When I learned late Thursday night that I would be preaching today, as well as finishing up the service Mary started for the anniversary of the Iraq war, my first thought was, of course, what am I going to preach about?

  Mary gave me some quick guidance by saying the hymns were set up for Luke 15, so I might want to try to make something out of that. So I read it. But after reading it I had a whole lot of other things I had to accomplish on Thursday night like finding a flight for Mary, a place for her to stay, and a way for her to get there. We also needed to get in touch with our daughters.

  So by the time I went to bed, and got back up because I realized I hadn’t actually made the shuttle service reservation for Mary, I was real tired, but not anywhere near going to sleep. So as I lay in bed I suddenly remembered Luke 15. “Oh yeah,” I said to myself, “what is that about?”

It’s not like I’ve never come across the story of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep before. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that’s not the story of the prodigal son, the son who decided to spend all his money on the joys of the flesh, but the story of the lost son. Lost son, lost coin, lost sheep. There are lots of ways to get lost, separated from God, from our families and friends, from ourselves and what we want for ourselves. And some of them are described in this chapter.

  Some of us get lost because we just kind of gradually wander away, not realizing what’s happening. There is grass to chew and sleep in. Rocks and streams to play on and in. There is the meadow to enjoy, the places to explore. And suddenly you look up and realize you are all alone and very vulnerable and afraid. You didn’t mean to cut yourself off from the support and protection of God and the flock, but you have. And all you can do is shiver in what now is not grassy meadow, but wilderness, and cry because you have no idea where to go.

  There are, also, those people who have been made lost, like that coin. Circumstances and situations have shattered their lives. There is pain. There might be abuse, or poverty, or heart break. There are tragedies of our own and others’ making that leave us lost, groping to find something familiar and comforting, but it’s not something we can find. So we wander sometimes more dazed than afraid at what has happened in our lives and wondering if we will ever find our way back.

   Then there are those who want to get lost, people who are tired of what has been, and go off looking for something else, heedless of God or anyone else. But what they find is loneliness and fear, sometimes even disgust with themselves. When they come to their senses, like the lost son, they realize they may have squandered something they can never regain, and they’ve got nothing to show for it.

  It doesn’t matter how we get lost, being lost, being apart from God, Jesus says, is all the same. There is no comfort for the scared one who wandered away that, at least, she wasn’t like that lost son. Being lost is scary no matter how you got there.

There are plenty of other images for being lost we could think up. But there are other images in this story that are about being found. We know some images of God, like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But what about Worried Shepherd, Crazed Housewife, Heart-Broken Parent?

  Jesus was always helping people think about God in different ways. Think about a God who combs the country side for a lost, vulnerable lamb when he still has 99 who are okay. In the wilderness sheep are going to get lost.

  Think about a God who rummages through all the piles, sweeps up the dust and dog hair in all the corners, goes though the trash, looks under all the cushions for one coin. Maybe that’s a God who knows something about how a coin or two can determine if a family is going to make it a while longer or not.

  Think about a God who stands at the screen door for hours every day looking up and down the road for that wayward son to come home. This is not the stern, unbending, disciplinarian, that we are to often convinced God is. This is another God.

  And what happens when that God sees the son coming down the road, when that God finds the lost coin, when that God rescues the lost sheep? God throws a party.

  It’s really interesting that the lost son doesn’t even get the chance to apologize and explain himself. His father is too busy thinking about the party he is going to throw.

  When the shepherd finds that sheep, he doesn’t sling it down from his soldiers in disgust and give it a good kick in the rear end on it’s way back to the flock. He gets the other shepherds together for a party. I found the sheep before the wolves did! She’s okay. She’s back with the rest of the flock.

  When that woman found the coin she had to have a party herself. She had faced the vulnerability, but things were going to be okay.

God’s love finds us, Jesus says. There is a way back home no matter how long we have been lost, or how we got that way. Or as the Apostle Paul says it, ‘there is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

  We often work with this little formula in the Church, repent and receive God’s grace. But we have it backwards, receive God’s grace and repent. It’s that grace of God, that incredible love that changes us. We don’t have to change to receive that love, but that love surely changes us.

  The older son in the story about the lost son, the one who had never really been lost himself, needed to also learn this lesson of God’s love. His father didn’t love him because he had been the good son, his father loved him because he was his son.

  If it had been him, the older son, who had taken off to spend half of his father’s life savings on slow gin and fast women, the father would have stood at the same door, and stared down the same road. God just loves us because God does. That’s what grace means. And it leads us home. In his own way, this older son also had to find his way home, but to the party.

These stories are prefaced by that accusation from the religious types that Jesus is spending too much of his time with the wrong kind of people. They couldn’t understand why Jesus wanted to party so much, let alone the people he chose to party with.

  All that Jesus was saying to them was come to the party yourselves. Let God love you a little bit. Is this the way you want to spend the rest of your lives? Do you always want to be the orthodoxy police? Or wouldn’t you rather just experience God, let that love drench you, and have a good time doing it?

And it’s not like it was all party for Jesus. He knew where this whole thing was headed. It wasn’t out of ignorance that he set his face for Jerusalem. But even when things get hard, and they can get hard following Jesus and his ways, the joy of finding your way home surpasses it all.

  And actually, it’s a home none of us have ever been to before. It’s a home we get to build with Jesus and each other. It’s no wonder you want to party. We were lost, but we’ve been found. And even the angels, Jesus says,  want to come to the party.

  Jesus knew there was a cross waiting for him in Jerusalem. But he also knew it was the way home, and that there was going to be a big party come Easter morning.