"Very Real Questions"
September 16, 2007: 16th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org
Scripture:
Luke 15:1-10
May God take these words
and make from them a holy word for us today.
Now all the tax collectors
and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees
and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them." So Jesus told them this parable: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them,
does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one
that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays
it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home,
he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice
with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just
so, 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. Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them,
does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she
finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends
and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin
that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy in
the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
Friends, God is still
speaking to the world. May our hearts be open to hear and respond. Amen.
Sermon:
Now all the tax collectors
and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and
the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them." So Jesus told them this parable: "Which one
of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave
the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he
finds it?"
And after he said these things,
a silence fell on the gathered crowd, until someone at the back spoke
up and spake thus unto the Lord, "What, are you completely
insane?" At which point the crowd broke into riotous, jeering laughter
at the Lord's expense. The heckler, a rough fellow, who looked like
he might be pretty well acquainted with sheep, continued:
"You say, 'Who does not
leave the 99 to go after the one that is lost." Who does?
I'll tell you: Nobody. Nobody does that, because it's stupid.
Any shepherd who did do that would be fired on the spot. It makes
no sense, to leave the 99 sheep—not at home, not locked in their pen,
safe and sound, but out in the wilderness—to go look for one lost
sheep. And you know why? Because sheep are stupid and willful—everybody
knows that!—and by the time you got that one little lost lamb home
again, you'd have 99 others to go chase down. It's a simple matter
of economics: one sheep in the hand isn't ever going to be worth 99
in the bush."
To which Our Lord responded,
"Well, um, okay. Then how about this: What woman having 10 silver
coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house,
and search carefully until she finds it? And when she's found it..."
"When she's wasted the
entire day, you mean," came a woman's voice from the edge of the
crowd. "When she's wasted the entire day down on her knees looking
for a single coin instead of hauling water and wood and going to the
market and spinning and weaving and tending to her children and baking
bread for the daily meal so her family won't go hungry, then she throws
a party? Oh, I see, of course, how perfectly sensible...! Get
on with you, now, preacher. Go sell crazy someplace else. We're all
stocked up here."
And with that, the spell was
broken, and the crowd began to disperse, each one wandering back into
their daily routine, leaving Jesus standing alone in the middle of the
dusty square. But not quite alone, as here and there, from the shadows
and the alleyways, a few weak knees and racing hearts dared shuffle
forward a single step, into the sun, toward Jesus. To them, our Lord
said, "Just so, I tell you—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. So, once upon a time, there was a man
who had two sons..."
Friends, these are some of
the best known images in the Gospels: God as the good shepherd, seeking
that one lost sheep, a woman looking for her lost coin, and in the verses
that follow, a father who scans the horizon for the return of his lost
son. These were the illustrations in our children's Bibles, the posters
on the walls of our child hood Sunday school rooms, if we had them,
the subjects of our hymns in children's church, if we sang them. But
even so, we shouldn't take them for granted, for as with so many things
that seemed simple in childhood, there's more to these parables than
meets the eye. Which means, despite their well-worn familiarity, we
probably ought to be paying more attention to these passages now, as
adults, not less. To let them go unexamined is to persist in a child's
naïve understanding of these challenging images of the nature of God
and God's activity in the world. In other words, when we read the
Bible, and in particular the Gospels and those passages we think we
know best, we would do well to stop thinking like Christians for a minute
and think like real people instead.
Real people know that
the strategy Jesus presents here as representative of God's way in
the world is utter foolishness. Jesus' audience would have been right
to heckle him. After all, no shepherd in his right mind leaves 99 sheep
unattended in the wilderness, at the mercy of lions and tigers and bears,
oh my, not to mention their own dimwitted tendency to wander off. No
shepherd in his right mind loves any one sheep that much, to risk losing
the entire flock—or should! It just doesn't make sense. And no God
in his right mind would suffer comparison to a lowly shepherd—rootless,
shiftless, smelly, trusted so little by the population at large that
their testimony wasn't even admissible in court. This is God?
I mean, a woman, a housewife, searching the sofa cushions for
loose change while supper burns on the stove? And, a messiah who
dies? Don't make me laugh!
