really Lost

Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins Colossians 3.13-16; Luke 2.41-52 Third Day of Christmas (2009).
Today there is no song; no dance. No bawdy story to rival the days of Burlesque. There is no clip from 1970s television or a 1940s movie. Today, I want to be uncharacteristically serious. Because today, as we celebrate the last Sunday of 2009, I don’t want to waste a single moment in making sure that everyone hears the point of today’s message. I want us to hear it; to own it. I want us to internalize it and celebrate it and by all means, share it.
We’ve all heard the speculations about the so-called “lost years of Jesus.” Mark introduces us to Jesus as a full-grown adult. Matthew and Luke, writing several years later, engage their creative imaginations to come up with stories about how Jesus might have been born. Matthew then fast forwards right to adulthood. Luke, after his Nativity story, fast forwards to Jesus as a young teen, and then fast forwards again to his adulthood. There just isn’t any information, not even any conjecture about Jesus’ formative years. That wasn’t important to these writers…none of them knew Jesus as a child, nor did they know anyone who knew Jesus as a child. They were focused on the impact the adult Jesus had on the lives of their communities, and more importantly, how that impact somehow involved the presence and power of God.
The gospel writers aren’t 21st century westerners…these aren’t literalists with a need for obsessing on details. Theirs is not a culture that would obsess for weeks on a celebrity’s affair, divorce, or tax evasion. In their culture, when one has touched people profoundly, you tell great stories that reflect that truth, not the tedious details of that person’s everyday life. You can even make up stories to convey the truth of the person’s importance…truth matters much more than mere facts. And to communicate truth, one may have to take some license and employ some creativity. And even at that, one is free to leap over huge spans of time in service of one’s message. And so, the life of Jesus we encounter in the synoptic gospels is only the highlights of a single year of ministry.
Many of us grew up in churches that focused on Jesus, on the biblical texts, on the tradition, on the rules we were meant to follow, on the symbols and sacraments of the shared rituals, but the bible writers were focused on God.
To be sure, Luke and the other NT writers thought of Jesus as a God-filled person, and they themselves had a richer experience of God because of Jesus; but the unnamable, indescribable, unlimited, omnipresent mystery of life was their primary focus, and the divine Life that was the at the center of their contemplations includes us all. We can’t ultimately be lost from it. In it we live and move and have our being, according to Luke’s account of St. Paul’s theology in the book of Acts (17.28).
Luke isn’t doing an expose’ on Jesus’ life; he’s offering commentary on how Jesus’ life helped other lives experience divine love more fully. Jesus helped people wake up to the divine spark that was already in their lives, because apparently, Jesus had managed to wake up to the reality of that divine spark in his own life. But the focus is, as it should be, on the Divine, on God. Any symbol, image, idiom, or metaphor which might point toward God is never meant to be a substitute for God. Wherever we see Jesus, we are meant to see how he is pointing us to the presence of God in our own lives; and if God is always in our lives, how can we ever really be lost?
This omnipresent, divine, Life is demonstrated in the experience of shepherds and in the experience of a teenage expectant mother in Luke’s Nativity narrative. Luke will insist that this benevolent Omnipresence includes prodigal sons, wandering sheep, and in today’s reading, even inconsiderate youngsters who wander off from their parents, leaving them to worry themselves sick. The power and presence that we call God leaves no one out for any reason; It is infinite Love and it is expressing in, through, and as every one of us without fail!
Our being always at home in God is a theme Luke seems to really like:
He tells of the Son, lost – found in Temple (Luke 2.41-52)
Lamb, lost – found wandering about (Luke 15)
Coin, lost – found in the house (Luke 15)
Prodigal, lost -found returning home (Luke 15)
He mentions an Altar to an unknown god…God is big enough to know what you are looking for, and big enough to respond. (Acts 17.23)
Luke even uses the scholar Gamaliel to suggest that we need not fear the twists and turns of a journey; we needn’t even fear being wrong. We can trust the process of life, trust the activity of growth, trust the journey will lead to the right destination. Luke imagines Gamaliel saying of the early Christian movement: if they’re right, then Right is on their side, and you can’t beat them; and if they’re wrong, why bother? Their fallacy will expose itself. Either way, live and let live. Let people find their way and just trust that ultimately, you’ll get where you need to be. (Acts 5.33-39)
St. Paul also suggested that we learn to trust the journey, the questions, the uncertainty, the twists and turns of life when he told the Corinthians to “live by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5.7). We don’t need to be spoon fed every answer. We don’t need every detail outlined in a creed or a book or dictated by an elaborate hierarchy. We can live by trusting the process of life, the unknowns and the surprises of the journey, and not by having preapproved questions answered in advanced for us. The bottom line is, if God is omnipresent, then that means God is everywhere fully present, so it could not be possible to ever be separate from God. And if God is good, and God is always where we are, then ultimately, how we could we ever be lost. We aren’t lost; God knows exactly where we are; because God is with us right where we are.
