Welcome Home!
09/12/04

a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Luke 15:1-10
I Timothy 1:12-17  

Welcome Home!  A sermon title that I hope you feel is fitting at the end of summer and the resumption of our “ordinary” lives.  The lives that include school and work and the end of visitors and vacations.  Lives that have a more familiar rhythm, a specified time to wake up and time to go to bed, shorter days and longer nights, easing into the cool crispness of autumn with Thanksgiving and Christmas just around the corner.  Welcome home, too, to the big celebration of our beloved church’s 175^th year and all the events and festivity surrounding the important weekend of September 24^th, 25^th, and 26^th coming up so soon.  Welcome home to the smiles of old friends and new ones, traditional activities such as the Sunday School Kick-Off BarBQ we had last Friday or the upcoming Harvest Dinner in October.  Welcome home to the seats that you know are yours, to the comfortable feeling of being where you belong, in the right place and the right time.

Welcome home!  I rejoice to have you with me, to have all of us together, to be here, now, in worship and praise of our God, the Creator of the Universe and of each and every one of us here in this sanctuary.  What a joy and a privilege it is to look out and see you all and to count you among my flock.  I have just a tiny inkling of what Jesus was talking about in the parables we heard read today.

Jesus starts by telling the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep, but let’s go back one verse and see what motivates him.  He is preaching, he is teaching, he is charismatic and puzzling and exciting and radical and new.  People, who’ve been afraid to get near the rabbis who come through their towns and preach because they know they will be judged and found wanting, begin to edge their way through the crowd and come closer.  The tax collectors, the prostitutes, the poor, the lame, the unfit, the unworthy, the sinners are sneaking forward, drawing near, trying to get close enough to hear what this man has to say.  He doesn’t seem to condemn them, but to suggest the kingdom of God is open to them all.  They want to know more and Jesus is willing to teach them.

The Pharisees and the scribes, the ones who follow the law to the letter, who show up at synagogue and who pray when they are supposed to and who tithe their ten percent and who sacrifice according to the law and observe the Ten Commandments and live a righteous life and teach others about the law that they might follow it, too, are not happy.  They see these people, these less-than, these unclean, these, these, these sinners coming close to Jesus and they’re mad!  Why is he letting the sinners get close to him and not paying attention to them?  They who do everything right and obey the rules and do their best!  What’s the deal here?

They begin murmuring amongst themselves – wouldn’t you?  If Jesus came to Huntington Station and started talking to the homeless Latino guy on the street instead of paying attention to you, who’ve been faithful all your life?  They begin murmuring to themselves, saying, “Who does this guy think he is?  Look at what he’s doing – he’s hanging out with sinners!  Talking to them and having coffee with them and inviting them to spend time with him and sharing meals with him!  This is just wrong!”

It is in response to this, that Jesus tells the parables that we heard today: the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep, the woman and the lost coin.  Let’s take them one at a time.  First the story where God is the shepherd, who leaves the sheep who’ve stuck together, to hunt endlessly for his lost sheep and when he finds it, lays it over his shoulders and returns home, rejoicing.

We are familiar with the idea of God as shepherd – even in Jesus ’ time, it is centuries old.  We all know the opening to the 23^rd Psalm:  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” and often to cling to that ancient imagery in times of sorrow or trouble.  What you might not know is that by the time of Jesus , shepherds no longer had a positive reputation and in the New Testament, the image of God as shepherd is totally absent – except in Jesus ’ parables.  By Jesus’ day, shepherding was listed among the despised trades by rabbis, along with camel drivers, sailors, gamblers with dice, tanners because they worked with dead animals, dyers because they worked with urine to make cloth colorfast and tax collectors.  So when Jesus began a parable in response to the Pharisees complaint that he accepts tax collectors and sinners, it is almost a double whammy that he uses a story casting God in the role of shepherd.  Not only does God hang out with sinners, God identifies with sinners!  It doesn’t get much more radical than this.  It’s like instead of Jesus talking with the homeless Latino man in Huntington Station, Jesus being the homeless Latino man in Huntington Station .

The Pharisees must not have liked this one bit.  I wonder, were they even capable of getting past hearing the parable, much less grasping its meaning?  Then there’s the parable itself.  Jesus , or the shepherd, also known as God, leaves the 99 sheep that are okay and goes after the one who’s in trouble.  When he finds it, he lays it on his shoulders, the shepherd equivalent of embracing it, hugging it, and carries it home, rejoicing.  This is the ultimate “Welcome Home!” – being carried on the Savior’s shoulders while he exults in having found you.

Then, Jesus tells us, in case we didn’t get it: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.”

There is tension in being one of the righteous over whom God, the shepherd, does not rejoice.  If we, who are sitting in these pews at the Sweet Hollow church consider ourselves among the righteous, does that mean that God does not welcome us home, too?  That God does not rejoice over our presence just as God rejoices over the finding of the lost sheep?  Much as we want to be good and faithful servants, don’t we also want to be welcomed home?  But what does that say about what we want for others – especially for those who are not as blessed as we are?

