Seekers and Foundlings

Proper 19 C


Do you remember being in the store with your kids in tow, looking at something for a moment only to turn around and find your kids gone? Do you remember the panic and moment of sheer terror? Or maybe you remember being the kid who turns away for a minute only to find your parents are missing.

Whether you are the found or the seeker today, this gospel speaks to you.

Sheep do not tend to be lost through their own actions. They nibble here and there, find a particularly tender shoot to eat and go for it, and just like a child who gets caught up in his surroundings, does nothing intentionally to get lost, but suddenly finds himself away from his flock. We like sheep may be going along in our own way, not intending to be lost. Perhaps we lost our job, were going through some kind of hard times. This week we have buried two people who had long ties with our church, but both of them were lost to us. One was lost when he moved away to be cared for in his aging process. Another was lost to us through perhaps merely finding other things to do on Sunday morning.

Those who are lost, including us, are sought desperately by God. The ones we would give up on God seeks by turning over every rock, calling out for them to be part of the flock who miss them.

Handel’s Messiah was performed in the most famous rendition as a benefit for the London Foundling Hospital in the 1700’s. The word foundling means orphan and is a quaint term we no longer use, but it fits our meaning of the lost sheep—one who is found. A friend of mine says he found his son in the aquarium. He and his wife went to an adoption day hosted at the National Aquarium in Baltimore to see various children who were hard to find homes for; they followed one little fellow around the aquarium for about an hour and fell in love with him and they adopted him on the spot. Their son was a foundling in every sense of the term.

God adopts us foundlings on the spot too. In our baptism we are adopted into God’s family. At baptism we are anointed by saying we are marked as Christ’s own forever—a kind of spiritual tattoo that cannot be removed. Once we are found and adopted by God there is nothing we can do to be unadopted—we are found once and for all.

We may stray still—we may decide not to be part of the flock, to turn a deaf ear to the voice of God asking us to stay close and be loved—but we cannot be removed from God’s presence whatever we do.

This is hard for some Christians to realize—that murderers, child abusers, and others who do vile things, are still God’s children. In God’s eyes they are redeemable, and worthy always of love. Our prisons are full of people who believe they are not loveable or worthy. Prison ministry is often fraught with helping convicted felons to learn to love themselves enough to want to improve themselves and their lot in life. Programs for GED and college coursework give prisoners a sense of self and pride of accomplishment and help them know they can be productive members of society.

Many groups of people in our society, like prisoners, are forgotten by us but not by God. I visit several homebound elderly who feel connected to this parish by receiving communion. They sometimes tell me they feel unworthy to keep on living because they feel they are a burden to their families. They can no longer attend church, but church attends to them instead and listens to their anxieties and cares.

Perhaps you know of others who are forgotten people, ones you come in contact with and can share a moment of caring conversation. God works through each of us as we seek out the ones who seem to be lost in the shuffle of our fast moving society that does not have time to stop for those who can’t keep up.

And each of us at some time have been found in this way. Perhaps you were feeling down or anxious and someone listened to your cares and helped you voice your worthiness in God’s eyes. God does not abandon us ever. It is we who turn a blind eye to God trying to find us.

Thomas Merton wrote: Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.... This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in God's creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth.

In other words we are both lost sheep and seeker with God in our own lives, by working with God in being found. Can you work with God to be found and find others?