Now, you don't run your life
that way, and neither do I. And, I'm sorry, but to think that God
runs the world this way, that "there is more joy in heaven over one
sinner who repents than over 99 righteous," that God would risk losing
everything to save one lost soul—that's not just foolish, it's
inefficient, it's patently unfair. And a messiah who dies? It's...
it's offensive, offensive both to our common sense and to our sense
of right and wrong.
Just what sort of God is it
we're worshiping here, folks? Because there's no getting around
it: the God to whom Jesus testified in parables like these, whose ways
Jesus embodied, the same God in whom we say we believe, as those gathered
now in Jesus' name, the God who is quite literally dying to save the
world—that God makes absolutely no sense according to the ways
of the world, which are our
ways the other 167 hours a week, once we've taken off our name tags
and headed home to our real lives, where we've got real problems
in need of real answers. As we explain to our own children, somewhere
in between Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, "Grace is a nice idea
dear, but it's hardly practical, now is it?
Let's face it: If people thought we really believed this stuff, they'd
put us away, and most day, if we
thought we believed it, we'd help them.
And yet, we must be at least
a little crazy, because we keep coming back for more. We keep showing
up here Sunday after Sunday, not just for the music and the coffee and
the fellowship of like minds, but, because, on some level, we are just
foolish enough to want to believe all this. We want to believe that
God, the God of the universe, might actually care for more than just
the favored few. We want to believe, if only for an hour, that God might
be looking for us, too, even us, to rescue us from the pitfalls into
which we have fallen, from lives of ruthless practicality and calculated
care, and carry us home rejoicing. And against every evidence in a world
where the invitations generally go out only to the privileged and powerful,
in our madness we dare to dream that God invites us—all 100 of us,
the whole wide world—to the party.
Of course, the alternative
is that it's not we who are crazy, but God. Seriously. I'll let
that sink in, because I'm not trying to be flip or funny. I mean it.
Perhaps God is so out of touch with reality, with the way the world
actually works, day in, day out, that all this rigmarole really is the
best God can do. Think about it: a psychotic shepherd, a housewife with
obsessive-compulsive tendencies, the king of kings dying on a cross
like a common criminal. Hardly seem the best efforts of a rational mind,
do they? Or any mind at all. Perhaps, as even some of our well-intentioned
friends have suggested, we're just deluding ourselves, sitting here
singing our hymns and praying our prayers, while there's really only
bats in the belfry. Maybe we'd all be better off facing our lot in
life, no matter how nasty, or brutish, or short, instead of rehashing
the 2000 year-old dreams of a mad God looking for hope, I don't know.
Maybe we're wrong.
I must confess, though, that at the end of the day, I don't care. I prefer the dreamworld. Back in the 18th Century, Samuel Hopkins, one of our Congregational forebears, made the bold claim that he was willing to be damned for the glory of God. Well, I say: If loving God and my neighbor and myself is wrong, I don't want to be right.
I am willing for people to
think I'm crazy. In fact, I am willing to be committed for the dream
because I am committed to the dream, because even though it may
not yet be real—all the way real, anyway—this dream of a faith at
once graceful and challenging, powerful and vulnerable, is still way
better than anything the world's got going on now.
And you know, that's what
it means to be church, really: To be willing to be committed to—and
for—God's vision, crazy as it may seem; to be willing to dream along
with God that another world is possible, one where the lowly will be
lifted up and the hungry filled with good things; where we will come
to understand that it really is love that makes a family; where trees
will no longer bear the strange fruit of racism and hate; where corporate
leaders will value the welfare of their workers at least as much as
their bottom line and their bonuses; where nations will seek security
in a broader commonwealth rather than in walls and bombs; where truly,
no child will be left behind; where violence will not always be our
first thought rather than our last resort; and where one day, one day
soon, dear God, this war will end and peace—true peace—will reign.
So, friends, if God should
come calling someday and ask you "Which one of you, having all the
respect and privilege and power the world may bestow, yet hoping for
just one glimpse of true justice, true peace, true love, will not leave
everything to pursue that dream?" how will you answer? Will you embrace
the madness? Will you eat with the tax collectors and the sinners? Will
you be seen with the prostitutes and lepers? For I have it on good authority
that there will be more joy in heaven over the crazy, graceful love
of one believer, and more joy on earth as a result, than for all the
purely rational, perfectly commonsensical, imminently practical people
in the world.