Readings
Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10
You know, during his earthly life, Jesus didn’t always have the best reputation. You see he hung out with all the wrong kind of people and to make matters worse he would party with them. As I have said before, he was accused by the religious elite of being a glutton and an alcoholic. So it is no surprise that this morning’s lesson begins with some pharisees grumbling that Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them.
But Jesus, overhearing their complaints, responds with 2 parables. While some of us may think of the first as the parable of the good shepherd, it is in fact called the parable of the lost sheep and the second the parable of the lost coin.
In the first parable, Jesus asks the question “which of you having a hundred
sheep and losing one of them wouldn’t leave the 99 behind and go after the lost one until he finds it.” He says that as if it is an obvious truth and we don’t hear anyone contradicting him. Why, because both he and those who were listening know how sheep function. When in a flock, as a rule, sheep stay together and do not roam. In other words, they are good at behaving themselves in ways that a shepherd would want. That leaves the shepherd free to go and look for the one that has gotten separated from the flock.
In the second parable, Jesus asks the question “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?” Again, no one is shocked or argumentative about this statement. Why? Because a silver coin would have been roughly the equivalent of an entire day’s wages. 10 silver coins would have likely been the entire family savings.
In both cases the result of finding whatever they are looking for is that there is a gathering of friends and family and a celebration that what was lost is found. And in both stories Jesus is making the same point. Namely that God rejoices in the sinner who repents more than in those who are in no need of repentance.
Now, I don’t know about you, but for much of my life I always felt a little uncomfortable with this lesson. You see there hasn’t been a time in my life when I haven’t been an active member of the Church. And while, like many of us, I have had my issues with not always making the best choices, except for in the salad days of my young adult life, there hasn’t been a time when I didn’t consciously try to live a moral life. In short, for much of my life I have thought of myself as a faithful person. And that would put me in the category of the 99 righteous persons Jesus mentioned. Why wouldn’t God be just as happy for all of my hard work and the choices I’ve made as he is for the person who has spent the bulk of their life messed up and then finally woken up to what God wants of us? I mean I ask you?
Well, I don’t know how else to put this, but the real mess up was me in my thinking. My presumption, much like the pharisees, was that there was a circle that marked who is in and who is out. That faithful, or perhaps righteous, people were the ones who are in the circle of acceptability and everyone else is on the outside. The problem with that is it creates a sense of superiority. Even if it is not conscious, we presume to be better than others all the while ignoring all the ways in which we fall short of being what God has made us to be.
This is why Jesus told those who were about to stone the woman caught in adultery “let those who are without sin cast the first stone.” Again and again Jesus calls us to recognize our own brokenness rather than the brokenness of others. You see sin, ultimately is something far more subtle than simply abrogating our limited understanding of God’s will. Sin is the inherent brokenness that exists in all of us. It is the struggle that each of us has to be the authentic being God has made us to be. It is our inability to be consistently compassionate and to set aside the needs of our ego. It is our unwillingness to accept that the nature of God’s creation is one of abundance rather than scarcity, as well as our indifference to the suffering and impoverishment of others.
You see, the real truth about the parables we hear today is that they are not about someone else. We are not called to be the shepherd or the woman. We are being called to recognize that we are the lost sheep, we are the lost coin.
The good news of today’s Gospel is that God is perpetually looking for us and ready to rejoice at our being found. We are being told nothing less than the fact that it is impossible to be permanently lost and it is impossible for there to be a limit to God’s seeking of us.
You see, repentance is not a one-off event. Repentance is a process that we enter into again and again throughout our life. The word for repentance in Greek is metanoia, which literally means “a change of mind.” But it means so much more than that, although changing the way we think is an important first step. To repent is to change course, to take a new path different than the one that reflects the brokenness in our life.
When that happens, the results are always the same … transformation. We become changed people when we repent. And in that transformation the truth of God becomes all the more evident to us. In short, we are found.
Through the simple act of turning from brokenness to a new way of living, our lives are imbued with a love from God. But not any kind of romantic notion of love. The love we receive in such a finding isn’t simply a warm fuzzy feeling. When we encounter the love of God in this way we become more compassionate, more able to show empathy, more concerned with the well-being of others and the world in which we live. We become nothing less than agents of transformation in the lives of others.
Jesus is calling us to move from the broken thinking of the pharisees to the pattern of his own life. He is calling us on a path of repentance not simply so that we might find God’s forgiveness, but so that in our finding we might know the transformative love of God. That we might step into his Kingdom which is always within our grasp. That we might be agents of his transformation. That we might be found and know his love