EX 32:7-11, 13-14; 1 TM 1:12-17; LK 15:1-10
That poor woman with her lost coin! A biblical commentator has said that people today don’t identify with the woman who swept her floor to recover her lost coin. Oh, no? That’s what he thinks! Once at the Newman Center, I lost the flash drive to my computer. I looked everywhere for it: my office, the rectory, all my pockets, my house in Berea, my luggage, my laptop carrying case. Nothing! I had given it up for lost, for good. Then one morning, I was concelebrating mass at Christ the King, and I went to empty the contents of my pockets in a sacristy drawer, and lo, there I saw it — tucked under a candle stick! Can you imagine!? I had forgotten it there, unseen under the candle, two weeks prior! I was thrilled, delighted. I even said to the person next to me: “I feel like the woman who last her drachma.” How about you? What about car keys? Or eye glasses? Or the worst: the cell phone. Anybody here ever lose track of your cell phone? We can’t remember where we put it. We go through all the antics of calling the phone from someone else’s phone, hoping we left the setting on ring? Right?
Well, that’s how God feels about us when we wander and get lost amid the pleasures, distractions and pressures of this world. God is thrilled to see us wandering back up the walk. The continuation of today’s gospel presents the parable of the Prodigal Son. I have often thought that the title should really be the Prodigal Father. The father is lavish in his love for both of his sons. He gave the wandering one his inheritance and, especially, his freedom: to go off, to get lost and to find himself again: “Coming to his senses, he said, ‘I shall get up and go to my father.’” The father was watching for his son’s return.
The Church is like that, too, like Motel 6, always leaving the light on. When people come to confession after 20 years, for example, I say to them, ‘welcome home.’ One person said: “You made it so easy.” I said, “God is gracious.” But the person is free. Notice the person has to make the first step: the awareness that something is missed, the decision to return and then the act of returning. The lavish God is there always waiting, offering mercy. As we know the sounds of a loved one’s foot fall or breathing or a signature gesture, so God knows the sound of our ‘car keys jingling’, the sound of our ‘cell phone buzz.’ God listens for the sounds of our return.
On this 9/11 weekend, we take comfort in knowing that the merciful God, the Eternal Father, mourned those lost lives and went out to meet them when he saw them returning to him in eternity.