215 Lost and Found

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Lost and Found”, originally shared on May 16, 2022. It was the 215^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   Have you ever felt that all was lost? Have you ever felt that you were lost? That’s a good thing. Today, we’ll find out why.

   There is a tremendous sense of discouragement in the world today.

   I remember a meme I saw when the pandemic was just picking up steam.

   It was a parody of the popular children’s book, “Goodnight Moon.” Over the strangely calming primary colors and the starry night sky out the window of the bunny’s bedroom it said, “Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Zoom, Goodnight sense of impending Doom.”

   Things haven’t improved much.

   Now added to the improving-but-not-over-yet-pandemic are a sense of rootlessness, national polarization, a war in Ukraine that it seems could spill-over into a calamitous World War, an economy in decline, and closer to home, a sense in the Church that something has broken.

   Why is this a good thing?

   In today’s gospel reading, we see a picture of brokenness and wholeness, and the transformation comes through a word from Jesus, in John 5:1-9,

5 After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

² Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. ³ In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. ⁵ One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. ⁶ When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷ The ill man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.” ⁸ Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” ⁹ At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Now that day was a Sabbath.

   The man by the pool had been ill for 38 years. That’s a long time to be ill. How much hope for healing or for anything good in life do you think he had after 38 years of illness?

   Jesus asks the “Captain Obvious” question, “Do you want to be made well?” Well, maybe not so obvious. After 38 years, illness can become a person’s identity. How would a person ill for 38 years know themselves if they were not ill? How would they live?

   It would take courage to desire that kind of radical change.

   It would also take faith in Jesus; it would take the belief that Jesus could heal him. Otherwise, why get your hopes up and take the chance that they would be shattered. Again. After 38 years.

   It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to be healed. People at that time apparently believed that an angel of the Lord (those are the really scarry ones) sometimes came and stirred up the waters and whoever got there first would be healed of whatever disease they had.

   People also believed that if you were ill, or poor, or struggling in any way it was because you were a sinner, or because one of your ancestors was a sinner, and you were being punished.

   So, when Jesus approached the man, Jesus offered him not just healing, but wholeness and a whole new life.

   The man at the pool knew what people thought of him. He probably believed the things they said about him, himself, and he knew that he needed a savior.

   Tim Keller, the presbyterian pastor who started a healthy church in Manhattan, in New York, and a respected author, tweeted the other day, “The gospel is always more compelling to people who know their own inadequacy. The highly competent, confident, and successful have a harder time with the concept of salvation by sheer, unadulterated, totally unmerited grace.” And he references Matthew 21:31,

³¹ Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

   I saw another meme a while ago that said, “Everything not saved will be lost.” It was a Nintendo “Quit Screen” message.

   This man at the pool knew that he was lost in every sense, but he turned to the Savior and he was healed.

   But. There’s a wrinkle.

   John ends the event in this Gospel reading with the words, “Now that day was a sabbath.” Out of context, it almost sounds like he’s tattling. But if you read the rest of the story, in John 5:10-47, you’ll see the point that Jesus is making for those who are critical of the now healed man for lifting his mat and walking, which they believed was doing work, on the sabbath, and of Jesus for his healing, i.e. also doing work, on the sabbath.

   All the man knows is that he had been made whole.

   He was like the woman in the song written by Carole King and partners and sung and made popular by Aretha Franklin, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”

“When my soul was in the lost and found
You came along to claim it”

   That’s exactly what the Savior did for the man at the pool.

   When a man named Zacchaeus, who was also publicly known as a sinner, a chief tax collector, humbled himself before Jesus, Jesus ate at his house, a public sign of welcome. And when Zacchaeus repented before Jesus, this happened, in Luke 19:9-10,

⁹ Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

   So, if you’re feeling lost today, if you know that you cannot save yourself, the good news for you is that you have a Savior. Don’t give up or surrender to despair. Jesus has come to seek and to save you. Let Him into your heart.

   We don’t know what the future holds in this crazy world, but we do know Who holds the future.