Hounded

Propers: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), AD 2022 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.

When I look back on my twenties, through admittedly rose-colored glasses, the thing I miss the most is that irrepressible energy of youth, the conviction that any obstacle could be overcome, any challenge defeated. It wasn’t just optimism; it was power. I woke up every morning feeling indomitable, indefatigable, or maybe I was just plain cocky. Whatever it was, it was great.

But time catches up with us all, and the burdens of adulthood weigh heavily upon the soul. It’s the endlessness of it, really: the endless chores and bills and dishes and laundry, and the astonishing amount of energy required just to keep a few children alive, let alone well-adjusted.  And most of us these days are doing it alone, without old friends or family support, not knowing our neighbors, not joining anything that isn’t online.

I start to sympathize with the sad songs which in my youth I simply found depressing. But now here they are cathartic. Go figure. There’s one that I particularly like, by Sting, which I listen to every autumn as the leaves begin to change. It’s called “The Hounds of Winter,” and it’s about a man in mourning for his lost love, knowing that he faces now the coming cold and dark without her warmth to get him through. It goes in part:

A season for joy, a season for sorrow.
    Where she’s gone, I will surely, surely follow …
All I hear is that lonesome, lonesome sound.
    And the hounds of winter, they harry me down.

Obviously Sting sings it better. But I love that image, that sort of clear-eyed, frank assessment that grief is like a hound, and you can hear it coming for you. You know it has your scent. And it will harry you—attacking, harassing, until it wears you down, until you accept defeat. It’s such a poignant image, isn’t it? It speaks to me, to my experience, to the hounds of winter. They harry me down.

Back in the Middle Ages, when nobles went hunting for deer, you didn’t sit up in a tree with your bow. You sent in the hounds: one sort to sniff your quarry, one sort to block escape, and one sort to go in and harry the deer, to wear them down. And once the dogs had done their work, then you send the shaft. The outcome is determined long before the end, determined by the hounds of winter.

But what if time and melancholy are not the only determined hunters? What if joy and salvation have hounds as well? What if they harry at us, at our fears, at our griefs, at our pains, until at last they wear us down, at last they catch us? What if God has hounds as well? And they will not relent until they claim us for His own.

The Dominicans, or Blackfriars, are an Order of itinerant monastics founded in the High Middle Ages who’ve become justly famous—or infamous—for their many accomplishments over the centuries. But they’re also famous for a pun. See, in Latin, Dominicanus sounds like Domini canes, “the Hounds of the Lord,” the dogs of God. And the Blackfriars leaned into it. They made it their own. “You’re right,” they said. “The Hounds of the Lord shall never relent.”

In Swedish Livonia, during the late seventeenth century, there were werewolf trials, but not of the sort that you might expect. There were men, it seems, who believed that on certain festivals every year—Santa Lucia, Pentecost, Midsummer’s Eve—their spirits were called down to hell in the form of mighty wolves to do battle with the devil and his witches. They called themselves the hounds of God. Holy werewolves! Imagine that.

It is all too easy, when we feel worn down, defeated, discouraged, to think of entropy, time, and loss as inexorable, as a tide that we cannot escape. But it’s not evil that proves tireless. It’s not grief that’s inexhaustible. They weary too. It is God who never tires, never gives up, never relents. It is God who says to the dawn, every day, “Again! Again!” We are older than God, the Ancient of Days. He is eternally young, eternally reborn, eternally now. God is limitless.

We keep getting older while He stays the same age, beyond age. We cannot outrun Him. We cannot outlast Him. We cannot escape Him. He is the tide, and the dawn, and the dogs. He will hunt us down. He will sniff us out. He will drag us into the light. And then we’ll see exactly who will harry whom.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is having much too good a time with the wrong sort of people. And the Pharisees wish to know why. I mean, really, when you’re a rabbi, when you have the ear of the respected sort of gentry, why then hang out with the rough and ready crowd? “Why?” Jesus responds to them. “Why, because it’s fun, because it’s joy.”

Imagine that you are a shepherd who’s lost but one of his 100 sheep. Would you not leave the 99 in the wilderness to go looking for the lost? And what joy there is when you find it, what joy when you thought to find sorrow! And what else can we do with our joy but to share it, express it, release it? That’s what heaven is like, He says. That’s what the Kingdom of God is like. It is joy.

Or what woman, having lost a drachma, doesn’t light a lamp and scour the house until she finds it? And when she finds it, how she must rejoice! This one I can relate to a bit more adequately than to the sheep, because I’ll often lose books somewhere in my stacks and hunt rather obsessively until I find them. And when I find them, it is release, relief, and satisfaction. This is what heaven is like, Jesus says: God is hunting the lost. And when He finds them, what joy must ripple the cosmos!

In his memoir Christianity Rediscovered, the missionary Fr Vincent Donovan recounts that a young Maasai man, a spiritual seeker, came to him in anguish, saying, “All my life I have hunted God like a lion and always He has escaped me.” And to this Fr Donovan simply responded: “God is the lion. All the time you were hunting Him, God has been hunting you.” And as soon as he bothered to stop and sit still, the Lion had got him at last.

Of course, as my wife likes to point out, this is all well and good when we’re the lost sheep, we’re the lost coin. But we get all bent out of shape when Jesus leaves us in the wilderness to go hunt someone else—especially someone whom we do not like. That’s the rough part. Loving Christ is comparatively easy. Loving your enemy: now that there, my friends, is the Cross.

But that’s rather the point of the story, isn’t it, that we shouldn’t get caught up in notions of the right and the wrong sort of people. I’m not saying that anything goes, but there is no-one on this earth whom God in Jesus does not love. It’s simple to love the ones who love us, or at least it ought to be. How much harder to be Jesus for those who do us harm. But when the lost is rescued, when the sinner saved, then there is joy in the heavens; then must there be joy in us.

You know, looking back, I wouldn’t really want to be young again, not in the way that I was. What little wisdom I have gleaned was bought at much too dear of a price. And I wouldn’t want to have to live my life all over again; I’m half-surprised that I survived the first time around. Besides, I could never give up my children, the family we have forged. Aging is worth it.

But sometimes when I’m weary, when I’m discouraged, when I’m worn and broken down, I have to remind myself to stop, to breathe, to hold still for just a minute. I have to let the lion catch me, let the hounds harry me down. And in that moment of selfless surrender, when I am both lost and am found, I once again recall my deepest strength, and draw from the well of His joy.

For the hunter is relentless. And none shall be lost at the last.

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