Reading from a book I finished recently, the author writes:

“It was in [my] bathtub, back in New York, [praying*] aloud, that I first started mending my soul.  My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup.  But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started [praying], and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation.  You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life…”

-from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

(I have changed what the author was doing, “reading Italian” to “praying”).

I have been meeting with a young woman, we’ll call her Joan, every week to help guide her spiritually.  Joan, for many years, had a wonderfully strong and refreshing relationship with Christ.  It’s the excitement and butterflies of this new and awesome relationship with a God who fills the voids in our lives.  When I think of this kind of relationship, I’m reminded of the words to a song: “Our God is an awesome God, he reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love, our God is an awesome God.”  It’s a great song.  It speaks of a God who is so awesome, who we always know is walking with us through each day and loves us unconditionally.

What about those days, though, when God maybe doesn’t seem so awesome, when we’re not really sure that God is walking with us and loves us unconditionally.  This is what happened with Joan.  This incredible relationship with Christ that had been so strong, had given her butterflies—this relationship suddenly changed.  It drastically changed.  You see, Joan realized a short time ago that she wasn’t being completely honest with herself in the way she was living her life.  She saw the futility of a past relationship with a young man.  She suddenly began really naming the dysfunctional relationship her parents have with one another.  And everything started to fall apart.  Gone were the butterflies and the assurance of Christ’s presence.  She felt as though she had completely lost her relationship with Christ.  Her friends kept telling her just to pray harder, and then maybe she would find her relationship again.  If she prayed, her friends told her, then she would once again feel the butterflies and be able to proclaim everyday for the rest of her life that her God was, in fact, an awesome God.

In today’s Gospel we find Jesus on his way to Jerusalem.  He knows that in traveling to Jerusalem he is headed to the place where he will be killed.  Along the way he continues to stop and teach.  Today we find him teaching on God’s love for the lost.  The Gospel begins by saying that the Pharisees and scribes were “grumbling” because Jesus was ministering to tax collectors and sinners.  Jesus responds first with the parable of the lost sheep.  He says that were a sheep lost, the shepherd would leave his 99 other sheep and go in search of the one lost.  Upon finding that one lost sheep, he would rejoice.  Likewise, if a woman who has ten silver coins loses one, she will search diligently for that lost coin.  Upon finding that one lost coin, she would rejoice.  Jesus is showing here an intense concern for the lost.  The sheep is lost from the flock.  The coin is lost from the woman’s meager store.  However, all are found again, and in this we see God’s love and concern for the lost and the outcast. 

The lost to whom Jesus is referring can be those who have purposely turned from God.  They can also be those who have wandered away, only to look up one day and realize that they are lost.  It’s particularly interesting with the sheep parable.  Sheep can get lost by just nibbling themselves lost.  The keep their heads down, wander from one green tuft to another, come to a hole in the fence.  Go through that hole to yet another green tuft.  They look up one day and none of their flock is anywhere to found.  This sheep has accidently wandered off and is lost.

In light of the lost sheep, let us wander back to Joan.  She feels as though she has wandered off from God.  And she has.  But I think something much deeper, much more profound is going on here as well.  It makes me think of my marriage.  When I first met my husband Greg I had butterflies every time I saw him.  I had butterflies every time I thought of him.  We dated for a year.  The butterflies were still there most of the time.  We were engaged.  The butterflies were still there most of the time.  And then we were married, and had a pretty hard first year.  Suddenly I didn’t feel butterflies as often. I still felt them, and still do, but I didn’t feel them often.  So I really felt as though I had lost something.  And Greg and I started to grow apart a little.  Without butterflies, what is there really?  But in that growing apart, we actually eventually grew closer.  Our relationship has turned from a one of many butterflies to one of great depth and understanding.  It’s as though we have been molded together into a deeply profound relationship.

This is, I imagine, where Joan is now.  It is, I imagine, an experience many of us have.  Joan hasn’t lost God.  Her relationship with God is not gone.  Her relationship with Christ is merely changing.  There really was no choice.  The butterflies idea of God, what a friend from seminary used to call “Care Bear Jesus”, doesn’t work when times in life get tough.  I’m not saying that “Care Bear Jesus” is bad.  I’m suggesting that the butterflies Jesus is not all of who Jesus is.  Jesus wasn’t only resurrected.  He also died a painful death on a cross.  And it is that painful death on a cross that helps us through the painful times in our own lives: the loss of a loved one, dealing with a depression so deep that you cannot see past your own despair, the desperation of knowing that you are dying.  The Care Bear, yippy yi yay, butterflies, awesome God idea does not get us through those times.  The humiliating and painful death on a cross idea of God does. 

It truly is so much like a marriage, then.  It’s changing from the butterflies, from the “Our God is an awesome God,” to something deeply profound and moving.  And it can feel like losing God, because we are lost.  But when we find God again, we will discover an overwhelmingly changed relationship.  We are no longer so naïve to believe that the butterflies idea of God will get us through.  Upon suffering from despair, we are not so naïve as to believe that we will always be able to know that God is present with us.  Because in times of despair, it feels like we are so alone, even though we really aren’t.

This moving away and coming back to God will happen to us many times in our lives, not just once.  But each time we move away and come back, we will come back to a much stronger relationship.  We will continue to return to God, only to find that we have been eternally molded to him.  Our relationship is stronger.  We are stronger.  And we are forever changed.

In the beginning of this sermon, I read from a book I just recently finished.  The book begins with the author moving further away from God, feeling lost.  She does a number of things to find God again.  And in her search she realizes that it starts somewhere with happiness, but a happiness that also knows what sorrow is.  The shepherd rejoices when he finds his lost sheep.  The woman rejoices when she finds her lost coin.  God rejoices when he finds us.  We rejoice when we once again see a glimpse of God.  And when we see that glimpse of God, when we feel that hint of happiness, it is our responsibility to grab onto that happiness, let it pull us out of the muck, and find our way back to God.  It is, after all, only when the sheep and the shepherd find one another that their relationship is made stronger, they are happier, and there is truly great rejoicing. 

This being lost, growing apart, and then growing back together: that is what it means to be in relationship with Christ.  If we were not ever lost, after all, we would not truly know the depth of God’s love for us.  If we were never lost, our relationship might never grow and mature.  It is in being lost and then found that we finally find happiness that we finally find God.