Sermon:
Lost and Found
Matthew 18:10-14

Introduction: The famous “Johnstown Flood” of May 31, 1889 was likely the single most newsworthy item in American history between the assassination of Lincoln and World War I. At 3:10 p.m. on May 31, 1889, following a full-day of unprecedented heavy rains, a 450-acre man-made lake, detained by a fifty-year-old earthen dam and owned by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club (the exclusive reserve of a select group of Pittsburgh’s crustiest upper-crust), ruptured its barrier and its liberated waters raced down the South Fork Creek, into the Little Conemaugh River, on its way to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, some 15 miles downstream. It took about 40 minutes for the lake to empty completely, but it did so with the force of the Niagara River at its famous falls. The estimated 20 million tons of water roared through the narrow confines of the mountain valleys at speeds sometimes in excess of 40 miles an hour and with a roiling wall of water and debris at times more than 70 feet high. The water scoured the valleys and hillsides to the bare bedrock, uprooting massive trees, shattering and pushing along all man-made structures: houses, stores, railroad beds and equipment, telegraph and telephone poles, stone and wooden bridges, plus uncountable tons of soil, loose rocks and huge boulders, and livestock and people and whatever else was in the path of its irresistible plunge downward as it descended some 500 feet in the 15-mile race to Johnstown. Before the flood, Johnstown was scarcely known outside of Western Pennsylvania. Some 50 miles east of Pittsburgh at the junction of the Stony Creek and Little Conemaugh rivers in a wide mountain valley, it had grown in its century of existence to about 10,000 souls (the nearby valley communities pushed the area’s population to about 23,000 or perhaps a bit more). The biggest employer, and indeed the town’s economic anchor, was a large steel mill which had been the largest in the entire country in terms of production in the 1870s and early 1880s. The lower parts of town had been subject to flooding by the converging rivers with some frequency in the past, but the water at its deepest rarely rose to more than six feet. The houses in the “better” and higher parts of town never had flooded, beyond having occasional standing water in the streets. At 4:07 p.m., the juggernaut of water and wreckage crashed into Johnstown (already experiencing serious flooding in the lower parts of town due the heavy rains), and swept unstoppably over the whole town and over its several sister towns. Whole houses and businesses, and whole blocks of houses and businesses were torn loose and shattered by the impact. The wave collided with the hillside at the far side of town and returned as a massive wave of backwash surging through the ruins in the opposite direction; leveling most of what little had survived the first impact. From start to finish, the devastation took a mere ten minutes. After dumping some of its load of mud and rock and wreckage on Johnstown and collecting a new load from the town itself, the water resumed its downhill course, slamming with incredible impact into a stone railroad bridge close to the ironworks. Huge quantities of debris were jammed next to and into the bridge, mounding as much as 80 feet high and all but entirely blocking the escape path of the flood waters (and incidentally