PENTECOST 15

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: PENTECOST 15
PROPER: 19C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 16, 2001

TEXT: Luke 15:1-10 – “Which of you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? . . . . .Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it. When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’

ISSUE: The twin parables of Jesus regarding the shepherd and the woman tell of the profound love of God who searches diligently for his people. Jesus, at great risk to himself, searches out the lost, and is a vision of the likeness of God. The world drastically needs repentance and change and a willingness to receive the love and grace of God in Christ. While Government searches out the perpetrators of evil, the Christian community must change and search for the lost in love. Just as rescue workers search the ruins at the World Trade Centers in New York and at the Pentagon in D.C., all of us must allow ourselves to receive God’s redeeming love and be trained searching out others. In the face of destruction and evil we recommit ourselves to Jesus Christ.
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It is difficult to know where to begin this morning. It has indeed been an apocalyptic week. The constantly repeated images of the blazing World Trade Center in New York City exploding and crumbling to the ground, the Pentagon ablaze in Washington D.C., and the removal of lost bodies, and the great shedding of tears, and the horrified faces will haunt us for a long time to come. The earlier part of the week was one of shock. I for one was dazed and took wrong exits off of the beltway. What we were seeing on the TV screen was like something you only see in the movies. Having to face the reality of this situation is shocking. None of the apocalyptic descriptions that appear in the Bible, in Daniel and Revelation are any worse than the images we say this week.
The next scene is this scenario will be the many tears, the feelings of sadness, and the dealing with our grief as human beings and as a nation, of our anger, of our frustration, and the desire to get-even. We have a humanly natural feeling and yearning for getting revenge.
What we are seeing played out this week is the terrible reality of human evil and wickedness. We see raw sinfulness. We may well feel naturally enraged by this terrible attack. We not only feel the rage of the moment, but other images of bad times return as well. Some here remember well the awful and evil attack upon Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s terrible holocaust, the assassinations of President Kennedy of Martin Luther King, the horrible Oklahoma Bombing. The raw human condition is ripped open once again. We are also caused to recognize that none of us are totally without sin. In certain instances, even white Americans who treated Native Americans and blacks as sub-human in our history, and our use of atomic weapons reminds us that we all participate in the sorry side of the human condition.
The other side of the story is the stories in the midst of this catastrophe. It’s what we might call the godly side of the story. At the very beginning of the event, hundreds of fire fighters in New York and police personnel rushed to the scene to do their job. Many of them gave their lives for the fellow human beings. People in their office buildings aware of their doomed situation picked up phones to call home to tell their family that they loved them. Even on the planes themselves, there are reports of passengers who dared in the face of great risk to abort the evil assault. Filtering out of the rubble and the horrific scenes will come the stories of great heroics, and of men and women dedicated to their jobs with great compassion. Thousands turned to God in prayer, and many people lined up to give blood. Still more will give funds to the various organizations, which will provide assistance to the victims of this Apocalyptic event as they struggle to rebuild their lives.
There is still another side to this horror. We have as Americans not experienced such an attack in a long time, at least not since Pearl Harbor. Maybe we can become sensitized to what it is like in countries where there has been long time terror and war, like the Israel-Palestinian situation, the problems in Ireland, and the political strife and hunger in African nations. Maybe from this terrible event, we too may become more sensitized to what real suffering is around the world. We are all vulnerable to human sin and suffering, and we all need to be changed in our thinking, minds, hearts, attitudes, and be there for one another beyond even our own comfortable borders.
Some of the images we saw this week were horrible. Yet there were other images of men and women searching the rubble. They are images similar to what we find in the Scripture readings appointed for this day. Jesus was challenged once again by some stiff necked religious fanatics. Why is he eating and associating with the sinners and tax collectors, and the unclean, and the general useless riffraff? He associates with human condition in such an unbecoming way. So Jesus tells the hotshot religious fanatics of his time a set of twin parables. Now, these Pharisees prayed daily thanking God that they were not born as a woman. Jesus confronts them with a whole new idea. God is like a woman! She loses one of her ten coins, which really didn’t have much value, a day’s wage maybe. But it’s valuable to her, so she gets down on the floor and searches the darkest corners of a very dark house risking spider bites and scorpions. She hunts and searches, and sweeps, and cleans and gets down on her hands and knees and searches in the rubble to find what’s she needs to find, in spite of its limited worth. And when she finds it, she throws a party rejoicing, and the party costs more than the value of the coin.
God, Jesus says to the Pharisees, is like a humble shepherd. God is like one of those bawdy imperfect, unclean, dishonorable trespassing shepherds, who dares to seek the lost sheep. What shepherd having a hundred sheep, - he must have been a pretty well off shepherd, but then I guess you can think of God as pretty well off – does not leave the ninety-nine to search for the one that is lost. Actually, that’s not really very good thinking as the world understands it, to leave the ninety-nine, but the shepherd does. He climbs hills and sinks into the lower gullies and valleys. He takes risks and confronts wild beasts with his rod and staff. He won’t give up until he finds the lost, returns home rejoicing and throws a party that costs more than the value of the lost sheep according to the world’s values.
The next time you see those images of the searchers in the rubble, think of God like an old woman desperately searching the devastated human condition trying to find and save, and renew and offer up so thankfully and joyfully the lost that is found. Next time you see the men trying to move a large section of concrete or a steel girder think of God’s Good Shepherd who comes in search of the human condition who comes at great risk to raise up, and resurrect his people loving and valuing them more than they could ever imagine.
May I add that in the Hebrew Scripture today the story is told that Moses went up the Mountain at God’s command to receive the civilizing law. While he was gone, the people cast themselves an image of a calf to be their image for God. God was furious and was ready to destroy each one of them. But Moses pleaded to God for his people: “Turn from your fierce wrath, change your mind . . . .” And the Lord changed his mind . . . If God himself in his compassion can change his mind, cannot we do the same? If the spirit of Christ could change St. Paul, a stiff-necked religious fanatic and man of violence and murder, cannot we all be changed? God yearns for a changed world, a world of compassion and mercy, and a world that is sensitive and seeks out the lost and raises it up, as if having great value and of more value than anything else. The good news of the Gospel is that God is searching for all of his people and loves them all. We are not doomed. We are not lost beyond his finding and his renewal. In spite of this apocalyptic event is the dawning of new hope, and awareness that the world needs repentance, change. We find our model in those servants who scavenger the wreckage for the lost, for our God in Christ has always and will always search us out and show us the way.
We have all come here today shocked and in grief. We have been faced with something most of us never dreamed possible. We are faced with the raw human condition and inhumanity. We know that evil needs to be stopped. We must step in with God’s help to cast out the evil spirits and the evil spiritedness of the world. Just as Hitler had to be stopped, so do the terrorists, but never at the risk of our becoming terrorists, or a people controlled by the cyclical sin of revenge. Rather, we enter the human condition with love, we join the search with Jesus Christ to find the lost and bring them into the Messianic Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of hope, to raise up that which is fallen to stand in the radiant light of the love of God. Faced with great evil, we recommit to Jesus Christ as the Way of our lives.