Luke 15:1-10

I hate getting lost. For others it may be an adventure, I know, but I am one who is thrown into a state of panic when I do not recognize my surroundings. Or when I recognize my surroundings but know they are not where I am supposed to be. Indeed, I am profoundly grateful for the gift of GPS on my phone which hardly ever lets me down — although it is also so that from time to time the maps in cyber space have not yet caught up with reality on the ground and more than once this fool proof tool for preventing getting lost has also let me down.

There is getting lost and there is getting really lost, of course. I have been lost — unable to find where I am going. And I have been ‘lost,’ all the while knowing exactly where I am. And yet, it is so that as often as not, the ‘getting found again’ is not always met with the kind of joy we hear about in the examples Jesus offers today. I would offer one such example now.

I was eight years old and in the third grade. It was a day in October. I was new enough to this classroom that the teacher did not really know me yet. I was not so new that I had not already learned the consequences for certain infractions.

We were outside for afternoon recess. My sister, Martha’s, 2nd grade class also happened to be on the playground at the same time and I was playing with her. This is, by the way, the only time I can remember this being so. Perhaps because of what happened next.

And so it was that I was away from my classmates and I did not see my teacher standing at her designated spot on the playground with one hand raised to signal it was time to go back inside. I did not see the other eight year old’s form a single file line and follow her up the fire escape stairs and back inside for a Social Studies lesson. (Yes, these 47 years later I still remember that.) For some reason, though, I quickly sensed something was wrong. I looked up from our play and scanned the children remaining on the playground and realized my class was gone. I scampered to the stairs and ran up them as quickly as I could and I found myself peering through the window of the fire door that locks when you go out and which will not open without a key and I saw my classmates taking off their jackets and hanging them on their designated hooks. My teacher saw me. And she told the other children not to let me in.

True story.

And so I sat at the top of those stairs and considered my options.

• I could walk around to the front of the building and make may way inside the other way. However, just a week before two little boys had made the same mistake and when they tried that our teacher simply shooed them outside to wait until she was good and ready to let them in. 

• I could certainly walk on home, but then I would have to explain to my mother how I had managed to get locked out. I knew it was my ‘fault.’ I felt foolish and ashamed. And I did not want her to know.

• Or I could just sit and wait.