In today’s reading, Jesus goes with the family to Temple, but lags behind when they start to return home. But even though he was very naughty to not tell his parents where he was, ultimately, his journey didn’t take him away from Mary’s love, or Joseph’s, and certainly not away from God’s.
The Lamb, the Coin, the Prodigal son take some wrong turns, but everything works out. Oh sure there were dangers and anxieties, in the prodigal son’s case, there was very real hardship and disappointment, but those were circumstances. The truth was, that even in a pig sty, eating garbage and living in filth, the prodigal’s sacred value was never tarnished. He always had a home, a place of love and acceptance…and even the worst of circumstances couldn’t change that truth. In the heart of God, we always have a home…and nothing will ever change that truth.
The God we are looking for has never let us go! That’s the exciting point that Luke makes over and over again. We’re looking for something we’ve never lost, because it is in us, it is part of us, it is holding us, it is expressing through us…in it we live and move and have our being…God is omnipresent and so there is nowhere away from God to go? The psalmist figured it out when he prayed, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? (Psalm 139.7). St. Paul, likewise affirmed that “nothing can separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8.39). The divine Love that the early church saw lived out in the life of Jesus is everywhere, including everything…nothing can separate us from that love. Where could we go from it? How could we ever flee from it? If God is, then “lost” is never a possibility.
Luke tells us that Mary & Joseph are afraid they’ve lost Jesus…but what does Jesus symbolize in the gospels? God with us, in us! Can we ever lose the love, the presence, the grace of God? No…where could we go from the Spirit in which we live and move and have our being?
Luke repeats the point throughout his gospel.
The lamb tries to wander off from the security of the flock.
A homemaker can’t seem to find her precious coin (a symbol of sacred value).
A son is afraid that he is forever estranged from his family’s warmth, love, and abundance.
In every case, the teen, the lamb, the coin, the adult son…is not really separated from the parents’ love, the shepherd’s protection, the homemaker’s care, the comfort and safety of family. What Luke is saying is that separation from God simply is not possible.
We are never really lost. We may be confused. We may be afraid. We may have focused on circumstances more than on the truth of our oneness with divine Love. We may feel like that lost coin, or that lost lamb, or like that irresponsible teen who lagged behind…but even when that teen was inconsiderate, he was still full of light…that light shone to inspire and impress the Temple leaders. Circumstantial clouds may temporarily hide our light, but they cannot remove it; that Light is God’s presence, and it is part of us, always with us, unwilling and even unable to let us go…it is the energy of existence, the divine stuff of creation. It is us and in us and it surrounds us and flows through us…we cannot lose it nor will it ever lose us.
Have you made mistakes? Have you lived in fear? Have you doubted your sacred value? Have you wondered if there was really a place for you in the interconnected wholeness of Life? In short, have you ever felt lost? Well, it’s time to get past that. The coin is never really lost. The lamb can’t wander off very far. The parents backtrack to find the teen. The adult son always has a home to come back to. Being lost or separated from or forgotten or abandoned by God just isn’t possible. The one thing God can’t do is stop loving you.
Accept this good word, and let it dwell in you richly. Be glad and give thanks to God…to the God who has never, will never, and could never let you go. This is the good news. Amen.
© Durrell Watkins 2009

Audio readings and sermon (http://sunshinecathedral.org/sermons/audio/20091227_1.mp3)
Video readings and sermon (http://sunshinecathedral.org/sermons/video/20091227_1.wmv)