Sunday, April 28, 2024
1.
It's telling, I think, that this morning’s parables don’t comment—not at all—on the ways and means of getting lost. It’s not important to the stories Jesus is telling, or to the point he’s making. He simply observes that one of those hundred sheep is good and lost. And one of those ten silver coins is good and lost. Could have been a bad break-up. Could have been a bad night at the racetrack. Could have been a dozen years in a bar.
Or, to be clear and honest, it might not have been the lost one’s fault at all. Maybe the lost one was ostracized by the flock, driven into the bush by prejudice, homophobia or jealousy. Maybe the lost one was frightened off by the daily news, by the headlines in the Times, and lost all hope in a world gone mad. Again, Jesus doesn’t say. Jesus knows that we get lost in a whole host of ways, in a bazillion ways; and the only important thing here is that there is One, there is always going to be One, who goes out to look. There is always going to be One who feels the loss of that one sheep, or that one coin, in her bones—and goes out to search and search and search. Until she finds. Until she finds the lost and brings it home.
2.
So if you’re feeling a little lost this morning, or maybe even very lost, wildly or wickedly lost, the message is pretty simple. Your pain may seem like it’s just your pain, or even your doing, or maybe your personal cross to bear. But God doesn’t see it or experience it that way. God knows. God hears even the silent cries of your spirt, the wordless weeping of your heart. There’s no such a thing a personal cross, anyway. If you’re lost, if you’re isolated by pain or disappointment or cruelty, God is searching the fields for you now, climbing through the brush looking now, even leaving the ninety-nine to fend for themselves—to leave no stone unturned in her quest to find you, to lift you up, to bring you home. And I’m serious about that. Whoever you are. However lost you may be. These parables are offered to you, for you today. They are many things, and they have many layers. But there’s something very real and very human here. God is searching the fields for you now.
And please, please hear this. The point of God’s searching, the purpose of her seeking, the meaning of God’s immeasurable grace is not revealed in judgment. Hear that part again. The point of God’s searching, the purpose of her seeking, the meaning of God’s immeasurable grace is not revealed in judgment. There are a whole host of moralizers out there who will try to shame us and manipulate our fear and isolation, bend our spirits to their ideas of what’s holy and important. But Jesus says, in the gospel, in these parables: Jesus says that the point of this searching, the purpose of all God’s seeking, is joyful reunion. Joyful reunion. Not suffocating shame. Not cruel manipulation. And not a church of those who know best. And lord it over the rest of us. No, no, no.
"Rejoice with me!” This is the voice of God. In the shepherd returning to the flock. “Rejoice with me!” This is the voice of God. In the woman gathering up that one lost coin. “Rejoice with me!” Joy is the sign of God’s presence in the church. Joy is the refrain of every prayer, and every hymn, and every potluck supper. Come from the east, west, north and south. Come if you’ve ever been terribly lost, or woefully hopeless, or painfully alone. Come to the circle and rejoice with me! Want to find God in the world? Look for genuine joy. Look for it in relationships. Look for it in cities and neighborhoods and schools. Look for it in churches too. Look for genuine joy. God’s close by.
3.
And the really cool thing is this. Once you’ve known this kind of joy, once you’ve been found again by this kind of Love, once you’ve been carried back to the flock on the shepherd’s shoulders—then you are quickly enlisted in the Shepherd’s sweet and sanctifying mission. You become the seekers, the searchers, the judgment-free finders of the wandering sheep. And your seeking is not the seeking of the self-righteous. And your searching is not the searching of the high and mighty. Your mission is simply and only about loving and seeking and welcoming and returning.
Those are our verbs, my friends, the church’s verbs today: LOVING. And SEEKING. And WELCOMING. And RETURNING. If you’ve ever been lost; if you’ve ever wondered if anyone, anywhere even noticed; if you’ve felt the shepherd’s arms lifting you, and the Shepherd’s shoulder’s bearing you; if you’ve been found that way…then this is your calling now. To love and to seek. To welcome and return.
