Ben's Sermon from Sept. 16th - Lost Sheep

I wonder if any of you is feeling a little lost at the moment? Lost in a new town? A new university? Lost among a new group of people? Among new church congregation? For those of you who’re already part of this congregation, perhaps you’re feeling lost because of the new service leaflet or new singing of the Lord’s Prayer?

Any one of you, whether new this year or returning, might be feeling like you have left the herd that sustained you over the summer, and now you are on your own. We often hear that sheep tend not to go it alone, yet to begin new school year that is exactly what you’ve had to do. You are on your own.

But the reassuring message of today’s gospel is that, wherever you wander, Jesus has got you. Whenever you are feeling like a lost sheep, Jesus “lays [you] on his shoulders and rejoices” to bring you home.

Today’s reading from Luke is one of two versions of the parable of the lost sheep in the gospels. You might not know it, but the story also appears in Matthew with a slightly different message. This is nice because it allows me to say something about the way we Episcopalians, we members of the Anglican Communion, interpret the Bible. Anglicans have a long history of being literary-types; we are maybe a bit artsy-fartsy for some tastes, but we believe in a breadth of interpretation. We are the sorts who believe that Jesus’s words are so magnificent, that there can’t just be one interpretation to each passage of scripture.

The parable of the lost sheep is proof of what I say, because Matthew and Luke interpret Jesus’s story in slightly different ways. The gospel writers use the story of the one sheep out of ninety-nine that is lost and put their own spin on it. Is it about being lost to sin, or about being lost in the world? Is it about God saving us from sin in the person of Jesus, or is it about Jesus promising that God holds on to us so that we never will be lost?

Luke thinks it is a parable about sinners and so he sets the story in the context of the Pharisees challenging Jesus. The Pharisees are saying: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Lk 15:1). So why does Jesus hang out with sinners? Luke uses the parable to explain. Luke seems to be presenting Jesus as a shepherd trying to find the sinners of this world, so as to make them aware that God loves them. Jesus ends the story with these words: when the lost sheep is found, the shepherd comes home, “And… he calls together his friends, 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” – just as Jesus the Son and God the Father rejoice together when one who is lost responds to their call, responds to their offer of grace.

The message seems to be that God finds you in your sin and God is active in you when you repent. That is what Augustine takes the parable to mean in his Confessions, the famous meditation in which the famous saint tells the story of his life. Even when you think you’ve gone astray, says Augustine, God is there guiding you back. You can’t get lost from God. This is what Augustine calls grace.

Augustine tells the story of his own time at college. Instead of going it alone, he got in with the wrong crowd – a group that picked on lonely freshmen. He writes: “I was far quieter than the other students, and had nothing whatever to do with the vandalism which used to be carried out by the Wreckers. This sinister and diabolical self-designation was a kind of mark of their urbane sophistication. I lived among them shamelessly ashamed of not being one of the gang. I kept company with them and sometimes delighted in their friendship, though I always held their actions in abhorrence. The Wreckers used wantonly to persecute shy and unknown freshmen. Their aim was to persecute them by mockery and so to feed their malevolent amusement.” Sound like any group you know?

Augustine says that it doesn’t help if, when you are feeling lost and lonely, you get in with the wrong crowd. It doesn’t help, but even there God is with you. Even as you commit sins against others, God is trying to bring you round through grace. When Augustine thought he was going away from God, as a young boy, as a student and then as a rich lawyer, he came to realize that God was still holding on to him throughout.

Matthew has a different take on this same parable: for him the lost sheep is an example not of a sinner but of a child of God, among whom we can count ourselves. God is the shepherd in this version and God looking out for you. Matthew introduces the parable with Jesus saying of the children of God: “Take care you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?... So it is not the will of your Father that one of these little ones should be lost.” (Mt 18:10-14)

Although the focus is no longer on sin, the message is still that God is never far away from you. Even if the world rejects you, or your peers reject you, or your sweetheart does, or your family, God will not. So which interpretation do you like best?

Both interpretations say something that Episcopalians and Anglicans think is particularly important to say about God. It is distinctively Anglican to focus on the incarnation, on God’s coming to us in Jesus, so that we might be found. In line with Luke’s version, we believe God has overcome sin in Jesus. In line with Matthew’s version, God has come into the world in human flesh so as to lift human flesh up to God. Sin overcome and humanity lifted to God: that has results for us too. As sheep who have been found, in Jesus we are given the opportunity to be transformed.

The meaning of the incarnation, and of this parable, is humanity’s transformation. Think of what Paul wrote in our reading from the first letter to Timothy: “I am grateful to Jesus Christ our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” (I Tim 1:12). Paul has been found. Like Paul, the Christian is no longer “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a [person] of violence” but is transformed by Christ “to [do] his service.” We are those who have been called to join a new herd. If we feel like we are lost, then look around you and recognize in one another that we are being transformed in God’s service.