12/26/21 “When Lost Isn’t Lost” by Nancy E. Petty
Luke 2:41-52
When lost isn’t lost! If you have done much shopping with a child, you will recognize this story. Nora, my daughter, was about three years old. One Saturday afternoon, we were shopping in an outlet store that sold sweat pants and sweat shirts. The store wasn’t very big, just big enough. Maybe a little bit larger than our chapel. It was a closing out sale so there was a lot of merchandise packed into a relative small space. It was a bit of a maze just to get through the store. In the middle of the store were huge cardboard boxes, about 3 feet high, filled with loose tee-shirts and socks. I was looking on one side of the store thinking that Nora was with Vickie. All of the sudden I saw Vickie and didn’t see Nora. With some concern but not yet panicked, I said to Vickie, “Is Nora not with you?” To which she replied, “No, I thought she was with you.” Trying to stay calm, I started calling Nora’s name. Nothing. With each call of her name, my voice became louder. Still nothing. No longer calm, and now frantic, everyone in the store starting calling Nora’s name. Nothing. The clerk, who obviously had had training for just such a moment as this, went to the door of the store while we continued to search for Nora. Nora, Nora, we called. Crickets. Then all of the sudden I saw something moving in the big box holding the zillion pairs of socks. It is that moment that you simultaneously want to shake the bejesus out of your child and hug her so tight that you don’t think you will ever let go. I had lost my child. But to Nora, she wasn’t lost at all. She was playing, in a pile of socks that had covered her little body.
This same scene had happened some years earlier with Jasmine, my other daughter. That time it was in a big store. If my memory serves me, it was Target. The same scenario had played out. I thought Jasmine was with Vickie and vice versa. I shall never forget hearing those words over the loud speaker: Code Adam. The doors to the Target were immediately closed and locked. No one entering and no one leaving. We had lost our child. But for Jasmine, she wasn’t lost at all. She was shopping in the toy section blissfully happy and fully aware of where she was.
While both of these experiences happened long ago, recently, I had an experience not quite the same but similar. I was visiting my parents in Shelby. One afternoon, I decided to take a drive to the neighboring town of Ellenboro. Now if Bill Gowan is listening he knows exactly where I was because he grew up there. As I was driving back to my parent’s house, I decided I wanted to drive by my grandparent’s old home place. I wasn’t quite sure if I knew how to get there but the roads looked familiar enough so I decided that maybe I could find my way to the old home place. As I made my winding way through the country roads, at each stop I had to decide which way I would go. Turn left, right or go straight. I could feel something inside of me, a knowing, guiding me but there was just enough doubt that I would find myself thinking, and at times saying out loud, “I think I’m lost.” But as I made my final turn onto Mountain View Road, a road that background offers an incredible view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the site of my grandparent’s home, I let out a sigh of relief and proclaimed: “I did it. I’m not lost at all.” When lost isn’t lost!
This is the story that Luke tells about Jesus being lost but not really lost. I know it’s a bit of a jolt for this to be the lectionary text for today. It was just a little over 24 hours ago that we birthed Jesus. And now, we are reading a story about when he was 12. But let’s stay with it.
You know this familiar story. Jesus’ family and others are traveling from the Passover celebration in Jerusalem. At some point, Mary and Joseph realize that their child is not with them. They direct an all-points search for the boy. There would have been no loud speaker, no Code Adam at that time, but you can imagine the 12 AD equivalent of people calling to each other to look for a young boy, named Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s boy, from Bethlehem. Three days later, they find him sitting in the temple courts carrying on a conversation with the temple leaders. Now I imagine that Mary felt a bit like I did in that outlet store. Simultaneously she wanted to shake him and hug him like she would never let him go. How do I know she felt that way? Because of what she said to him: “Son, why have you done this to us? Why have you treated us like this?” Can’t you just hear saying to her boy, “Son, we were worried sick and scared to death. We thought we had lost you, that something bad had happened to you.”