And all of this welcoming and returning, all of this loving and seeking: it’s not God’s intention to gather us up in a single community of copy-cat Christians. It’s never been God’s desire to circle us up in a cookie-cutter church—where everybody thinks the same, and everybody looks the same, and everybody sounds the same. God’s desire, God’s sweet desire, God’s loving desire is a community of joy: where my spirit celebrates your spirit and your spirit celebrates mine. A community of joy: where your gifts dance with mine and my prayers augment yours. “Rejoice with me!” says the Shepherd returning with the one. “Rejoice with me!” says the sweeping Savior, finding the one lost coin.
And it’s interesting, isn’t it…more than interesting, it’s critically important…to note that repentance here means returning to a community of joy. Repentance doesn’t mean self-hate or self-diminishment. Not at all. What repentance means in these parables—which are something like the spine of the Christian tradition itself—what repentance means is returning, rediscovering, reclaiming your place in a community of joy. A community of mutual celebration. A community of mutual gift-giving and receiving. A community of the children of God—wildly and wonderfully diverse, each uniquely gifted and called, returning to one another not to judge and control one another, but to lift one another up, to rejoice in one another’s company, to build a movement of peacemakers and bread-breakers and gospel weavers.
4.
Years ago, I heard a brave veteran of the civil rights movement ask a room full of seminarians—myself among them—whether we intended to become chaplains to the empire or pastors to the world that may be. Kind of intense, right? He was talking about racism in America and apartheid in South Africa and the church in our time. Choices to be made. Chaplains to the empire? Or pastors to the world that may be. It’s one of those moments, and one of those questions, that I wake up asking myself in the middle of the night these days. Chaplain to the empire? Pastor to the world that may yet be?
I thought of that civil rights hero and his question again this week, as I watched footage of Jewish rabbis in New York celebrating a Seder in the Streets. Maybe you saw this too. A busy Brooklyn intersection, just a block away from Senator Chuck Schumer’s home. Rabbis at a huge, creatively designed table on the street itself. Recalling Moses, Miriam, their people’s journey from slavery to freedom. Are we, these rabbis were asking, appointed merely to bless the whims and habits of generals and empires? Or are we called to imagine and enact together a world of blessing, renewal and liberation? And, of course, the whole point of the Seder, the provocative heart of Passover itself, is about liberation…it’s about Jews interpreting themselves INTO the story of their people’s liberation from oppression, from violence, from hostility and empire.
So those rabbis in New York this week, they insisted that they could be, that they should be visionaries of a new world, dreamers of a reconciled world, practitioners not of war and apartheid, but of liberation and compassion and a future shared by all God’s peoples. Not chaplains to the empire, but pastors and rabbis and teachers for a new world. And most importantly, most powerfully, this means to these particular rabbis a vision of a world where Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, all God’s children are liberated together. Not one at a time. Not one people first, and then another. But together. If Jewish Israelis are to rejoice in God’s liberation, then Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are also invited, must also be included. God’s future, our future is a future in which the wellbeing of Jews and the wellbeing of Arabs is tied together, linked in the great interconnectedness of God’s love. God’s future, our future is a future in which the wellbeing of Iranians and the wellbeing of Americans is also tied together, linked in the great interconnectedness of God’s love. In so far as nationalism—American nationalism, Iranian nationalism, Russian nationalism, or Zionism—defies that future, rejects that future, deprives us of that future—nationalism is just another word for empire.
5.
So here’s what I’m thinking and feeling this morning.
The heartbeat of our gospel is this great interconnectedness of God’s love. We hear it again in the parables of Jesus today. God’s passion refuses to give up on any one of us, or on any community of God’s children, ever. When one of us is lost, in a sense, we are all lost, there is something broken and incomplete among us. When one of us is oppressed, we are all oppressed, and there is something to be repaired, something to be healed, justice to be done in the human family.
And the Shepherd’s quiet way, in the midst of every human story, in the complicated push and pull of human history, is to seek out the lost, and to search and search until she finds. Her vision is not—and can never be—that one people rises above another, or that one people eradicates another, or that one people humiliates another. Her vision is always that we discover blessing and abundance in mutual care and in shared liberation. This is why God is seeking you out this morning, in the dark night of your soul; and this is why God is stirring among those rabbis in New York and those students across the country on so many college campuses—to insist on an end to the madness of war, an end to the cruelty of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and a beginning to the world that may be, that can be, that will be.
Amen and Ashe.
