Lost

On May 4^th, 1995, a Jewish girl called Suri Feldman disappeared while on a school field trip to Bigelow State Park near Massachusetts.

Suri had been walking in the woods with several hundred classmates, and it was only when they got back to the buses that they realised she wasn't there.

The park was enormous, and after a brief search, her teachers decided to inform the local police that Suri was missing.

And when they heard the news they were very concerned because a few months earlier, a twelve year old girl called Holly Pirainen had disappeared and been found murdered in the same woods.

Police from Massacheusets and Connecticut started the search that evening in the middle of foul weather. Weather so bad, scared Suri might die of exposure before they could find her.

By May the 6^th, there were a thousand police and volunteers looking for Suri. Six hundred of them were Hasidim, religious Jewish men in black, three piece suits and black hats. People from Suri's own community.

They'd driven from New York, Washington, Boston and Montreal to try and help find her. One even arrived with a truckload of kosher food to feed all the rescuers.

On May 7^th the police found Suri Feldman down a dirt track in the heart of the forest. She was alive and completely unharmed, although obviously cold and thirsty.

When the news filtered through to the Hasidim, they danced. Right then and there in the middle of the woods.

It's part of the way people in their tradition give thanks to God. So they danced.                     

And after Suri had been given a medical, they took her back home to Brooklyn, and when the car pulled into the parking lot near her house, it could hardly move because of the throng of Hasidim who had come to rejoice.

Men with black beards and black hats and black coats, looking for all the world as if they'd just stepped out of the 18^th century.

A local volunteer said "I've never seen so many people dance in a circle".

The joy of being found. The terror of being lost.

We all know what it feels like, at least to some degree,

Maybe it’s your wallet or your purse that’s gone missing. Maybe it’s your keys. Maybe – worse still – it’s been a child in your care. Or maybe you’ve been that child.

If so, you’ll know the gut-wrenching fear of loss. And the elation of finding again, or being found.

And that’s why Jesus’ stories of lostness – lost coin, lost sheep, lost, or Prodigal, son – are among the best remembered and most loved parables he told.  They push our buttons. In different ways we’ve all been there, done that and got the T-shirt.

And the story of Zacchaeus takes us into similar territory, but in a less obvious way, because real life is rarely as clear cut and obvious as it is in a story.

It’s only at the end of his encounter with the little tax collector that Jesus mentions lostness; it’s only on reflection that we realise that Zacchaeus was every bit as lost as the stray ewe in the story of the Good Shepherd, or the younger son in the parable of the prodigal Son.

“The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” said Jesus of Zacchaeus. So how exactly was he lost?

Well not physically, obviously! He knew where he was! Up a tree trying to get a look at what was going on!

But why was he there? Well I reckon he was there because he was lost emotionally and lost spiritually.

Remember that Zacchaeus was one of the tax-collectors. They  were in cahoots with the Romans and they used their power to fleece everybody in their districts for as much money as they could. And they made a good living from it.

The downside, of course, was that nobody wanted to know them. They were social lepers, cut off from the community because they’d become lackeys to the Roman overlords.

Make no mistake about it: Zacchaeus wasn’t just up a tree because he was small. That’s the Sunday School answer. He was up a tree because he didn’t belong. Nobody would step aside for him, nobody would make way for him because of who he was. He was emotionally lost – out on a limb, quite literally, with nowhere to go and no-one to turn to.

And what’s interesting is that for all the wealth he’d gathered, he still wasn’t content. Somewhere inside him there was a voice telling him that things weren’t supposed to be like this.

If he’d been happy with the way things were, why didn’t he just grunt when people went running off to see Jesus, and go back to counting his money?

I think it’s because he knew his lack. There was a lack in his life – a spiritual lostness – and it was that dull ache that took him up that tree more than idle curiosity.

Doctors tell us to pay attention to dull aches, don’t they?! Well, the doctor I live with does, anyway!

Is there a part of you that feels that same ache today? Maybe it’s buried deep within you, unnoticed most of the time. But you know it’s there, even if you rarely admit it, even to yourself.

Maybe you feel the same kind of isolation Zacchaues felt. You don’t have to be alone to feel lonely. It’s possible to be lonely in a crowd; lonely in a marriage. Loneliness isn’t about the proximity of people. It’s about the quality of relationships we have with them.

We can meet and greet people all day, go to work, come home and be the life and soul of the party and still be lonely.

Or maybe you’ve become lost within yourself, somehow. You don’t understand why you do the things you do. Why that temper keeps surfacing. Why life seems perpetually disappointing. Why you keep making the same old mistakes.

Or maybe everything’s fine in life – things are going well and you’re happy. But deep down there are still unanswered questions about life and faith that you’d prefer to keep in the dark. The answers might be too inconvenient to deal with. They might mean a change in your lifestyle. But every now and again the dull ache reminds you that they’re still there.

Maybe you’re up that tree today, with Zacchaeus, watching to see what happens.

Well I love what happens in this story, because for me it’s a snapshot of the whole gospel. Jesus stops dead in his tracks and he calls this man by name.

“Come down Zacchaeus. I have to visit your house today”.

Imagine all the heads turning towards the wee man up the tree; the hated wee man who’d been trying to hide but was now – deliberately - the focus of everyone’s attention What was he going to do? Fob the teacher off with some lame excuse, or take him at his word and come down?

It was one of those moments when your whole life hangs in the balance; like the infinite seconds between a man’s proposal and a woman’s saying ‘yes’, or a labouring mother’s final push and the newborn’s first cries.

We’ll never know how long those few seconds of attention and deliberating felt to Zacchaeus, but we know what he did. He clambered back down the tree and jumped, feet first, into a new life.

A life where nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed.

He walked with Christ along the same streets back to the same house, and hurriedly tried to tidy away the same breakfast dishes he’d left lying there that morning because he wasn’t expecting visitors.

He was still a tax collector. He was still short. He was still hated. But he wasn’t lost anymore, because Christ had called him by name.

He wasn’t in the place he wanted to be yet. But now, for the first time in his life, he knew how to get there. He knew the way; and the way had a face, a voice, and a name,

Christ had found him. He wasn’t lost anymore. And there was dancing in heaven.

Let’s pray.

Lord, call us by name.

Call us out of our lostness.

Call to us in our loneliness, our disappointment, our pain.

Call to us in our unbelief and hardness of heart.

Call to us,

Not so our circumstances might change,

But that we might be changed within them,

And being found; being known,

We might walk more closely, and with deeper joy,

The road which leads us home.

Amen