30 August 2018 | Belgrade, Serbia [Julian Hibbert]
You can’t fall asleep when Pastor Ian Sweeney is the preacher – even after a full day of seminars, workshops, fellowship, and for some, walks around the beautiful city of Belgrade. Sonja Kalmbach, a pastor in Sweden confessed “his sermon really touched me!”
Pastor Sweeney, British Union Conference president and former winner of the Times Preacher of the year competition, chose to base his Wednesday evening message at the European Pastors’ Council on the trilogy of ‘lostness’ parables found in Luke 15.
In the first parable Jesus posed this question in verse 4: ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?’ The wording of the question seems to presuppose a confident ‘Yes!’ response, doesn’t it? However, as Pastor Ian pointed out, our practice and statistics testify that we are not so good in searching for those lost sheep.
It was the second parable though, that the preacher was really interested in: ‘Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?’ (Luke 15:8) Here the answer Jesus anticipated is a resounding ‘Yes!’
According to Pastor Ian, ‘it was not the intention of Jesus to say the same thing in each of the three parables! . . . Now [in the first parable] we preach and paint the picture of the sheep being found and being carried around the neck of the good shepherd. In the third parable we preach and paint the picture of the Father God running to receive His son back home.’ However, as he correctly points out about the second parable: ‘it does not carry the same force or intensity as the other parables, maybe because it is not a cute lost lamb, or a son beaten up by sin. In this second parable, it is an inanimate object, a coin.’
This parable is more disturbing than the other two, however, because the ‘woman of this parable lost her money in her own home.’ What does it suggest? Simply that while we are trying to bring more ‘coins’ into the church, some of those who are already there may actually be lost! ‘They are not on the mountainside like the sheep, or in a far country like the younger son, . . . They are still at home, their names are still on our membership roll, but they are lost!’ As Pastor Ian puts it, we shouldn’t be surprised that we can lose something as precious as our fellow brothers and sisters in the house that we call church. For in the days of King Josiah of Judah (2 Kings 22) ‘they managed to lose the Word of God in the Temple.’ ‘If we can lose God’s Holy Oracle in the one place where it should always be available, let’s not be surprised that we can lose His precious people in the selfsame place!’
Another reason why this parable is most disturbing is the way it attributes blame for the loss. Those who are lost within the church are lost because of us. Yes, you and I can be one of the main reasons people are lost within the church. And to make it all worse there is this pertinent comment: ‘Angels weep, while human eyes are dry and hearts are closed to pity.’ (Christ Object Lessons, page 191) We don’t care!
Some years ago, the Seventh-day Adventist Church conducted a comprehensive study as to why people left the church. The findings were both fascinating and frightening. Seventy-nine percent of those who left still believed in the authority of Scripture as we teach it, while fifty-eight percent still believed the authority and writings of Ellen White. In contrast with that, the top reasons they left were hypocrisy (1), divorce (2), lack of friendliness (3), and the high levels of conflict in their local church (4). Three of those top four reasons are attributable to the actions of their fellow members! After all, coins don’t usually lose themselves, do they?
Let’s close this brief synopsis of Pastor Ian’s thought-provoking presentation with this snippet of practical advice: ‘Our language betrays our carelessness to one another. When a member is missing from church for 6 weeks, we show our carelessness when we say ‘Hello stranger!’, when not having once picked up the phone to find out how they are!’ Then we make it worse by telling this lie, ‘I missed you!’ They know that had we really had missed them we would have called.
Coins don’t usually lose themselves, do they?
tedNEWS Staff: Victor Hulbert, editor; Sajitha Forde-Ralph, associate editor
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