Found

Propers: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

What does that word repentance mean to you? For most of us, I imagine, it means saying you’re sorry and promising to do better. Give us just one more chance, O Lord, and we promise to never disappoint You again. Welcome to Religion 101, where the antidote to vice is virtue, the antidote to sin is self-control. Sadly, that doesn’t work for me. Or for anyone, really.

The parables we read today, parables of lost and found, posit something quite a bit more shocking. Scandalous, even. Jesus is speaking to the scribes and the Pharisees of his day: the scribes being academics, theologians, if you will; and the Pharisees being a movement of lay people seeking a stricter piety, a more demanding religion—living as Levitical priests though they themselves are not of priestly lineage.

In Jesus’ day, the Pharisees are the good guys. Their piety goes above and beyond. They’re the moral majority, the fundamentalists of their time. Imagine something like a modern political party advocating not only a return to traditional family values but also the adoption of a strict monastic rule for all in daily life. The sinners in the story, meanwhile, are normal folks: not academic scribes, not elite Sadducees, not publicly pious Pharisees, but regular people working hard, making mistakes, more worried about getting by than about particular purity codes.

And when the Pharisees and the scribes criticize Jesus for the company He keeps—for hanging out with sinners rather than with serious religious people like them—Jesus responds by telling three stories, three parables of lost and found: the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The first two we heard this morning. The third deserves a sermon of its own, though if it doesn’t ring a bell, please do read it when you get home. It is perhaps the most beautiful of all the stories Jesus ever told.

In these stories, repentance is not the work of sinners, at least not primarily. Repentance, rather, is the work of God. The word metanoia, which we translate as repentance, means to be changed, to be turned, to go beyond one’s mind. And the Pharisees clearly think that we need to turn ourselves back to God. That’s their whole spiel. Work hard, choose God, be good. Sinners need not apply.

But in each of these stories Jesus tells, it is God who seeks the lost, God who goes the extra mile, God who goes to ridiculous, even foolish, lengths to rescue and redeem seemingly small and expendable things, unworthy things.

Let’s be honest: sheep are stupid. It’s not their fault, really. They were one of the first animals that humankind ever domesticated, and we’ve been breeding them to be docile and dumb for thousands of years. No wild ram would ever be so sheepish. But when one sheep goes astray in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd leaves the 99 in his flock and braves the dangers of the wilderness to rescue the one. And when he finds that little lost lamb, he does not simply lead it home but hoists it on his shoulders, carries it all the way back, rejoicing at the return of this one wayward sheep.

Likewise the lost coin. In my house, things go missing all the time, and I confess a certain mania about overturning the household until we find them. My wife has a more Zen outlook: “It’ll turn up,” she says. And more often than not, she’s right. But Jesus says that God is not like that. God is like a woman who lights the lamps and searches all night for a single lost coin, indefatigable, never giving up, until what has lost has been found—and not just returned, but celebrated, rejoiced over.

There is no indication in either of these stories that the sheep or the coin did anything to be rescued, or even to deserve to be rescued. The sheep did not look for the shepherd. It did not cry out for help. The coin did not leap into the light, ringing out, “Here I am! Come save me!” No, the sheep is rescued because of who the Shepherd is, and the unfailing love that He holds for that sheep. The coin is found because of who the Woman is, and how She will not relent in reclaiming what is Her own.

And that’s what God is like, says Jesus. He does not rescue the worthy or the qualified or the deserving. He rescues the lost, period—just on account of their being lost. Something went wrong. They wandered off. They fell and were hidden. But the outcome is never in doubt: God will find them. God will rescue them. God will bring them to repentance, bring them home at last, and all the angels of Heaven shall rejoice over each and every lost and wayward sinner whom the Father welcomes home. Salvation is assured not because of what we do but because of who God is.

The love of God never wavers. The mercy of God never relents. The grace of God will not be denied. We can resist Him all we want. We can run kicking and screaming off into darkness and exile and the valley of the shadow of death. But in the end, God will save this wayward world, even if He has to lift every one of us up on His shoulders and carry us back to our home; even if She has to light every lamp in the heavens until there is not one nook or cranny or shadow left in which we can hide. And this isn’t just a New Testament thing.

Look to our reading from Exodus this morning. In it, the Israelites have rebelled against God and set up a false idol, and God says to Moses, “Just look at what your people have done. There’s no way we can curb their wickedness. Let’s just be done with them, let Me be angry with them, and we’ll start over with you.”

To which Moses replies, “Oh, no. These aren’t my people. These are Your people. What kind of God would You be if You poured out upon them the wrath that they deserve?  What kind of God would You be if You didn’t keep Your promises even to the unworthy and undeserving?” And the Lord, it says, changes His mind.

Now, some may read that and find it unsettling. God can change His mind? Could the Creator of all things, seen and unseen, the Source of all Goodness and Beauty and Truth and Being, the Love from whom all loves flow, be so fickle? But this is to misread the story, for the point of this tale is precisely the opposite. God is not like the gods of our own devising. God does not change. He is faithful. He is eternal. He is true.

And it is to this unchanging character of God that Moses appeals. Not to piety. Not to worthiness. Not even to reason. But his prayer, in so many words, is: “I trust in who You are. I trust in what You do. I trust that God’s mercy and love and forgiveness never fail, no matter what we do, no matter how sinful and cruel we are, but simply because You are God. Even Your wrath is a sign of Your love. For indeed, God is always for us. Even when He must be against us, He is for us.”

And Moses’ prayer is not in vain. God relents from punishing, relents from wrath. Not because He changes, but precisely because He does not. The Love of God isn’t something that He can turn on or off, like a faucet, merciful one day, wrathful the next. Rather Love is who He is, and He cannot be otherwise.

And that is why God will go to any length, to ridiculous lengths, to come down here, in the flesh, in the wilderness, to seek out the lost, to light every shadow, to brave danger and hardship and wounding and death, even death on a Cross, to lay us across His shoulders and carry us home and rejoice forever in the Kingdom of God that we had been lost, and now are found; we had been dead, and now arise.

God is the Shepherd. God is the Woman. God is Jesus Christ our Lord. And He will do anything to bring us home. There’s nowhere we can hide, nowhere we can run. Even if we flee to the pits of Hades, He shall come down Himself and dig up the dead. You can’t stop Him. You can’t escape Him. You can’t fight Him. Even if you kill Him, He’ll just get back up again. The Love of God cannot stay dead.

This is the Fire that shall light all the world. This is the Love that shall save all our souls.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.