As I prepared for the sermon a little over a week ago on Luke 15:1-10, I was bowled over by a thought—too tangential for what I was hoping to do on Sunday, but too important to ignore.

Jesus introduces a trio of “lost” things in parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost (prodigal) son.  Many commentaries are more interested in the first and third parables, but there was something shocking in the way I started thinking about the middle one.  It says [NRSV]:

“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? 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.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

We are tempted to observe the humanity in these parables—that we are lost and that GOD comes to find us—and the lost coin doesn’t work for us, because we aren’t coins.  But this is far too literal a mindset for these stories.

Think about the woman’s actions: she tears her house apart.  She doesn’t wait until morning. She expends fuel oil to light a lamp, and besides, she should be sleeping anyway.  But she can’t.  There is something missing.  She overturns all of the furniture, pulls everything out of the covers, and even empties the trash can, looking for this lost coin.  She sweeps the floors and dusts the bookshelves.  And finally, after everything has been going through everything she finds it.  Then she throws a party.

There is a great image in this for us in the church and our devotion to our legacies and our buildings and our accumulated stuff that is worth examining.  That Jesus encourages us to seek out that which isn’t here—and that our buildings and our wealth are nothing in light of what, or who, is absent.  Who is absent is well documented: Generation X and the Millenials.  And what we are called to do, in hopes of revealing these missing generations is to potentially overturn everything of value and everything in our homes with such urgency that we burn our lamps because the time is now.

What would it mean for our churches to display that level of devotion and caring for the generations that the church is still ignoring?  Is it possible that the response could be forgiveness?  And isn’t the point that kind of reconciliation, not the adoration of stuff?

Given that, I’d forgive the church.