Seeking the lost

I love this picture. I took it while on sabbatical in Shetland in 2016. Sheep out for a walk! I’m putting a service together for Sunday morning and the bible passages are all about getting lost and helping lost things be found. Sheep are notorious for running off and getting lost and it takes the owner of the sheep a long, painful search to find the one who has gone astray. 

I’m leading worship for the third time in The Fens Circuit on Sunday morning, this time a communion service in a church where the congregation will be probably four people, in a vast Victorian building and two of them will be sitting on the back row in the corner! I thought we’d have a reflective table of things we lose and I’d write a liturgy about seeking and finding. We will see what emerges as my thoughts develop. 

What sort of things do we lose? Here’s my list:

Keys - why don’t I just put keys in a box rather than throw them down somewhere? 

My winter coat - today is rather autumnal and I couldn’t find my warmer coat this morning so I ended up buying another one at lunchtime being so cold.

Clerical collars - I throw them off then get in a state when I can’t find any half an hour before I need to leave the house on a Sunday morning. 

The way - why do the roads in the Fens all look the same? It’s easy to get lost without the sat nav on.

Important things from the Circuit I’ve just left - my study is still full of boxes and I need to find stuff that needs returning. The deeds to a manse were missing. I’ve found them but I’m still searching for a baptismal register! 

Glasses - I can never find my glasses. I need glasses on to find my glasses!

Socks - why is it you put two socks of the same colour in the washing machine and one of them then disappears? 

Bic biros - why is it you buy a new pack of Bic biros and then can’t find any of them a week later? 

Cats - we have three new rescue cats who are all youngsters. They are fast on their feet. The room with the fire escape in had the door to the fire escape open the other day and little Alice went out to explore then started wailing as she didn’t know where she was. 

The Bible in Luke chapter 15 talks of lost coins and lost sheep. One little coin, perhaps worth a fortune to the woman desperately searching for it;  one little sheep lost out in the cold, breaking the heart of the one who is responsible for its care as it has got away. Like we get stressed when that key we need now or that pair of glasses we need now can’t be found, we aren’t at peace until the lost is found.

How does it feel to be lost? Perhaps we get frightened, paralysed, feel totally alone, we cannot function, we go into a panic because what we need to function, either a thing, or a way out, is not there. We cannot save ourselves so we need help. The coin is lost without help, the sheep is lost without help. The sat nav on the phone gets me out of trouble when I’m over confident I can find the way to the doctor in Parson Drove without  help. We need when searching for something, a calm, systematic search rather than a mad panic!! That’s how I’m looking for things my former colleague Tricia, now Superintendent of the Circuit, needs like yesterday. 

There are lost people in the world tonight. I’m in London writing this watching people trudge home after work. Many feel lifeless, lost, directionless, life is one big stress. The journey is wayward rather than easy. And what about our government? Those who disagree with Boris are booted out, we may have an election, we may be leaving the EU on October 31 or not, no deal appears to be against the law now, there is little trust, whether you voted leave or remain, in our government. And today the speaker has resigned. It’s a directionless mess. Parliament has been perrouged tonight with a lot of important stuff lost now.   We need strong leadership, but not a dictator. Not that I’m allowed to call the present shambles that! 

We need a God who keeps searching until we are found. The coin in the dark recesses and the silly sheep stuck in bramble need pastoral care now. The people in our society who need “finding” are an urgent call on our time and priorities. Those with depression, abused, the lonely, the ones no one gets, have to be at the top of our priorities if the Church really says she cares. The service of  ordination for ministers includes the charge to seek the lost. The charge of the Church should be the heart of the Gospel following the example of Jesus, with the likes of the blind man by the side of the road, a despised tax collector shunned by everyone who he’d wronged and a woman ostracised as she was riddled with bleeding, a Jesus who seeks and saves the lost. 

The Church today, in my opinion, seems to be spending endless energy on keeping going with little energy to reach out to the lost who are desperate. I learnt some time ago of a church where a homeless man slept on their steps by the front door overnight prior to a Sunday morning service thinking he might find help when people arrived. Alas many of the good Christian people arrived, saw him, avoided the front door and used the back door, hoping he might just go away. Lord, have mercy.

To be lost is a horrific experience. I’ve been there. To lose what I cherished has been the worst trauma of my life. To be so unwell has been so difficult. Today I’ve finished three months of counselling with the fabulous Simon in Islington who has helped me journey from feeling totally lost and bereft to being found and with a purpose again. The Fens Circuit have also helped me enormously as we’ve got amongst them over the last three months. 

I walked past St Paul’s Cathedral this afternoon. It is a fact that people are wandering into sacred space to find some direction. They aren’t, in the main, interested in commitment of planet Church, but there is a searching within them to find something more. We need to open our churches more! Not with helter skelters or crazy golf courses, like some cathedrals recently, but to simply offer sacred space and silence to think

about direction. Peterborough has had the Gaia earth in it over recent weeks. I’ve found it powerful. While the earth turns (lost) the cross stands.

The Son of Man came to seek and save that what was lost. The call on us today. The most urgent pastoral need round our isolated churches is in people who simply need to know they are in the fold. If we are spending our energy on anything else, then we fail. We need to change the world today! 

 Are we lost for ever? That isn’t the Christian message! I usually take a book with me on a Monday on the train and today’s is by one of my spiritual heroines Barbara Brown Taylor:

“ On her deathbed about six hundred years ago, Dame Julian of Norwich received a series of visits from her crucified Lord. He stood at the foot of her bed and consoled her, saying, “All shall we well, and all manner of things shall be well. “

“ That is, in the end, the message that the cross calls us to believe without knowing how or why: that come hell or high water; come affliction and hardship; persecution, hunger, nakedness, peril or sword, come whatever may; nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, who has promised us that everything, finally, all shall be well.”

(God in Pain,  Barbara Brown Taylor, Canterbury Press, 2018)