Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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The school bus never made it to school -- picked up thirteen kids and never brought them in! (We all remember the story, just a few days ago.) As soon as officials realized a bus was missing, dozens of local police and concerned citizens fanned out and started searching. They retraced the bus' normal route. Looked down every side road, looked into every ditch, peered into every wood and every thicket. Nothing. In less than an hour hundreds of state police had joined the search. When enough time had passed for the bus to have crossed a state line, the FBI was called in. More people, more resources, all looking for a yellow school bus full of kids. By mid-morning radio and television stations had picked up the story, and soon the whole country was focused on Oley Valley, Pennsylvania. Parents huddling together at the school, the principal praying with them, everyone worried sick.

Why all the fuss? Why this huge expenditure of time, and money and emotion? There is only one answer: the children on that bus were precious beyond measure. Precious to their families, of course, but (as it turns out) precious to all of us. For we could all imagine ourselves in the awful place of those parents. The kids on the bus had no idea that "half the world" was looking for them. Afterwards, one of the older boys told of stopping, somewhere in their weird oddessy, to get gas. They could see CNN on television through the gas station window -- couldn't hear it, but could see a banner move across the bottom of the screen with some kind of message about a lost school bus. And they laughed and said to each other, "There must be another bus missing." It never dawned on them, the boy said, that it might be they. They couldn't believe that they were the objects of a nation-wide search. They had no idea how loved they were. It ended well. The bus was found, the kids rescued and returned to their parents who rejoiced greatly.

The fifteenth Chapter of Luke is a gem. It contains, one right after another, the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son (commonly called "The Prodigal Son"). All three tell of something lost which, when found, brought great joy to the one who searched. We, of course, are what is lost, and it is God who searches for us and rejoices so greatly when we are found. I'm sure you noticed the words at the beginning of the chapter. They seem at first to be just transitional, just "throw aways" (Actually, there aren't very many "throw away" words in the Bible.) Luke says, at the beginning, that the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling because Jesus was associating with poor white trash - sinners, tax collectors, rug merchants, lounge lizards, scum. He was even eating with them! And Jesus does not respond to these scribes and Pharisees by saying (as we might expect), "The people I associate with are not sinners. You are the sinners." Instead, he begins to talk about how wonderful it is when someone who is lost is found. Instead of hide-bound, holier-than-thou, rule-religion, where those who perceive themselves to be good put down those they perceive to be bad, Jesus says, "If someone is bad, nothing makes God happier than when that person changes his ways." There is not so much rejoicing in heaven over ninety-nine righteous people as there is over one sinner who repents." That got him in trouble, because most of his enemies counted themselves among the ninety-nine, among the righteous.

The thought of a good shepherd god, one who comes looking for us, drives us crazy. We don't have a brain category, a mental pigeon hole, for something like that. We could fit into our brains a God who would simply reject us when we did wrong, who would say, "You made your bed, now lie in it. I'm outa here." We wouldn't like that, but we could understand it. There's even a perverse comfort in that kind of god: If God rejects us, we can reject him. We can say, as some people do, "Well, I guess I'm just no good," and move on with life, no longer torn between right and wrong, no longer burdened by guilt. We might also fit into our brains a god who would fold his arms in anger, looks down his nose and say, "Well, you knew what the rules were and you knew the consequences for breaking the rules. I'm not rejecting you forever. When you decide to live by my rules, you can come back. I'll be here." That finds a place in our mental landscape. And that, too, is perversely comforting. A God like that we can set aside for a long time while we promise ourselves that we will return to him some day when we are ready..

But a God who will not let us go, who searches for us when we are lost, a God who is miserable when even one of his sheep is missing and who conducts an immediate, massive search - looks down every side-road we might have taken, looks into every ditch, every wood and thicket, is beside himself with grief at the thought of our being lost because we are so precious to him - Jesus' kind of God -- is a problem for us , indeed. He cannot be rejected or set aside. Wither shall I go from thy spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven thou are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!…If I say, "let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with thee.

The Constitution protects us against unreasonable search and seizure. But nothing can protect us from this unreasonable search. We are the uncomfortable objects of an enormous love. A teen aged boy, arrested and jailed for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, said, "The last people on earth I wanted to see, as I sat in that cell, were my parents. I had wanted to reject their way of life, or maybe I had thought I would reject it now and return to it later - but there they were. Not only had they not rejected me, they had searched me out and found me. I had no idea how much they loved me." And we cannot imagine how much God loves us. When we hear the message of his love, we say, "Must be another school bus." We're not important enough to be the objects of such a search. But, apparently we are. At least that's what Jesus said.

Neither God nor Satin is a static force. They both come looking for us, God out of his great love, Satan out of his ruinous desires for us. If we're going to be caught by one or the other, let it be God. But when we get thinking as those scribes and Pharisees (how we are good and need no help, and how the only thing we must do to be saved is to avoid being polluted by the bad people) we put ourselves right in Satan's crosshairs. Better to see (in this communion service, for example) that God searched for us and found us, and continues to search for us, in Jesus. And when we are found all heaven rejoices! But the Father said, "Go get the fatted calf and kill it, put rings on his fingers and shoes on his feet, for this my son (that's us!) - for this my son was lost and is found, was dead and is alive again."