Midweek Faith Lift
November 13, 2019
The Parables of the Lost and Found
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
On this week’s menu are two back-to-back parables about what is lost. Here we go! They are in the Gospel of Luke and they read like this:
Luke 15:1-7
The Parable of the Lost Sheep
15 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
3 So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (NRSV)
Luke 15:8-10
The Parable of the Lost Coin
8 “Or 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? 9 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.’ 10 Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (NRSV)
So let’s take a moment and set this up so we can begin to unpack it from a metaphysical point of view. At the get-go, in the first parable, we have some powerful metaphysical symbols: eating, Pharisees, scribes, tax collectors and sinners. Wow, what a crew! I think we can all find our place in that lot as we share the same table. Now the traditional understanding of this story is that of bringing people into the fold, of bringing the “lost” to Jesus, or converting them. And the righteous, of course, want to count themselves in the 99 who are already in the fold. But because of the audience and the fact that only one is lost, the meaning of the story goes much deeper than that.
Who do we have in this story? Tax collectors and sinners who are scorned by the Pharisees and Scribes, the elite within the Jewish tradition. And we have Jesus telling them a story about themselves, but they don’t get it! Metaphysically the Pharisees represent “one who understands the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law; one who is lacking in understanding of Spiritual Truth, pretending to practice spiritual law” but constantly failing to do so. Revealing Word, p. 149 You can add self-righteousness to their profile!
And then we have the Scribes who write down the law. Metaphysically, they represent “thoughts that come to us from the outer world; Spirit inspires us from within. When Spirit speaks, no person can be quoted as authority-the Truth itself is authority, and it bows to no human exponent.” Revealing Word, p. 174. So our Scribe nature is externally focused for validation and importance! If I can find it in writing, a source that I can quote, then I must be right! No matter that I cherry-picked what I wanted and ignored the rest!
And then there are sinners who are caught up in “falling short of divine perfection. “Sin is the human failure to express the attributes of Being-life, love, intelligence, wisdom and other God qualities.” Revealing Word, p. 179. In other words, we forget that we are human/Divine beings and engage the world from the limited perspective of our human awareness, looking for validation and authority outside our own heart and mind with a sense of self-righteous indignation, quoting Scripture or other authorities to justify ourselves when someone calls us on it! Ok, count me in! I no doubt belong in this crowd at some level!
Whew! So here is Jesus, with this audience, with all of us, who believe we are on either side of this artificial divide about who is holy, who is acceptable and who is not, no doubt looking at each other with some kind of disdain and judgment, no doubt, thinking, “Do you really belong here with these inferior ones, self-righteous ones?” To be painfully honest, that is how I felt at my first 12-step meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics! Do I really belong here!?!? Um, yes.
And then we have the idea of eating, which also has an important metaphysical meaning. “Eating is symbolical of mental appropriation of thoughts of substance….to eat is to appropriate the substance of ideas through thinking about them.” Revealing Word, p.59-60. In other words, through our thinking and feeling nature, we begin to take in Spiritual Truth and it becomes an inherent part of our consciousness as we wake up to that Greater Reality of who we really are. We eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and we begin to see ourselves more clearly, both our immaturity and our God-Self.
So, here we are with all of our human limitations and Jesus tells a story about the ONE who is lost, which is a story about each one of them, each one of us, but I am not sure that they get it! And I am not sure that we have understood it either! What is it that has been lost? A sheep! Metaphysically sheep are “harmless and innocent animals; they represent the natural life that flows into man’s consciousness from Spirit. It is pure, innocent, guileless.” Revealing Word, p. 178. What is lost is our sense of innocence and purity, our sense of wholeness and our Oneness with God and each other that does not seek its good at the expense of the other 99. When we are holding on to grudges, to a sense of being right because of how we were wronged by another, we are truly lost.
The story tells us that just ONE sheep is lost which is metaphysically significant in that what is lost has caused separation from that sense of Oneness with Spirit, with the innocent love that expresses fully and freely. And what happens when we let go of what has been keeping us in that self-righteous state of non-forgiveness, of separation, of feeling “better than” or more enlightened than the other? The Shepherd, which metaphysically is God or Spirit, the Source of all understanding and all help rejoices and throws a party to celebrate our return to a sense of Oneness and wholeness that comes with profound awakening.
Now for the parable about the Lost Coin! We have had one about our masculine, thinking nature, which is the reference in the Lost Sheep. To make sure we also include our feeling nature, which is the parable of the woman and the lost coin. She has 9 silver coins, so what is the big deal about finding the One that is lost? What is the fuss? It is the same theme as the previous parable about having 99 sheep. Why is the One that is lost so important?
Well, again if we dive into the metaphysics of it, we first learn that silver symbolizes love and light symbolizes wisdom. We have a woman, representing our feeling nature searching her house, or her consciousness, for love and wisdom. She gets broom to sweep up everything in the house, all the dirt, dust and debris so that she can find the ONE coin that will bring her back into a consciousness of Love and Wisdom, in to Oneness with her Divine self.
She lights a lamp and light metaphysically represents “The understanding principle in mind. In divine order it always comes first in consciousness. Light is a symbol of wisdom. When Jesus said “I am the Light of the World,” (John 8:12), He meant the He was the expresser of Truth in all its aspects. Women were also seen as a source of wisdom.
So we have wisdom lighting a lamp so that love can be found within us because that is what brings us back into alignment with our Divine nature, our True Self, our God-ness. And then when that happens, in the story, Jesus again describes rejoicing and the presence of angels. From last week, we remember that Angels are direct messengers from Spirit and are present to us when we are fully aligned with our true God-nature, which is Love.
Finally, both the number 9 and 99 represent three trinities, which are evidence of the creative process as we learned last week. What Jesus is telling us in these parables together is that it is our human thinking and feeling nature coming into Oneness with our Divine Nature that is what is most important. We can have 99 sheep or 9 coins and say so what, that is enough. What our human nature has created is enough. But the message is that something is missing, something has been lost. It is not until we come into an awareness and connection with our true God nature that is love that we find true joy and gladness. And it doesn’t really depend on what the other 99 do; our joy comes from finding that God connection that has been lost.
So a contemporary version of this story is that when we stray too far from the Server, or we have too many windows open with 99 tabs open on our screen, we lose the connection and then nothing works and the whole system crashes until we turn it all off and reboot! Who knew Jesus was a computer programmer!
Let us take a moment to remember that we belong, we are not here by accident, but by divine appointment. Let us remember the ways that we belong. As we breathe, let us remember first, that we belong to our breath. It is the Hebrew word “ruah” Spirit or breath that was breathed into the first human creature. We belong to our breath. And then let us look up at the stars, the sun and the moon and realize that we are made of the same stuff as they are. We are “star stuff” and we belong to the Universe. And then let us look down, feeling our feet connected to the earth. This is where we live, on the earth and we belong to the earth. Then, extending our hands, one facing up and one facing down, we connect with each other, holding hands, realizing that we also belong to each other. We are each the lost sheep that belongs, the silver coin of love that has been found.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb