Our daughter recently got married. I performed part of the ceremony and hosted a houseful of out of town company, while trying to not miss a beat with the fall semester courses I was teaching. Super pastor. Super professor. Super hostess. Super mom In the days leading up to my guests’arrival I became a tad frazzled. One day, I was running multiple errands, dry cleaners, grocery store, gas station, and drive-through ATM machine. I put my card in, punched in the code, waited impatiently for my money to come out, tugged it out of the slot, turned right out of the parking lot to drive home. It wasn’t long before I noticed an SUV coming right up behind me and beeping. “What an idiot!” I thought. I’ll be they’re drunk. And look at that, she has kids in her car. What is she thinking? The woman drove her SUV right up beside me and motioned for me to pull over. While holding up my ATM card.
It’s not every day that something you lost comes looking for you.
I once heard a speaker discussing this parable. He offered the audience a riddle: “How does the lost sheep repent?” Because I had been studying this passage, I knew the answer. I raised my hand: “Well, it doesn’t, except by being found!”
“That’s right,” he said.
The emotional energy of this parable of the Lost Coin, like that of the lost sheep and lost sons that surround it, is on the Finder: the shepherd, the woman, the undignified father. It’s on the act of finding more than on what is lost. In this parable, repentance means allowing yourself to be found by God in the midst of your ministry.
And who knows where allowing yourself to be found will lead!
God has a hard time finding me when I’m awake. Sometimes God waits until I’m asleep. Seven years ago I was serving as an interim pastor at Langhorne UMC, Langhorne, Pa. It was about a 600 member church – I was finishing my PH.D in homiletics at Princeton Seminary, just getting started writing and dreaming about what I might contribute to write about preaching and wisdom. I was starting to interview for positions at a couple of seminaries. The staff parish committee formally asked me to stay and become their fulltime pastor on a Friday afternoon. I felt tremendous conflict between the deep, longstanding call to write and this newer pull of this local church whose people I had grown to love. I felt that staying would mean all my energies would be focused on the Church and its needs and that a decision to stay would be in effect a vocational choice that would leave little time for writing amid church and family needs. That night I had a dream. I dreamed I was running. As I ran a golden pebble slipped out of my hand and fell by the wayside. I ran on, but looked back over my shoulder. And the pebble called out to me, “Come back and get me now, or you never will.”
Rabbi Eliezer in the first century taught his students, “Repent one day before your death.” One of them then asked, “How will we know when that day is?” To which he replied, “All the more reason to repent today….”
“The sea obeys and fetters break
And shattered hopes thou dost restore
While treasures lost are found again
When young or old thine aid implore. “
“Tony, Tony, Turn Around. Something’s Lost That Must Be Found”
Alyce M. McKenzie is Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology
This reflection is a version of a sermon entitled, “Tony, Tony, Turn Around,” published in Novel Preaching: Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
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