Recently, my cousin Leslie called me. Very excitedly. She said “Julie, I know we normally just text each other, but I HAD to call you to tell you the craziest thing just happened to me.”
She started: “You know my Skip necklace?”
Yes, I knew her Skip necklace. It’s a pendant necklace that says the word “skip,” S-K-I-P. She never takes it off.
Everyone in my family knows Leslie’s Skip necklace. Her mother had it made for her after her father’s death as a reminder of his #1 parenting lesson. When Leslie was little, anytime she would be angry or upset or unable to forgive someone or otherwise “in a mood” and unable to shake it, her dad would simply give her one order: “Skip.” He knew that it’s impossible to be angry when you’re skipping around the house. So, skip. Turn that frown upside down. Skip. Anytime you’re upset, angry, resentful, what have you – skip. Skip until you’re not angry anymore. Leslie hated it, but mostly she hated that he was right. It always worked. You can’t be angry when you’re skipping around. Anytime she needed to change her mindset, she simply had to skip.
That one word was a lifelong lesson for Leslie, held close to her heart, and even more so after her father’s death. The necklace became more of a talisman, something she’d reach for to touch unconsciously throughout the day, connecting her not only to its message but to its messenger.
So last week, Leslie was out and about and reached up, as she does so many times a day, to touch her necklace. But for the first time, her neck was bare. The Skip necklace wasn’t there. It was supposed to be. It must have fallen off.
As you might expect, she panicked. She retraced every single one of her steps, multiple times. She tore her house apart and searched every dark corner, looking for the necklace. She alerted all her neighbors, on the possibility that it had fallen off while she was out walking the dog. Her neighbors joined her in scouring the neighborhood for the lost necklace. Days of searching, and she came up empty. The necklace was gone.
So Leslie thought, maybe there’s a reason for this. Maybe God is telling me something. Maybe I’m supposed to let go somehow. It’s not like the necklace was worth a lot of money, it just had priceless sentimental value. Maybe I just need to let go of things, and remember that my dad’s memory isn’t contained in one piece of jewelry. None of that felt like a good purpose, but this loss felt so great, she was struggling to make meaning out of it that she could.
One day, while out walking her dog, she bumped into one of her neighbors, who asked her how her search was going. When Leslie told him she hadn’t found the necklace, he proceeded to tell her about his own faith journey, and how he had experienced the presence of God in his life. He said to Leslie, “I’m going to pray for you, that you will find your necklace. I never have much luck when I pray for myself, but every time I pray for someone else, my prayer is always answered. I even keep a notebook and have a list of all the prayers I’ve said that have been answered! I will pray for you to find your necklace.” Leslie said “Thanks, but I’ve searched everywhere. The neighbors have searched everywhere. I’m pretty sure it’s gone.” The man said, “God can pick it up and put it in a place where you can find it.”
Late that night, as Leslie was getting ready for bed, she opened her pajama drawer and pulled out a top – and out fell her Skip necklace.
What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, `Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’
I suspect many of you have your own stories of things you’ve lost. Of being acquainted with that panic, that desperation, that you feel when something precious to you goes missing. That overriding despair when you’re out of your mind saying “I HAVE to get it back! I have to find it! It means too much to me!”
These twin parables about the lost sheep and the lost coin ask what, essentially, it means to be lost. In a world where GPS and Google Maps can give us directions to just about anywhere, no technology can prevent our hearts and souls from wandering and wondering how we’ve gotten so far from where we started.
The shootings in Utah and Colorado this past week are just the latest example in our headlines of how a country that claims to be the land of the free has become a place where we are trapped by a false worship of guns and a distorted sense of individual freedom that shirks any care or responsibility for the well-being of others, and those entrusted with leadership call upon the lesser angels of our nature, stoking hatred and division among the very people they are responsible for bringing together. We have wandered so far away from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. we have become skilled in doing evil, and do not know how to do good.
Jesus tells these parables in response to the religious authorities grumbling about him accepting people who are perceived to be spiritually lost – sinners and tax collectors, the worst of the worst. And the great surprise that Jesus lays on them is that being lost is not, as they imagine, to be depraved, or severed from God somehow, permanently separated from grace. The great surprise is that to be lost is also to be beloved, to be precious, to be sought after, to be desired, to be the object of unmeasurable, stop-at-nothing love.
In these twin parables about the lost coin and the lost sheep, what Jesus is asking us is: Do you understand that this is how God feels about you? Do you know how precious you are in God’s sight? That like the woman with her coin, and the shepherd with his sheep, God finds you so precious, so valuable beyond measure, that God would turn the house upside down and leave everything behind just to find you?
And isn’t it interesting that in both of these parables, that which is lost isn’t something that can find its way back home on its own? I think this is what it means to be truly lost – to be unable to find a way back on your own.
And I think all of this is where most of us don’t realize we get stuck. We say we know God loves us, but do we really believe it? Do you know yourself to be truly beloved, precious to God? When you imagine God’s gaze upon you, is it a gaze of unimaginable love?
Can you imagine God feeling about you the way Leslie felt about her Skip necklace?
As one commentator puts it, “What if it is precisely our faith that we have lost? Do we not sometimes find ourselves in the place of the seeker, not exactly seeking God, but seeking the faith that has become lost to us? What is it to “lose faith” but to lose the conviction that one has been found, to begin to wonder whether one is sought at all – whether there is in fact a shepherd or a peasant woman tracking us down?”*
But the good news here is the great paradox of it all: that being lost – “becoming like the tax collector and sinner … is to have wandered into the place where one can be found.”*
Like Leslie’s neighbor said: God can pick up that which is lost and put it somewhere where it can be found.
And that’s not the end of the story.
When Jesus tells these parables, he isn’t speaking to the lost. He is speaking to the Pharisees and the scribes, the ones who were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” to the ones who are so caught up in their own righteousness that they can’t quite find it in their heart to rejoice with the seeker and celebrate what has been found.
He’s talking to us.
He’s talking to us whenever we can’t find it in our hearts to believe that God’s love really is that big, that those we believe to be lost, beneath us, sinners, are still precious in God’s sight. He’s speaking to our hearts – the parts that need to be reminded of how much we are loved, and the parts that are still hardened toward other people. The parts that are too mired in resentment to lean into something joyful.
The parts that are so angry they just don’t want to skip.
And therein lies the crux of it: you can’t have these parables about seeking what is lost without also having a parable about rejoicing when it’s found. It would just be a pointless story ending with “and then she found her coin.” The moral of the story is twofold: that God seeks the lost, and that God rejoices in finding them and invites us to join in the rejoicing.
“Finding and restoring the lost gives pleasure to God as well as to all who are about God’s business.”
Friends, we are all about God’s business. And if we are all about God’s business, then we aren’t just about being found ourselves; we are also about the joy in others being found, too. Others we might not be eager to make room for, others we might not want God to find. And it is then that God reaches out to us and says: my precious child, I have found you; now come join me, and Skip.
