Lost and Found--Luke 15

These texts of lost and found things probably bring many snippets of panic and fear to all of us. “Where did I leave the keys? Where did I park the car? I know I had that most precious of things (my coffee cup, the handouts for worship, the coupons for the grocery store), just a moment ago, but where did I put it or them?” In our hymnody, many of us will echo, “I once was lost, but now am found,” but few of us will spend any time reflecting on those things that are lost to us and cannot be restored.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Susan, and I were doing some radical pruning in our yard. I got to use the switch-blade-like pruning saw my mom had given me for Christmas one year. My mom had died the previous year and so as I used the saw I also heard my mom’s delight with new designs of tools and if not actually using those tools, her anticipation of being able to use the tool sometime in the future.

As I sawed through the many overgrown branches of the bushes around our new house I could almost feel Mom’s presence and satisfaction of knowing that she had given me something that I could really use.

When I was done for the day, I put my tools away, got into my truck and hauled all of the debris from the day out to the city waste disposal site where it would eventually become mulch for some other project.

The following summer I went to get my pruning tools to do some clean up on the new growth on those same bushes after discovering a few more branches that needed to be pruned out. My anvil pruners were where they belonged, the scissors pruners were there too, but my switch-blade pruning saw was nowhere to be found.

Yes, I pulled the shop apart. I went through the entire tool chest. I pulled it out from the wall. I checked under the work bench and on all of the ledges I might have laid it on. I even checked the laundry room and the shelves in the pantry, but the switch-blade pruning saw was not to be found.

I finally decided that some youthful transgressor had seen this novel tool and naively absconded with my prize tool not knowing of the sentimental attachment and my personal joy I felt using it. It was gone.

Well, I had other pruning saws, I thought. They weren’t as much fun or as convenient, but they were certainly usable. I went to work and tried to get over the grief and yes, anger over having had that wonderful tool taken away from me. Later that year I found the identical saw in a hardware store, but I was not able to bring myself to replace it. After all, I had gotten the job done without it, and even though I would have the tool, I would always know that it was not the tool my mom had given to me.

Over the years, I have thought about that saw with regret and wondered whether the person who had ended up using it appreciated it. I wondered if I could ever really justify replacing it? I really didn’t need it, but it didn’t really cost that much. Yet that lingering thought of having lost the gift that was given prevented me from being able to fully move past the loss of that simple tool. Each time I needed to do some pruning I revisited the sense of loss and violation I felt over the loss of the switch-blade pruning saw.

A few months ago I found an old tool box that I had been using at the time and I opened the box to check whether I had put the saw in there, but no. I kept looking in the past trying to reconstruct my movements that day trying to locate that saw. On some occasions I concluded that I had inadvertently put the saw among the branches I had trimmed that day and that the saw was part of some mulch pile somewhere and that the workers had gotten angry when the metal saw blade had gone through the shredder blades dulling and possibly chipping them. At other times I concluded that I had forgotten to pick it up at the end of the day and someone had come by and picked it up thinking that it had ben abandoned. Okay, I obsessed about it.  I even dreamed that I found it one night and had very carefully put it in a safe place to be used later, but when I went to that safe place the next day it was not there.

This searching for the saw continued as a way to restore something that was lacking in my life. It was something that was broken that I thought could be made whole again if I just put all of the parts together again. These parts were in the past and so I kept looking in the past revisiting the pain, nurturing the pain, feeding the pain and frustration each time I thought about it. I longed to have that sense of accomplishment and belonging that I felt that day I trimmed the bushes.

I thought that I had put it all away until I heard Joni Mitchel sing the iconic song of 1969 (Woodstock). In this song she sings, “We are stardust. We are golden. We are trapped in the devil’s bargain. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

I thought about my saw, I thought about our lives of faith and struggling to find the lost relationship of the Garden of Eden, the 15^th anniversary  of 9/11, and even the language of our election this year. how all of these things are trying to recover and restore something lost that cannot be made whole again.

Okay, I know that the loss of my saw had something to do with my mother’s death and that I was not going to be able to bring her back again, just as I know that the relationship of the Garden is not something that we can get back to. The mindset of our nation before 9/1`1 in gone forever, and  the rhetoric of trying to make us something again is not possible. So why do we keep trying so hard to do exactly that?

These events of loss in our lives can become fixations that anchor us in an unhealthy past. It is not that we should not feel grief or remember loved ones and the past with fondness and a sense of loss, but the wholeness we knew before these events continues to be part of our wholeness today. These particular events make us who we are and testify to our ability to cope and adapt to our new world situations.

The joy of recovering the sheep, the coin, and the son (in the prodigal son), are not about restoring a wholeness that was, rather, these stories are about creating circumstances for celebration in the present/future. These times of finding are opportunity for creating new communities of celebration and understanding. Even the great losses of life and property that we have witnessed around the world these past fifteen years are not events of paralyzing times of destruction only, they are also times for us to learn new ways of living with one another, listening to one another, and new opportunities of finding peace in ourselves and in our world.

There are those who say that our world was forever changed by 9/11, and to some extent that is true, but the loss of life and property is a daily event too. There are those who say that the greatness of our country has been lost and that we need to recover that greatness, but we cannot rest upon the laurels of the past. We must continue to build for the future. We cannot even get back to the Garden because God intervened in history, finding us when we had gone astray and changed the relationship forever. So we are given this amazing gift of letting go of our sins of the past in order to live into a new future having found not lost things, but our relationship with God.

Stanley Hauerwas responded in a pacifist response to 9/11 writes, “Our response [to life in a post 9/11 world] is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was [forever] changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.” Indeed, the consequences of that celebration resulted in the losing of one more thing. There was a body that was lost in the tomb. That loss has resulted in us being found finding new life in Christ. Finding that, all else is changed.

A friend asked if he could borrow my truck the other day. Wanting to clean out some of the detritus that had accumulated, I pulled out odd pieces of paper toweling, oil rags, and ancient maps. Reaching into the map pocket to see what was preventing the new maps to seat properly I found my switch-blade pruning saw. Suddenly I remembered getting into the truck that night and sitting on the saw which was in my hip pocket. Wanting to put it somewhere safe I threw it into the map pocket and promptly forgot it. So, in celebration I am inviting all of you to come to a shrubbery trimming party. If I can riff on an old saw, “[It] once was lost, but now [it’s] found. I’m blind and yet I see.