I don’t know whether you ever lose anything. I do, constantly. It may be a thing I had in my hand only five minutes ago, or it may be a reference I know I saw only last week. Once it was the office keys. I was sure I’d put them away in a safe place before going on holiday. I had too. They turned up months later in the toe of an old pair of trainers. You look high and low. With difficulty you refrain from throwing things at your partner when they ask helpfully where you last had it. And eventually it turns up in a forgotten pocket, or under a pile of papers on the desk. It’s alright, you call out. I’ve found it. You may not call the neighbours in for a party, but you do experience that little surge of joy and relief that comes when you find whatever it was that had gone missing. Rejoice with me for I have found the coin that was lost.
One of the benefits of omniscience must be that God can’t suffer from absent-mindedness. So he doesn’t lose things like we do. But his children do get lost from time to time, and like the shepherd and the householder in these stories he is deeply troubled until they are found. Of course, in our old testament reading, it was the whole nation that had got lost, in the sense that they had abandoned the worship of the one true God, and started worshipping the golden calf that they had made with their own hands. Whether it is one sheep in 100 that has wandered off, one coin in 10 that has rolled away, or a whole nation that has lost its head, the point is that God knows and God cares.
God cares enough to get angry. Let me alone, he says to Moses, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation (Ex 32.10). Moses is not tempted by this offer. On the contrary, in a dramatic dialogue which extends over three chapters, he appeals to God to remember who he is and what he has already promised to do. He knows that God’s love is steadfast and sure. At the climax of the story, when the Lord has agreed that his presence will go with his people despite the way they have behaved, Moses asks God to show him his glory. For his own protection God hides him in the mouth of a cave, and as he passes by, he proclaims his name:
The Lord, the Lord,
A god merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness
Forgiving iniquity and transgression,
Yet by no means clearing the guilty (Ex 34.6-7)
By proclaiming his name, God reveals his true nature. In Christ Jesus he will find a way to clear even the guilty, but already his mercy and grace are enough to forgive the people’s iniquity and transgression, whilst his steadfast love and faithfulness commits him to going with them through the wilderness as Moses has asked. And he is slow to anger. Anger is not wrong in itself. It is wrong if it simply gives violent expression to our own impatience, frustration and lack of self-control. But God’s anger is not like that. He is angry, and we should burn with a more passionate anger than we do, when we see what greed and the abuse of power do to those who are poor and vulnerable, what happens when we worship the golden calves of our own self-centred ambitions, instead of bowing down before the one true God.
Paul was more acutely conscious of God’s grace and mercy than most of us because he had been literally stopped in his tracks on the road to Damascus, knocked to the ground and put together again as a new person. When he remembered what he had done to persecute the young Christian church, he burned with shame, and with gratitude to God to Jesus indeed, whose voice he had heard, whose presence he had sensed for the grace which had met him, turned him around and given him a new life. His offence was far more than that of the inanimate lost coin, or even the probably silly lost sheep. Paul would have identified more readily with the lost son, the prodigal son, whose story follows those read this morning, the lad who had really tested his father’s patience and tried his love to the limit, setting off in completely the wrong direction until something turned him around and brought him back home..
The Bible is full of stories which make their point by exaggeration. The lost sheep is just one in a flock of a hundred, but the shepherd still cares so much for that one sheep that he leaves the rest in the wilderness while he goes off to search. The behaviour of the prodigal son is outrageous, many a less generous parent would say unforgivable, but the father in his steadfast love and faithfulness still runs out to embrace him, an action which in itself would generally be regarded as demeaning for a parent in the cultural traditions of the Near East. These extremes make the point, but most of us are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. We might occasionally toy with the notion of skipping off into the wilderness like the sheep which got lost, but we don’t actually do it, we mostly stick with the flock. After all, here we are this morning.
But even if most of us don’t therefore experience the grace of God in anything like the dramatic fashion of St Paul, we do perhaps find that our lives are occasionally touched by little flashes of grace, which we should be more willing to recognise for what they are. Robin Gill, [Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent], published a little book two or three years ago called A Sense of Grace’, a series of short meditations on our perceptions of grace and how they might relate to the theme of grace in the Bible. Among other things he tells the story of John Newton the 18th century hymn writer, whose parish at Olney some of us visited at few years ago with the Christian Study Centre. As a young man Newton led a pretty dissolute life, as a merchant seaman engaged in the African slave trade. His conversion occurred when he thought his ship was going to founder in a terrible Atlantic storm; he prayed almost unthinkingly for God’s mercy, and although his fellow sailors thought they had just had a lucky escape, Newton came to believe that God had used that storm to bring him to his senses.
Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed
Later in life both John Newton and his friend and neighbour William Cowper were afflicted with bouts of depression, for which there was then no real treatment, much less cure. He therefore experienced in an acute form the emotional ups and downs which are common to all of us in less extreme forms. It was precisely his fragility that opened his soul to an appreciation of what he interpreted as God’s grace. Here are William Cowper’s familiar lines:
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on thy head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense
But trust him for his grace
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
We do not need to have been ship-wrecked, or sectioned, to understand what these words mean. In the ups and downs of our lives, it is often when we have been at our most fragile, closest to moral or physical danger, or to despair, but have yet cried to God for help as Newton did that we have experienced in some measure a sense of grace. For others it may have been a moment of exquisite beauty or tenderness. Paul seems to have known more or less at once that he had touched by grace; in Newton’s case the understanding grew in him over a period of years. And it’s always possible to dismiss such moments as good luck or delusion. But if you feel that you have at some moment been touched by grace, don’t dismiss it, accept it with gratitude, cherish the memory, and ask yourself how you should respond.
The choice of course is down to us. The prodigal son might have been too proud or too ashamed to come home. We do not know whether the older brother came in to join the celebration when his father pleaded with him at the door. But the Lord, our Lord, is a god merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. His grace still reaches out to us, and when he finds us, his love and our response still find expression in joyful celebration as we gather around his table. Come on in. Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.