The Church of the Ascension
September 16, 2007
Proper 19

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

The shepherd says, “Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.” 

A couple of weeks ago I saw an Off Broadway play entitled. “Gone Missing.”   It is a delightful wry musical about losing things. I know something about that – losing things.  My keys come to mind.  And my wallet also.  Not to mention papers and other assorted life paraphernalia, the searching for which takes up an extraordinary amount of my time.  There is a great vat in the rectory – and not a simple vat but one that actively attracts items that I put down, sucking them into crevices and hiding places.  Sometimes items are lost for days; and the older I get, the problem, of course, gets worse – as so many things do.  In the musical the characters sing clever ditties about these calamities; my reaction is …ah…less musical. 

There is to the play a more serious side too, a longing that is generated by simple lost things.  A misplaced small piece of jewelry, not valuable in itself or a lost stuffed animal, losses which result in a void that signifies more than the object itself.  Who of us does not know the sheer unbearable panic that comes when we have suddenly misplaced a child?  On the occasions when Brian disappeared from sight when he was a little boy, time was suspended and breathing wasn’t really possible until he was found again.  The relief was so great that the impulse to kill him for wandering off generally was held a bay – save for the occasional near suffocating that came from hugging him so tightly.

The shepherd says, “Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.”

Jesus suggests in his story today – a story told to the uptight religious folks with whom he sadly was dining - that when we are found, God experiences the kind of joy and relief generated when the most precious thing we can imagine which was lost is found again.  The comment that prompted this story from Jesus was one frequently made about him: “This fellow welcomes sinner and eats with them.”  The Pharisees just couldn’t get over that fact.  Not only was Jesus friendly to sinners; he ate with them breaking every known holiness code in the world!  The Pharisees remarked about it again and again.  And each time they did, Jesus said to them in a variety of ways, “Can’t you get it: I have come to bring good news not primarily to the people on the inside like you but to all the folks out there – the outcasts, the poor, the hungry, the weak, the lost.  The ninety-nine sheep safe and secure in the fold are loved, but the one who needs me is the one wandering about alone and unprotected.”

Bless their hearts.  Religious people, like the Pharisees, were often so afraid that their righteousness would not be quite enough to qualify them that they constantly bolstered their goodness by being scandalized by someone else’s sinfulness.  Sadly that is a phenomenon not limited to the first century.  Sometimes for us too to feel holy, we need to observe, silently or not, the sin of another.  We do it sometimes almost unconsciously, but we do it, whispering to ourselves,  “Lord, I know I am falling short of what you want, but at least I am in church, at least I give this much, at least I don’t do that…”  And on it goes.  Some of those moments are the times when we are most lost. 

In the play, “Gone Missing,” the emphasis is upon the object that has been lost.  I confessed to knowing a great deal about that process.  I also, though, know a lot about what it feels like to be lost.  Sometimes like the Pharisees, my self-righteousness makes me lose the way; sometimes other things separate me from the fold.  Wandering about wondering what the next step ought to be; wrestling with questions and fears about money or relationships; fighting generalized feelings of sadness or lack of purpose – these are ways of being lost, ways that separate us from the core of who we are and who God wants us to be.  It is a terrible feeling to be lost; it feels alone no matter how many folks are around.

Sometimes I am lost because of my hardheadedness.  In this story Jesus does not shy away from the fact that sin – choosing darkness over light, choosing to follow our way rather than God’s way – results in our being lost.  In the Old Testament lesson today, the Lord says to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are.”  Sometimes we are – stiff-necked; we refuse to live according to God’s commandments for us.  We are stubborn and recalcitrant, unwilling to let go of our needs to be right or first or indulged with this or that.  And Jesus acknowledges that such “sins” separate us as the “lost” sheep.   In the sentimentality of this beautiful story, that needs not to be missed.  Jesus does not deny the presence of sin in the world, and it is a serious thing because it separates us from God.

But….the Good News of the gospel is that repentance is always a possibility for us.  No sheep – nor one of us - can get far enough way, can be bad enough, stiff-necked or rotten enough to be out of the sight and providence of God.  People can go too far for us.  We say, “That’s it; I am done; enough is enough.  She/he is out of my life.”  God never says that.  God says, “There is that hard-headed Buddy still wandering about out there, but I can wait – because deep inside I know he wants to be here in this fold with me.  He will come around.”  Isn’t it wonderful that God is God, and we are not?  God never gives up; God sees goodness in us when no one else can; God never limits the number of chances to be found; God never closes the gates to home: it is always open.                                          

And the response to our repenting, Jesus claimed, is not a sigh of relief or a worn-out, “well, it’s about time.”  No, in the extravagant generosity of God’s goodness, Jesus says, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”   

The shepherd says, “Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.” 

In a minute we are going to baptize a little baby girl.  In that liturgical act, we are initiating her into the church, into the institution of the church, making some promises – all of us are – about how she will be brought up, about the values that we will inculcate in her.  And all of that is good.  But above all we are claiming for her that she is a child of God and that she will never be beyond the reach of God’s love.  “Sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” – she will be.  As surely as day follows night, she will wander in and out of the fold – we all do after all; but she will be marked as Christ’s own; and when she is lost, she will be found again – and there will be much rejoicing.

The shepherd says, “Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.”