Family Service Sunday 14th September – led by Lilian Evans
It was one of those days – internet down and the lapel microphone not working – so Lilian had to speak from the lectern and the sound quality could have been better.
When Jesus wanted to explain things, he often spoke in parables. With Lilian it’s often in the form of personal anecdotes. So, after the reading from Luke 15 – “The lost Sheep and The Lost Coin” – she asked us whether we’d ever been lost ourselves, and then told us she’d got slightly lost on her way to us the very morning.
With Lilian all sorts of things could get lost. And so she had a dog, a wind-up musical dog with a zip pocket where she could store her purse and mobile phone. Marian rang her mobile number and hey presto! – there it was. With the purse and also a bag with silver coins (which she didn’t tip on the floor).
When it came to the story about the shepherd going out to find one lost sheep, Lilian thought it didn’t make a lot of common sense. Sheep normally all clustered together. So had the missing sheep been stolen, had it found a gap to escape through, or had the shepherd simply miscounted? It might take a long time to find the one lost sheep, and that could mean that all the other sheep would wander off as well. So, not common sense, really, to keep looking for it.
Children often got lost. And Lilian, aged 9, had been no exception. While her mum had been talking to a friend, she’d wandered off into a store in Watford and started looking around. When her mum had noticed she was missing, she’d retraced her steps and found her. Just as God came and looked for us.
She’d been walking around Watford and been handed a little leaflet about what God wanted us to know. “You need to be saved, because you’ve sinned. You can’t save yourself. Jesus can save you”. And then the familiar verse from John 3. “So, trust Jesus. Seek the Lord. Call on him to save you”.
In the reading from 1 Timothy 1 – “Gratitude for God’s mercy”, Paul had recognised that he had been against God and far away from him. He’d come to see what he’d been doing. He’d wandered off the path. Lilian felt that when it came to Paul’s letters you had to read it about 3 times before you could work out what he was saying. It sort of wandered all over the place sometimes, the way we usually do. He’d recognized that he’d received mercy. He’d been causing a lot of problems for the disciples and for Jesus. He’d said, “Well yeah, I should have done better”. But he’d wanted to ask God to be with him as he continued on his journey.
He knew about the lost sheep, the lost coins, and the lost people and realised that he’d been a bit lost himself. But God had sent Jesus so that we might see Him. Immortal, invisible God. You couldn’t see Him, but you could see Jesus and what He was doing. Jesus was doing was what God would have been doing if he had been a man. Of course, not everybody liked that. Not everybody wanted to listen to him: they wanted to carry on doing things their own way. It wasn’t easy: God had sent His Son in order to find us. Sometimes things were hidden from sight.
And then Lilian told us about her cataracts, mistaking a dust cart for a bus, and the ensuing operation. We looked and saw things, but they were not always what we thought we were seeing. And then there were difficulties in remembering as well. She was an expert in finding her car using the key-fob (you had to remember on which floor of the car park you had left it!)
But God gave us more than we could understand. He was looking out for us. “I was lost but now I am found”. And he’d brought us to a place where we could pray. Where we knew we could ask, and that God was listening. Where we could say thank you for things that he’d listened to.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 