In the name of God, the holy and undivided Trinity, Amen.

     Several years ago, I was the object of a search-and-rescue operation.  I was participating in a program at a retreat center in the canyon country of southwestern Colorado.  We had done quite a bit of hiking over the four days that we had been there, and early on the last morning, I decided to take a short walk up into the hills behind my cabin to visit, again, a lovely overlook where I had been a few days previous.

     I=d expected I=d be gone half an hour, forty-five minutes at the outside; I was going somewhere I had been before, and so as a result, I told no one where I was going, I wore sandals not hiking boots, and I didn=t take any water with me.  I followed the trail up the hill and along the canyon rim, and it didn=t look exactly as I remembered it, but close enough.  There wasn=t really much of a trail because the landscape was very dry, but I found where I thought I was going.

     It was a beautiful overlook, and I sat there, musing on the wonders of creation for a short time and then began to wend my way back.  Now it really didn=t look like I remembered.  In fact, my thought began to be, AWho moved the canyons?  Why is that just not quite where I thought it should be?@

     My frustration grew as I walked up and down on that rim, looking for the way down that had seemed so obvious on the way up, knowing that quite soon the people in the workshop would miss me, and that they would look for me B for we had been told in no uncertain terms not to wander off, to tell people where we were going, to go in a prepared way, and that they didn=t want to have to search and rescue us.

     I wondered how they would know were to look for me.

     It was a warm day, but it was November and there were clouds to the west.  I knew that storms could come up quickly in those canyons.  I was getting more and more disoriented as I wandered, and my panic was rising.  I really had to admit that I had absolutely no idea where I was.  I wondered if I would be able to get back to New York that evening; I wondered if I would get found at all, or just vanish into the canyon, and I thought a lot about how angry the leaders of the retreat would be B how mad the participants would be that I had disrupted the last morning, and how stupid I had been B how stupid I had been.

     This story is not a total parallel to the parables of losing and finding from the Gospel this morning.  As it turned out, I was out for about three and a half, four hours.  There were some very skilled wilderness guides looking for me, and they told me later that they would have found me if I had only stayed put.  But, I finally figured out that what you need to do in that country is to head down towards the river, and after lots of false starts, lots of arroyos that ended in sheer drop-offs, I finally managed to descend a cliff face and get down to where the river ran along the road going back to the retreat center.

     As I was trudging along, some members of our group appeared in a car, searching for me along the road, and when I got into the car several of them cried as they hugged me.

     In a way, the part of the whole experience- which was full of many powerful learnings for me- that made the biggest impact on me was just that: I was completely wrong about how people would receive me when I got found.  It turned out that as soon as they had realized that I was missing, people had volunteered to go look for me, and fortunately they had been people who knew what they were doing in search and rescue.  But as the hours passed and I didn=t return, the other program participants had gathered to keep a kind of vigil until my return. They prayed and sang and drummed, and instead of anger and blame and a lecture on my stupidity and on wilderness safety, I was greeted with a kind of heartfelt welcome and a sense of relief that really cracked my heart open.  It was as disorienting, in its way, as getting lost had been.

     I think disorientation is the mark of these Gospel experiences of being lost and found, of losing and finding that the parables of the sheep and the coin, the shepherd and the woman that we heard this morning talk about.  And in a way, the lack of a neat kind of a parallel in my story is appropriate because these parables are a sort of a moving target- or, to use a different image, a prism that shifts continually as we look at them from different angles or different moments and experiences in our lives.

     Where might we be in these deceptively simple stories?  Well, there are several possibilities, aren=t there?  We might find that we need to attend to the context in which Jesus told these stories B the religious community is gathered, and the religious people B the Pharisees and the scribes B are grumbling.  They are Jesus= target audience, or at least one part of the target audience for the story.  Are we, as good and faithful people, their successors?  The questions are raised about wholeness and reconciliation.

     We might ask ourselves: who is missing from our gathering?  Are we willing to follow the shepherd into the wilderness to look for what is lost, or who is lost?  Do we know that we exist for mission, and not only for our own religious nurture, the care of those inside the community?  The religious leaders of Jesus= day criticized his persistent and in-your-face downward mobility, his eating with tax collectors and prostitutes and sinners.

     These parables call them and us to help those in need, but also to something deeper than helping B to a kind of a solidarity and to a perspective on the poor that is reflected, I think, in a legend about the fourth century deacon, St. Lawrence, who is said to have been the treasurer of the church in Rome.  A group of Christians were rounded up by the Roman authorities and the others were all executed summarily in the persecution of that day.  But Lawrence, because he was the treasurer, was allowed to live a few days more, and the Roman authorities demanded to know where the treasure of the church was kept.  AGive me a few days,@ he said, Aand I will show you.@  Faithful to his word, he met them a few days later in an appointed place, and when he threw open the doors, there were the lame, the blind, the poor of every description.  AThese,@ he said, Aare the treasures of the church.@

     So one dimension of these parables asks where we who are in the church locate ourselves in the social dimensions of the text.  They call us to a genuine welcome and hospitality and mission, and ask us who we in our day see- consciously or unconsciously- as outside the bounds of God=s care.  But I think we miss something if we don=t also grapple with the parable in a more personal way.

     At times we are called to be seekers, and at times we are sought, and sometimes, mysteriously, it seems that the two are aspects of the same thing.  We can=t be found unless we know that we are lost.  The question can actually be asked in two ways: what is the lost coin, the lost sheep, in us?  What have we lost, and how have we lost it?  Or, for what would we, like the shepherd, be prepared to brave the wilderness?  For what would we, like this woman, be motivated to search diligently, lighting a lamp in the darkness and turning our house upside down, in order to see into all the dark places, until we find what it is that we seek?

     These questions alert us to the hidden dimensions of our own souls and to an awakening hunger for God.  There=s another aspect of this part of the story which we might easily miss B we are so used to hymns and stories and images about the good shepherd that we don=t really grasp the scandal of Jesus using this language to talk about God.  We get a hint of this sometimes in the Christmas story when we talk about how the shepherds who come to see the infant Christ are rough and irreligious.  They sleep outside with the animals; they can=t fulfill their obligations under the Torah, they don=t care for their families B they are very, very unlikely images for the divine power, majesty and love.

     And this other image is a poor woman, someone with no resources, no religious standing.  It would seem that our soul=s deepest longing might be discovered in the hidden and unvalued and needy parts of our lives, and also, in recognizing the unexpected and hidden and vulnerable face of God where we never thought we would see it.

     Being lost, being found, making a way for a new and surprising insight into ourselves and into the God of surprises- all of these are the call of this passage.  Theologian Brendan Lane writes about this reciprocity of losing and finding in the mystical tradition B he says it=s as if we play hide-and-seek with God.  In another arresting image, he writes this: