Searching

It has been fifteen years this morning, a generation, since the September 11th terrorist attacks.
We begin another year of Sunday school today as well.
It is a good time to be reminded just why we study the gospel and shape and form our humanity with the gospel.
It is about much more than raising moral children and being productive citizens.
What we are doing is learning to repent of the violence of false idols, the golden calves that destroy our humanity, and we learn and worship the redemptive power of the image of God.
Sept 11th is a memorial to the dangers of false idols and the false logic of violence that they justify. How to confront evil without becoming evil is the Gospel question.
That is why we have Sunday School, naming the idols that destroy our humanness and created-ness, and worshiping the image of God that redeems all creation.
It might seem cute and innocuous, but Sunday School is about training for God’s revolution, a revolution of humility, of love, of servant-hood, of forgiveness, of modesty, kindness and radical hospitality to the stranger.
I have friends who spent weeks and months sifting through the devastation of the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania. I have heard their stories of searching for fragments of human flesh to honor, to redeem the violence and degradation that was endured.
How we honor our dead says everything about how we live life.
That image of searching for the lost fragments of humanity to redeem and honor is an image of God. We see that image in Jesus’ two short parables in Luke’s Gospel today.
We see God’s image as a shepherd searching the wilderness and a woman sweeping, holding up a lamp, going over every nook and cranny searching for the lost.
Then gathering friends and rejoicing over finding what was lost.
Searching, finding, gathering, rejoicing: that is the image of God that redeems our humanity, that pulls us back together, raising us into a new creation.
We are all lost sinners, victims, and perpetrators of the power of sin and golden calves that trample us down. God searches us out, pulls us back together and breathes new life into our breathless lives.
The apostle Paul, called himself the chief of sinners, the foremost of sinners, God using his fallen -ness and violence as proof of the power that saves and restores.
Jesus is that shepherd in the wilderness, the light searching the dark places, the woman sweeping, he is the fullness of the image of God, he is the fullness of our humanity.
This is the Gospel that shapes and restores our humanity, and it is a gospel of tremendous power. It searches out the broken fragments of our lost humanity and brings us back to life with rejoicing.
This is who we are about, the one who was broken so that we may be gathered back together. Searching, finding, gathering and rejoicing.