TESSIE’S  LOST  TEETH 

INTRODUCTION

In order to touch people, in order to touch their lives, you have to  try  to reach them where they are, or where they have been. You have to tell a story that is their story, so that they will say, “I’ve been there.” You have to connect with people through their experiences. 

TODAY'S GOSPEL: LUKE 15: 1-10

In today’s Gospel Jesus tries to reach us and touch us with 2 basic human experiences:

                    1) loosing something, searching frantically for it and then the joy we feel when we have finally found what we lost.    

                    2) being in a situation where we say, what's he or she doing here?

FIRST: LOOSING SOMETHING

Everyone has had the experience of loosing something: a wallet, a watch, car keys, a book, etc. We can all relate to the people in the American Express commercials - who discover their money has disappeared. Help! I’ve lost something.

So Jesus tells two stories: that of a man losing a sheep and a woman losing a coin. He wants to touch the garment of everyone in his audience.

SOME MODERN EXAMPLES

A priest I was stationed with told me about one of his nephews. The kid had very poor eyes. Once he and his buddies were swimming in a large public pool and his nephew lost one of his contact lenses. He shouted to his friends to try to help him find it. No luck. 

The guy who was in charge of the pool let this kid and his friends stay after closing time so they could do some more searching. Finally, someone came up with a way of dividing up the pool. Sure enough they found it. A contact lens in a pool. A needle in a haystack. A sheep in the hills. A coin in a dark house.

Mark Link in one of his Homilies gives this example for today's gospel story, “A teacher instructed his students to rewrite Jesus’ `Parable of the Lost Sheep’, putting it in a modern setting. One student wrote, “Suppose you have just finished typing a 100 page term paper. You discover one sheet is missing. What would you do?”

“You would forget about the ninety-nine sheets and go looking for the one lost sheet. When you find it, you are so happy that you take the other 99 sheets, throw them in the air, and yell, “Super! I found my lost sheet.” Well, that’s how God feels when you’ve come back to God and church again.”

When I was stationed at  Most Holy Redeemer  Church, Third Street, New York City, I had an unique experience. One Thursday morning I got a call from a woman named Tessie who worked at the school lunch program over at the  school.  Since I was in charge of Bingo, she asked me if anyone who had worked in the kitchen the night before had found her teeth. Evidently, she worked without here teeth at times. I said “no”, but I’d be right over. 

As I walked down 4^th street I noticed a garbage truck at the top of the block. I ran to the school and talked to Tessie fast. I found out that she was in the habit of wrapping her teeth in a napkin and keeping them on the counter while she worked. 

I said that they were probably scooped up and thrown out. I checked the garbage bags in the garbage pails. All were empty. 

Next I said, “Tessie, get your coat on and bring a few plastic garbage bags. We got outside and started searching.” 

The garbage men were still coming down the block. Wouldn’t you know? It started to rain. We started emptying out each full bag, into a clean bag and as we did, we searched through each napkin. We found interesting items: orange peels, apple cores, half eaten sandwiches, bingo papers, cigarette butts, and a few hundred other kinds of items, some unmentionable. 

We were in the third bag when the garbage men stopped in front of the school. 

One guy said, “Hi Tessie!” 

Another said, “Father, what you looking for?” 

I said: “You ain’t going to believe this one. Tessie here lost her teeth and we’re hoping to find them.” 

Someone said, “That’s a new one.” Another guy said,  “Ok, guys, let’s find them. And the first one who finds them gets a big kiss from Tessie - without her teeth in of course.” 

And so they joined in the search. 

In about the seventh of the eleven bags, there they were: Tessie’s false teeth. 

She rejoiced - giving everyone a big toothless kiss.

Well, that’s a kind of human experience we’ve all had. And notice. It’s communal. We need to tell others our story. Tessie probably tells the story till today. Here I am telling you, almost 50  years after it happened.

SECOND: WHAT’S HE DOING HERE

Now losing something is an experience we don’t mind sharing, but this second experience is the one we don’t like to mention.

Haven’t we also had the experience of saying under our breath, “What the heck is he or she doing here?” 

No nerds allowed. No weirdos allowed. No gays allowed. No people who are mistake makers allowed. No people who look like that allowed.

There is a tendency when we get religion to get our nose out of wack. We can become holier than thou. We can become pharisaical.

So there is a great advantage then in sin - in falling - because it brings us back to the first story. We’re the nerd, the one who is lost, the sinner, the one others say, “What’s he doing here?”

God will search high and low for us when we are lost sheep. God will search every garbage bag till he finds us lost teeth. Lost teeth. Uuuh. Yuck.

So the point that Jesus wanted the Pharisees to see, hear and feel,  is that they we are  sinners - lost sheep - lost coins.

And once we reflect deep down in ourselves, who we are, then the tendency is to stop looking down on others.

One good way to learn humility, is to be humbled - especially by our own mistakes - our own blunders.

We’re all lost sheep. we’re all lost teeth. Lost contact lenses. Lost pieces of a term paper or a section of our autobiography. Lost children on milk containers in garbage bags.

CONCLUSION

Now I would contend and conclude this sermon with this important point: we better learn and live both messages.