Luke 15:1-10
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
So he 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.”
Today is September 11th. On the Sunday following the original September 11th, this was the Gospel. I think on that day, more than any other day, EVERYONE in our nation knew what it felt like to be that lost sheep, separated from everything familiar… everyone in our country knew the loneliness of the coin that had rolled off and now rested in some dark crevasse. On that Sunday after 9-11, I think our country, for that one brief moment, understood the beginning of this parable more clearly and more personally than they ever had before. We were all lost. We all knew it.
I would have liked for us as a nation back then to have had the courage to sit in that lost darkness a bit longer. To not just react and lash out in fear. I would have liked us as a nation to have sat still long enough to experience the truth, that finding the “lost” is THE specialty of the Good Shepherd… the expertise of our Divine Homemaker. It is, after all, precisely the lost whom God comes to find, the broken that God comes to heal, the last whom God makes first, the weakest that are made strong and the dead that God raises up to new life.
Instead we insisted we’d make our own way back to the flock... that we could roll ourselves back to the purse, that we would work out our own salvation. We tried to do that for more than two whole decades and we found out, at an unfathomable cost, that no nation… no one… can work out their own salvation. As a nation we were not ready to learn what this parable has to teach us.
So what does this parable have to teach? First it wants us to know that no matter how it is we manage to get lost in this life, the fields are searched and the floors are swept and in Christ’s life, death and resurrection each and every one of us is ALWAYS found! Each and every one of us and every molecule of creation are lifted onto the Good Shepherd’s shoulders and fed with the bread of life… each and every one of us and every molecule of creation are swept up to drink from the cup of salvation. On one side of that coin from this parable, it teaches us that we are all broken and lost in some way or another, but that in Christ, God finds us all!
On the other side of this parable’s coin, we’re also taught that together WE are the Body of Christ. Individually we ARE the broken, the lost, the last, AND… TOGETHER we are the Body of Christ, called and sent into the world to seek out and lift up those folks who have wondered off with their heads down, eating one tuft of grass after another until they suddenly don’t have any idea where they are any more. Together WE ARE the Body of Christ, called and sent into the world to sweep up those who have been thrown away into dark corners… lift up those who have rolled out of sight, and return those who have fallen through the cracks back to the life they were created to live. It is one of the mysteries of faith. Individually we can only be lost. Together we are nothing less than the Body of Christ.
In 2001 the nation was not able to see over the rubble and through the smoke and the pain and fear to recognize in all that death, the opportunity for resurrection that had been offered to us on the other side. It was an opportunity for us to be transformed in those days, months, and years following 9-11. Transformed together… to reset our national DNA and see ourselves in a new way… with honesty, humility, repentance, and empathy… to be turned over as a nation from a group of fear filled and lost individuals on the one side, into a nation that came together and acted like the Body of Christ together like the other.
This parable on that first Sunday after 9-11 didn’t work that way and perhaps that’s not how this parable was meant to work at all… for everyone… all at once. Perhaps this parable… maybe all parables… are meant to be told over and over and over again so that they are always there being told when we are finally in a place to hear them fully and embody them deeply. Maybe parables are meant to transform the world like a river carving out a canyon and not all at once in a single day.
I don’t really know to be honest, but maybe that’s how parables work and maybe, just maybe, one or two of us are ready to hear this parable today like we’ve never heard it before. To finally give up trying to roll ourselves back to the purse and just sit still, knowing that the fields are searched and the floors are swept and we are all found. Then, finally seeing we have been found, perhaps we will flip the coin over and live more deeply from this day forward into our place in the Body of Christ. Amen.
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