A Runaway Sheep

Martyn Payne

On Your Marks:

Again and again throughout the Bible we find God searching for those who are lost. In many ways the whole Bible is a story of 'lost and found'. People choose to go their own way and leave the security of God's love but God does not give up on them. God comes searching to bring people home because, as St Augustine's prayer puts it, 'we are restless, until we find our rest in [God]'.

This session is part of a series that explores this theme in stories from the Old and New Testaments. In each we see individuals who are lost for a variety of reasons, but God rejoices to find them again and bring them back to his loving arms.

This outline focuses on the story of the lost sheep as told by Jesus among the 'lost and found' parables in Luke's Gospel.

Get Set:

Use the retelling of this story as found in The Barnabas Children's Bible, story 281, page 248.

You can also find the story in Luke 15:1-7.

Go!

1. Jesus tells the parables in Luke 15 and 16 to the religious leaders of his day, who were scandalized that he is eating and drinking with the 'irreligious lost' of society at that time (see Luke 15:1-2). They haven't understood how much God loves all people and comes looking for them, however they have lost themselves - whether deliberately, foolishly or accidentally. God's love is so much greater than they had yet realized!

The first 'lost and found' story about the sheep would have provoked as much consternation as insight! No sane shepherd would have gone to such great lengths to rescue one lost sheep when the welfare of the other 99 was at stake. It didn't make any sense in shepherding terms. And the story is still disconcerting today and that is the point. God's love for each of us breaks the bounds of human reasoning and calculation. God the Good Shepherd will do what no ordinary shepherd would do, just to bring us home.

To try to capture the sense of how crazy this search for one lost sheep is and set the scene, why not arrange at the beginning of your session to spill 'accidentally' a container full of hundreds and thousands. They will end up everywhere, of course. Enlist the children's help in picking them all up, but keep insisting that there must be one more somewhere that they have missed, perhaps rolled away out of sight. Keep up the search for as long as is possible and then use this to introduce the story:

The shepherd went searching for the one sheep, however hard it was and however unimportant that sheep might have seemed. He doesn't give up. Jesus' story really surprised the people then and today.

2. Read the story in The Barnabas Children's Bible, page 248, story 281 - up to the words 'the right path' (top of page 249).

N.B. This story goes on to unpack the truths about the Good Shepherd but you can come back to this at a later date.

3. No doubt Jesus, the storyteller, would have stressed how long and difficult the search was that the shepherd undertook, thus underlining that God's love is just as amazingly persistent. You could try the following game with the children to explore this idea:

Each child has to try to dream up another difficulty that the shepherd had to face. For example:

He had to climb this huge mountain and then, just when he thought he'd found the sheep...

He had to wade through a massive bog and then, just as he thought he'd found the sheep...

He had to shelter from a torrential downpour and then, just as he thought he'd found the sheep...

He had to fight his way through a thick thorn bush...

How many impossible challenges can the group come up with on the shepherd's search?

There is a tremendous poem in The Gospels Unplugged from Barnabas, which has further ideas as to the lengths to which the shepherd might have gone.

4. With a younger group you could turn the search into a follow-the-leader game that they act out, along the lines of 'we're going on a bear hunt'. However, it will be 'we're going on sheep search', of course.

When the sheep is found eventually, don't forget that you will haveto retrace your steps through all the obstacles you've invented (and in reverse order!), in order to get home again!

5. An interesting part of this parable is the emphasis on the tremendous joy that the shepherd has when the sheep is found; a joy that he just simply must share with his friends and neighbours. The fact that God gets so excited and is so pleased to have us home again is another aspect of the story that would have surprised his listeners then and still is hard to take in today. God actively delights this much in us.

I wonder if all the neighbours would have understood this unbounded joy, though?

Ask the group to become the shepherd's neighbours and to enter into a group role play. When they hear what has happened and are invited to the celebration, what would be going through their minds? For example:

I can't believe that the shepherd went to the lengths that he did - he must be mad!

Just fancy doing all that and for one measly tiny sheep!

Who cares what he did - any excuse for a party, I say!

Call himself a shepherd - I'd rather not be associated with someone like that.

I'm not going to his party - people will think that I'm mad, too.

6. The wonderful truth for us in this story is that God is exactly like this crazy long-searching shepherd and does not give up on any of us, even though it's usually our fault that we get lost in the first place. For many Christians the picture of the shepherd carrying the sheep on his shoulders is especially important and helps them remember what God means to them. There are several versions of this picture available on the Internet. Print off a large version of this image or copy one roughly by hand and invite the children to add some thoughts-bubbles around the sheep at the top, expressing what the sheep feels at this point of rescue. To prompt them, ask them to think what they would feel like or say if this happened to them.

Talk the story through and let the children make their own connections with the story and what it might be saying to them personally.

7. For a time of prayer you will need to place a circle of gold thread or cord in the middle and then hand out a number of cotton wool balls. These represent the sheep that are lost. Now invite the children, one by one, to pick up a cotton wool ball and move it on a route of their choosing from where they are, bringing it eventually safely back into the golden circle in the middle, which represents the safe place of God's love.

Ask the children, as they do this, to think about situations in which they or others have felt lost or in need of help and wanted to be close to God again.

The story of the shepherd's long agonizing search and the fact that he went to any lengths to find the sheep is brought home, of course, when Jesus goes to the cross in order to bring us all home. You might like to introduce a small cross to conclude the prayers and place it next to the circle where everyone is safe, using words like:

Thank you, Jesus, that there is nothing that you would not do in order to bring us home.

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