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Home Page
The Rector's Welcome
Worship
Sermons
Music & the Organ
Newsletter
Schedule & Events
History
Programs & Ministries
Tour the Building
Links
Map & Directions
Monthly Calendar
Home Page
The Rector's Welcome
Worship
Sermons
Music & the Organ
Newsletter
Schedule & Events
History
Programs & Ministries
Tour the Building
Links
Map & Directions
Monthly Calendar
Fr. J. D. Ousley
16 September 2007Luke 15“Lost”
In the Name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
The term, "per cent" is not found in traditional translations of the Bible. Nor is it found in the original Greek and Hebrew versions. This absence is because the concept of "percentage" is a modern one.
People today make calculations according to decimal systems because such systems are much easer to use. For example, the old system of British money, the pound sterling, was divided up into twenty shillings, with each shilling worth 12 pence; today, there are 100 pence in the British pound and making change is easy.
Yet while the word, "per cent" isn't found in the Bible, the idea is certainly there. In the second lesson today, Jesus uses the concept of one out of a hundred to illustrate a vital religious truth. Christ tells of a shepherd with a hundred sheep.
And Jesus notes if the shepherd loses one of those sheep, he will leave the other 99 and go off and search, and he will look until he finds the lost sheep. The single sheep, in itself, only represents one per cent of the shepherd's total wealth. Losing it wouldn't make a huge dent in his net worth!
Yet the shepherd will still look everywhere until he finds his missing sheep. He takes the loss personally; he wants to have the whole flock, not just the 99%.
And you can sympathize: if you had $2,000 in your bank account and your bank improperly deducted $20, you would call to protest. You wouldn't go broke if you lost that one per cent of your money. But you wouldn't let the bank take it.
Now of course Christ's concern in telling this parable isn't the preservation of capital! He is using the parable to illustrate the attitude God has toward those who reject him.
So the parable is really about those who stray away from God; it's about apostasy.
This old word refers to the act of abandoning one's faith. The term has come back into use in recent years because some Muslims believe that followers of Islam who reject their faith should be punished by death.
While we may find this attitude appalling, we Christians should remember that during dark periods in our own history, like the time of the Inquisition, apostates were also sometimes executed. In the early years of the Church of England, some of the church's most prominent bishops and theologians were beheaded or burnt at the stake because their theological views didn't agree with what the authorities at that particular moment called orthodox.
Today, thank God, we don't do that. For we recognize that to be a Christian a person must accept Christ of her own free will.
The Christian faith can only be chosen; it can't be imposed. Punishment for leaving the faith doesn't make sense: a person can't be forced to follow Christ.
And Christ's parable suggests a more humane and hopeful way to treat apostasy. Instead of condemning people who leave the church as traitors, Jesus encourages us to see apostates from God's point of view.
For God doesn't condemn those who have rejected religion. Rather, God seeks out his sheep so that he can restore them to the community of his Kingdom.
Notice, then, that the parable forces us to look at God in a radically different way. People often talk about "searching for God" — about seeking spiritual truths, even about discovering that God exists. But the parable suggests that instead of finding God, we need to be found by him.
It may happen, for example, that some people aren't able to"get religion" — even if they read lots of spiritual books or they attend different services of worship.
Instead, they find the faith they seek only when they stop doing these things. When they stop searching on their own and listen to the Spirit, when they let God guide their worried minds "in spirit and in truth."
The parable also suggests that another way to be "found" by God is to have a connection with God's "flock." Spiritual adventurers who go off on their own tend to get lost!
Those who conduct their spiritual experimentation within the context of a church community have an advantage: they have tradition and Scripture and fellow seekers to accompany them as they find their spiritual way.
Now I admit that this remark sounds self-serving; it's hardly surprising that an employee of the church would say that the church is needed! And this attitude is self-serving if we are seeking church members just to perpetuate our institution.
But we're not being selfish if we recognize that we all need to be part of something larger than our individual selves.
And this, I think, is the way we should approach the whole notion of being spiritually "lost." People can be lost without appearing to be lost. For that matter, they can be lost without knowing it themselves.
Many men and women, for example, get lost in their work. They may even joke that beyond their jobs, they need to "get a life."
But that joke betrays a serious problem. These dedicated workers have strayed away from friends and activities that they admit should be part of the process of "getting a life." It's no coincidence that the main reason people give for not participating more in the church is that they are "too busy." And they would admit that they need to be connected to something larger than their individual selves.
Now before I complete this train of thought, I want to make a comment about a way in which Christ's parable speaks to us in the Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion. The symbolic leader of those of us in the world who are Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is going to meet this week with the bishops of the Episcopal Church. They will be discussing issues such as sexual morality that divide our national church from much of the rest of the Anglican Communion.
I don't want to bring up these specific issues now; we have already considered them at great length over several years of discussions in our parish.
But it is impossible to mention the word, "apostasy" without noting that this is the charge traditionalist Anglican bishops direct against their American colleagues. They believe that our church has left the Christian faith.
Again, I don't want to defend our church right now, though I think openness to new ideas should be as much an Anglican "tradition" as good choral music!
Leaving aside the question of who is right in these disputes, we might ask: do these disagreements really constitute apostasy? Do we have so little common ground that our group of Anglicans is "lost" to our brothers and sisters in Africa and Latin America and Asia?
We all need to be part of something larger than ourselves. Extremists on both sides might do well to remember this; instead of saying things that get them quoted on CNN, these extremists might save the word "apostasy" for obviously unchristian behavior. And they might also recall that God doesn't want even one percent of his people in any way to be "lost."
In fact, to return to the personal faith we have been given: one major reason each of us needs to be connected with the larger "flock" of the church is so that others can help us share the burden of belief. We need not worry that we have everything right in what we believe or what we do because we can trust God in the fullness of time to bring the whole church to faith.
The old hymn, "Amazing Grace" is now sung or played at all sorts of occasions, including funerals and memorial services that aren't explicitly Christian. Yet, as we know, the hymn was written by John Henry Newton who had come to faith in Christ after living the profoundly unreligious life of a slave-trader.
Why do so many people want to hear this Christian song, often played in the dirgelike sound of bagpipes? Not I suspect because the mourners are thinking of the opening words, "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me" — for they are not remembering the deceased as wretches.
Nor do mourners seem moved to choose this hymn by its reference to the word, "grace" — for few secular people will think when they hear that word of the complicated Christian doctrine of justification by faith — the belief that we are saved not by our "works" but by our relationship with God.
On second thought, however: maybe the words are important. Perhaps, at some barely-conscious level, that is why people are choosing this hymn.
For the doctrine of justification by faith holds that we are brought to God not by what we do but by what God does.
Which is another way of saying, perhaps, that we don't usually discover religion through our own efforts — like we search for the best cup of espresso or the most comfortable pair of shoes. Instead, perhaps we need to stop, and recognize that there are some ways in which we don't have everything together. That we are, if we are completely honest with ourselves, a bit "lost," and that we will only find the way we are searching for when we are found by God.
It is with these thoughts that we who are members of Incarnation can approach next Sunday and the rest of the fall season. We can regard newcomers and an occasional returning "old-timer" not as potential church members but as people whom God is seeking, as people whom God is trying to make into happier and better persons.
People who are in some way lost and who need to find their way and be found by the Spirit. People, in other words. like us!
And now unto that same God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be ascribed as is most justly due all might, majesty, power, dominion and praise, now and forever, Amen.