The Rev. Austin K. Rios
11th September 2022: Proper 19
Chapter 15 of Luke’s Gospel is an extended meditation on the heart of Jesus’ mission.
Jesus’ movement continues to grow and gather steam, and the Pharisees and the scribes get upset that among those who are listening to Jesus are those who were reviled by “respectable” members of society.
Tax collectors were in league with the occupying forces of Rome and were known to use their position to extort further money from their own families, friends, and neighbors.
Prostitutes may have serviced some of those same leaders and power brokers who complained about them, but were publicly despised for their work and deemed sinful because of it.
It was shocking for the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus didn’t shoo these sinners away from his public preaching, and extra concerning that he associated with them beyond those public appearances too.
But as we learn throughout the Gospel, where our narrow and sometimes callous hearts and minds see important social distinctions, Jesus instead sees equal members of the family of God.
All humanity has suffered under the spell of sin—the call of Christ is that we recognize this shared state, receive the grace and mercy of God in love, and then spend our liberated lives helping others wake up to the greater reality we share in God.
We humans get lost in so many ways.
We lose the innocence and possibility of childhood and exchange it for the respectability of adulthood.
We confuse sinful actions and behaviors for virtue and get trapped in patterns of being that dehumanize others and ourselves.
But perhaps most dangerous of all, we wrap ourselves in the rhetoric and regalia of faith but leave the loving heart of God behind and make ourselves the ultimate arbiters of divine judgement and justice.
When Jesus tells these two parables about finding a lost sheep and a lost coin, he is inviting both the sinners that everyone sees—the prostitutes and tax collectors—and the sinners that may yet be blind to their sin to wake up to what God is really doing among them.
God looks for the lost, finds them, and then rejoices over their return to the flock and domestic treasury.
Just like a shepherd rejoices over one found sheep, and a woman rejoices over a once lost coin that she worked hard to locate.
Jesus is using familiar examples to say that God, even though thankful for and caring for the 99 sheep or the nine other silver coins, feels the loss of the one too, and will stop at nothing to restore them.
A relentless God of love and restoration who comes for us all and finds us, no matter how far we have strayed or how much work it takes to sweep away the dust that keeps us hidden…this is NOTHING BUT GOOD NEWS!
And it should be cause for the greatest rejoicing.
Unfortunately, the equalizing nature of God’s love and searching is something the scribes and Pharisees don’t appreciate.
And yet, even though they resist this good news, God must draw them into this new community as well.
Right after these two examples of finding the lost and rejoicing, Jesus tells one of his most famous parables—the one we refer to as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Following on the heels of these examples, it becomes clearer that the Father loves both his sons—the one who squandered his property in dissolute living and the one who stayed and worked the estate but couldn’t rejoice at his brother’s return.
The Father in that famous parable goes out searching for both his sons, meeting the prodigal on the road and the older brother in the field, and invites them both to share in the celebration feast of wine and the fatted calf.
They have to choose to do so though, and part of the genius of the parable is that we don’t know if they do or don’t.
Jesus’ invitation is for scribe and sinner alike, but a distinguishing part of the way of love is that no one can coerce you to rejoice.
It is our choice whether we will see the lost sheep and the lost coin as part of ourselves—part of the whole to which we all belong.
And the more we choose to see the world through these lenses—the more our vision and decisions begin to resemble Jesus’ own—then the greater our capacity for rejoicing over the lost and the restored.
Once that rejoicing is reactivated in our spiritual DNA, then we also begin to see ourselves not only in the lost sheep and coin that was found and rejoiced over, but also as the shepherds and seekers who dedicate our lives to searching for the lost, with God’s help.
We are easing into a new program year at St. Paul’s, and I can think of nothing more important for us as a community called together in Christ’s name than to live into the heart of this parable.
To recognize that the Lord of life has searched for us and found us, and to rejoice over our restoration to the family of God.
To invite all who wish to hear the good news, and to do all we can through our worship, programs, and witness to allow its promises to be manifested among us and through us.
To see our growth and maturity in the servant’s way of Christ as a call to become shepherds and seekers too—eager to find and restore what has been lost and to rejoice together.
Take heart this week, dear people of God.
The persistent love of God will stop at nothing to find you, no matter how lost you may be or feel.
This church of St. Paul’s, with your participation and help, will continue to “bear witness in Rome to a dynamic and living faith, welcoming all and rejecting none.”
And when each of us becomes an active shepherd and seeker in the model of Jesus Christ, then the long-standing barriers between peoples will begin to come down, the lost and the found will be reconnected in God, and we will have but one response left to us in the face of so much love and grace.
The choice to rejoice.