Luke 15 is a chapter for our day. It speaks to the religious, and irreligious; the one who knows he’s lost, and the one who doesn’t.  It makes us face up to the reality of our lives.  It shows us the terror of what it is to be lost and the glory of what it is to be found.  It tells us of the wonder of a God who comes down to rescue, and man’s response to God. It should move us as a church that the people around us are lost, without hope and without God.

The other day I found myself in the City of London and my phone battery had died.  I was confident that I knew where I was going.  I was slightly smug that I could find my way around central London without needing a phone. It was only after walking 20 minutes and seeing buildings for the third time around I began to realise that my confidence might have been misplaced.  I asked a shop worker about the street I was looking for but they barely spoke English and were no help.  There was no A-Z (those under 40 won’t know what that is) that I could buy in the newsagents I passed.

It took me a while to awake to the realisation that I was lost.  I didn’t want to admit it, but I was.  There was something humbling, dare I say humiliating about it.  I’d lived in this city for 25 years and yet did not know where I was.

One writer has said that for the first time in history there is a generation growing up that will never say in a response to a question, “I don’t know”; instead, they will just google the answer.  In the same way, technology has moved at such a pace that no one has a Sat Nav anymore, but they just use their phone with Google maps and different apps to help them find their way. No one need ever be lost again because of technology- of course, that is if the technology works.

My issue was the realisation that I had been lost all this time, but I didn’t realise it.  I was so confident in my own ability and rightness, an assurance that I knew the way –  I was utterly blind to my lostness.

I think we see this in our culture consistently.  In so many ways, our world thinks that it knows better than previous generations. It clearly displays what CS Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’.  However, there is rarely any awareness of lostness. There is little recognition in our culture of where we have come from, where we are, or where we are going.  There is a refusal to admit that we might be lost.  There are millions of people in our city blind to their lostness.

The word lost conjures lots of distressing images. The child in the supermarket separated from his mother in floods of tears. The driver in an unfamiliar city having no idea where he is.  We talk of being lost in our thoughts, that is someone being so focussed in one’s thoughts that they are no longer paying attention to their surroundings.

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