The young lad seeks to explain himself: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” A little different than having your child say, “I was just playing in the socks.” To Mary and Joseph this explanation made no sense. But oddly, Luke records no more questioning, no more conversation between 12 year-old Jesus and his parents. Luke ends the pericope writing: “But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”
To Mary and Joseph, their son was lost. But to Jesus, the one presumably lost, he wasn’t lost at all. He knew exactly where he was and was doing exactly what he needed to do. Just like Nora was playing in the socks and Jasmine was shopping for toys. Now I know it’s not the same. Nora was playing and Jasmine was shopping for toys. And Jesus, well he was being Jesus. He was sitting among the theologians discussing religion at the age of 12. And not just discussing. It appears he was teaching for Luke tells us that all were amazed at what he was saying.
It’s worth pulling back from the narrative to remember that this text, the Gospel of Luke, was told, then written, then reshaped over the telling and writing to make a point – that Jesus was being Jesus from the very beginning. I believe we are to take from this story that the young Jesus was already living in and out of his divinity, that even at 12 he was holding together the things of God and the things of humanity. But as you know, these Biblical narratives are complex, and they rarely reveal just one thing. There is always lurking in them a deeper layer, another truth, for us to probe and to prove through our own experience.
Here is that deeper truth for me in this year’s reading of this text – what if there is no such thing as lost? What if we are only and always just where we are, and that place or that moment is inextricably bound to where we have been, and where we are going. If this is beginning to sound a little like a riddle, I think it’s supposed to! We humans are so bound up with time, with straight lines, with outcomes, and with what we judge to be right and wrong. But with each passing year I grow more convinced that rather than going anywhere, or becoming anything, or even doing anything, we just are.
Let me give another kind of concrete example of this. My wife, Karla, is gifted in many things, but navigation is not necessarily one of them. Don’t get me wrong – she can read a map with the best of them, and has successfully found her way around most American cities and quite a few foreign ones. But she doesn’t have the same kind of sense of place and direction that some of us have – one that is just naturally oriented and prone to sense our way to places we have been before. I asked her permission to share this part: she still uses googlemaps to find her way from Six Forks road home, and she’s lived in Raleigh for 16 years now! As you can imagine, she gets “lost” a lot. She recently told me that as she found herself “dislocated” somewhere between Capitol Boulevard and Wade Avenue she realized that she wasn’t where she thought she was. And rather than get annoyed, she heard herself asking, “I wonder why I came this way, and why I need to know this route?” You see, over the years, she has realized that when she gets “lost” she usually finds something that she didn’t realize she was looking for. It isn’t always immediately apparent – life never seems to be that linear. But sooner or later, she knows that something she saw on that diversion is part of a new path she’s on.
A former colleague of mine, Ginger Barfield, writes: “The Gospel has the power to break in and surprise without providing total clarity. Our efforts to de-mystify it are sometime counterproductive…In a culture that calls for clarity and conclusive ways of understanding God’s good news in Christ, [Luke gives us a story] that ends in pondering and lack of understanding. The conclusion of the story does not nail things down. The story is as open-ended as is the Gospel itself.”
So I wonder, on this first Sunday of Christmas, if Luke is inviting us to consider the possibility that you cannot, we cannot be lost. No matter how disoriented you feel today, or in the coming days and months, you are exactly where you are! Instead of assuming that you are NOT where you intended to be, try turning it around, to instead say, “This is where I am. I wonder what I need from this?” I know this may sound Pollyanna to some, but I’m convinced this is part of the lesson of this sacred text. We cannot be lost, we can only be exactly where we are, and our work is to find out where we are, and what it means. Maybe, the message – the good news – is to learn to trust as I tried to do on those backroads from Ellenboro to my grandparent’s old home place, that there is something inside of you is guiding you to the place you are searching for. Maybe it won’t always turn out as it did for me that day. That I ended up where I intended to. But maybe, like Karla reminded me, it’s not always about ending up where you planned. Maybe the life of faith is about those moments that break in and surprise us and we end up somewhere different having learned something new. Maybe the gospel way is not the way of clarity and always knowing, but rather it is the way of being right where you are without always know why and trusting that something inside of you and beyond you is guiding you.
For one who thinks that what I need is clarity and understanding at every turn, the Gospel today proclaims this good and hopeful news that clarity and understanding is not a pre-requisite to a life of faith. I pray that you, too, will find Luke’s invitation to ponder and live with a spirit of open-endedness as being a hopeful word and some good news. And when you are feeling lost, consider the possibility that you are not lost at all. That you are right where you need to be.