Proper 19 :: Jeremiah 4: 11–12, 22–28; Psalm 51: 1–11; I
Timothy 1: 12–17 ; Luke 15: 1–10
This
is a homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at St. John's Church, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
on Sunday, September 11, 2016.
“LOST
AND FOUND, OUT AND IN”
(Homily text: Luke 15: 1–10)
Lost and found, out and in.
These are the phrases that come to mind as I think about our gospel
text for this morning, which puts before us two lovely parables, the Parable of
the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin.
With regard to the Parable of the Lost Sheep, there is a familiar
painting of the Lord carrying a lamb or a sheep over His shoulders, which you
may have seen. It is a lovely image.
But for all the loveliness of the image of the Lord carrying one of His
sheep back from being lost, there is some very dramatic stuff going on in the
two teachings we hear this morning. So let’s dig into the situation a bit, and
explore the ramifications of the Lord’s teaching.
We must begin by looking at the target audience for these two
parables: The Pharisees and the scribes.
Luke tells us that these two groups were grumbling about Jesus’
behavior, saying that He ate with “tax collectors and sinners”. The Pharisees
and the scribes avoided contact with these two groups at all costs. The reason
is that, to be in contact with a sinner was to risk becoming unclean oneself.
Recall that – in the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry – the matter of who was “clean”
and who was “unclean” was, perhaps, the one single governing rule which
dictated acceptable behavior. Moreover, in that time and place, the company one
chose to share a meal with was important, for it signaled who one’s friends and
acceptable associates were. (In our own culture, we’ve lost this sense almost
completely: We don’t really pay much attention to the company we keep when we
eat in public places. But remember that public eating places were very rare in
those days, so most places where one would share a meal or would eat in the
company of others were homes.)
To the Pharisees and the scribes, tax collectors and sinners were
“lost”.
Moreover, tax collectors and sinners were so lost that they could never
be found, according to the thinking of the Pharisees and the scribes. Such
people were completely outside of God’s will and were totally shut off from
having any acceptable relationship with God, or so the Pharisees and the
scribes thought.
Jesus undermines this way of thinking with the two parables He put
before the Pharisees and the scribes. He describes the incredible and risky
steps that God will take to seek out and find someone who is lost. I use the
word “risky” because of Jesus’ assertion that God will risk the welfare of the
main flock of His sheep in order to find the one who’s gone astray.
If we think about it, no shepherd in their right mind would do such a
thing. Most shepherds would cut their losses with the one sheep who’d gotten
lost, in order to preserve and protect what assets they have left. But God
doesn’t work that way.
At this point, we come to the matter of God’s economy. Economy
is a word that, in common usage today, has come to mean things having to do
with money or finances. But our English word denoting money or finances has a
Greek root, where it means “plan”. God’s plan is to seek out and find those who
are lost. God deliberately undertakes this search mission, and there is an
urgency to that mission … notice how Jesus says that the shepherd leaves the
ninety nine sheep in the wilderness to seek out that one lost sheep. The
shepherd does not take the flock back to the sheepfold to bed them down safely
before heading back out into the wilderness. Notice also how the woman in the
house lights a lamp to find the one coin she has lost. She does not wait until
sunlight arrives the next day, she begins her search immediately.
No such urgency can be found in the Pharisees’ complacent and
self-assured attitudes about the tax collectors and the sinners. In the mind of
the Pharisees and the scribes, they know their status with God, and – according
to their reckoning – they are anything but lost. They are the “in” crowd with
God.
Ah, but in this observation, we stumble on an awful truth: The
Pharisees and the scribes are the ones who are lost. They are the ones who are
on the outside of God’s love and God’s will, for they have placed themselves
outside of the divine will by their arrogance and by their self-important
status, which they think they have earned by their own meticulous keeping of
the Law of Moses.
In the Prayers of the People that we will pray together in a few
moments, we pray this petition: “I ask your prayers for all who seek God, or a
deeper knowledge of him. Pray that they may find and be found by him.”[1]
In our search for God, and in God’s search for us, when does the
searching and the finding happen?
The quest for searching and finding begins at baptism. It is in the
waters of baptism that God offers each one an invitation to become a child of
God. It is God’s initiative that makes the finding possible. As we enter the
waters of baptism, we take God’s hand, a hand that is outstretched toward us.
But the searching and the finding doesn’t stop at the baptismal font.
If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll have to admit that there will be times
when we might adopt the attitudes of the Pharisees, tending to rely on our own
merits and not on God’s grace, tending to think we’ve gotten everything figured
out where God is concerned.
When that happens, then we are at risk of being alienated from God. We
find ourselves among the lost, not among the found. We place ourselves outside
of an ability to hear God’s voice, a voice which calls us into a loving
embrace.
The reality is that each one of us is at risk of such behavior. It is
the very reason that we confess our sins to God before coming to the Holy Table
of the Eucharist. No one of us is immune to the disease of spiritual arrogance.
Fortunately, such a condition need not be permanent.
To see ourselves as God sees us is to realize the potential each one of
us has for getting lost. This reality encourages us to look around to see if we
are in a spiritual wilderness, lost in a place of our own making. If we find
ourselves in such a desolate place, spiritually, then we are called to listen for
the voice of the shepherd, and to welcome His carrying us back to safety.
So then, Jesus’ parables, heard this morning, challenge us to see our
true status with God….where are we? Are we among the lost or among the found,
among those who are “out” or among those who are “in”?