A Jewish story tells of the good fortune of a hardworking farmer.  The Lord appeared to this farmer and granted him three wishes, but with the condition that whatever the Lord did for the farmer would be given double to his neighbor.  The farmer, scarcely believing his good fortune, wished for a hundred head of cattle.  Immediately he received them, and rejoiced – until he saw the two hundred cattle that now belonged to his neighbor.  But he shook off his dismay and thought about what else he wanted.  Next he wished for a hundred acres of land.  Once again, he was filled with joy as he stood in the fields that were now his, land to his left and to his right – until he saw his neighbor now had two hundred acres of land.  Rather than celebrating God’s goodness, the farmer felt jealous and angry and slighted because his neighbor had received more than he.  He didn’t know what to do.  He grumbled to himself and thought and thought and thought.  Finally, he stated his third wish: that God would strike him blind in one eye.

And God wept…

The second parable’s focus is even more greatly on the joy over what has been lost being found.  Here a woman has ten coins, but cannot find one of them.  She does what anyone would have done in those days given her home and lifestyle.  You see, back then, a person’s home was usually one room with a dirt floor and no windows.  Rooms were cool and dark.  So her response is totally normal.  First she lights a lamp, then she uses a broom to sweep the house from corner to corner until she finds the coin that has dropped to the floor without her knowledge.  Upon finding it, she rejoices, calling her female friends and neighbors and saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost.”

Jesus further clarifies, telling those who are listening that “there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”  Here he leaves out the righteous and focuses only on finding the sinner who is lost.  Before we anthropomorphize sheep or coins too much, let us remember that neither of them can repent, so the focus of the parable is not on that aspect of being found.  It is not on the sinners doing anything in order to deserve grace.  The important point is the celebration.  And upon calling the righteous to join it.  For only those who can celebrate God’s grace to others can experience that mercy themselves.  So ultimately, the question posed by the parables is whether we will join in the celebration – will we rejoice with the shepherd who has found the lost sheep, the woman who has found the lost coin?

Whether one will join the celebration is all-important because it reveals whether one’s relationships are based on merit or mercy.  Do we expect that because we do everything right, because we show up in church every Sunday that we are able and do the best we can to live the lives that God would hope for us, that we deserve God’s attention and blessing?  Or do we remember that all we have and all we are comes from that same God?  Do we remember to keep our hearts open to others and grant mercy to those for whom perhaps we do not care?  Those who have disappointed us or made us angry?  Do we show the mercy to others that God has shown to us?  Or do we get angry when someone else is acknowledged at work when we feel that we deserve the greater show of appreciation?  Do we feel slighted when someone else is spoken of with love and affection when we have done our best to be there for others?  Do we want to lash out at someone whose fortune has seemed greater than ours, wishing God to blind us in one eye that the person of whom we’re jealous might lose his sight?  Those who find God’s mercy offensive cannot celebrate with the angels when a sinner repents.  They cannot rejoice when a good thing happens to a seemingly undeserving person.  And in excluding others, they then exclude themselves from God’s grace and mercy, too.

But, of course, there is hope.  There is always hope.  That is why it is called “the good news of the gospel.”  The fact of the matter remains that no matter how righteous and well-deserving we are, we have all fallen short of the glory of God.  It is simply human to be sinful.  To make mistakes.  To begrudge others’ good fortune and perhaps even to try to sabotage it.  Much as we may think that we are the righteous, that we are the law-filled, tithing, superior Pharisees, in fact, we are the broken, the wretched, the lost as well.  And it is when we remember this that we have a chance to become the people God intends us to become.

This is what Paul or the author of the first letter to Timothy that we heard read today is reminding us.  Paul has been entrusted with the job of following Christ even though he had blown it big-time.  Even though he was someone who had blasphemed, who had insulted, who had tortured those who followed Jesus beyond all boundaries.  Even though he was a sinner – not just a sinner, but the foremost, the worst, the deepest of sinners who worked against the cause the Christ – God granted him mercy and ultimately, another chance.

The language of the 1 Timothy passage fills the parables of Jesus with a homeliness that we can all identify with – because we are all the sheep who know the way and we are all lost, we are all the coins already in the purse and the coin that is hiding in the corner, we are all Pharisees and we are all sinners.  By being in this room today, we confess a desire to follow Jesus , however humbly and incompletely.  We also confess the need for forgiveness and the recognition of our own ineptitude in the face of a world filled with conflicting values.

It is September 12^th and I would be remiss if I did not note the importance of this time in our history.  I’m sure you were aware of yesterday as the third anniversary of the tragedy that befell the World Trade Center in New York City and all of us who are Americans.  A world in which we had felt safe for over thirty years crumbled.  We on Long Island have a special relationship with the City and feel a special vulnerability given our location and geographic weakness should anything untoward happen again.  It is with great sadness that I lift up the date, September 11^th, 2001.  But I also raise it as a harbinger of hope.

In his latest book, The Church That Forgot Christ, Queens ’ own Jimmy Breslin wrestles with his lifelong commitment to the Catholic church and his sense of anger, dismay and betrayal as the scandals of the past several years have unfolded.  Disillusioned with his church, though not with his faith, he reaches to the World Trade Center attacks to rediscover the vocabulary of Christ .

Jimmy says in the process of fulfilling his reporting duties for Newsday on that fateful day, September 11, 2001, he passed a firefighter at the Twin Towers around the corner from the first building to go down.  A thick coating of gray dust made him look like an ancient mummy.  The man had lost several of his people and was left against a shaky wall, dazed at being alive.  He didn’t seem to recognize Jimmy as he passed by: he didn’t say hello or acknowledge him with any physical motion.  With tears in his eyes, he simply said:

“I have a daughter in college in Baltimore .  And I love her.”

Jimmy also reminds us of the many cell phone calls that crossed the airwaves through the black smoke that engulfed the people inside the buildings unable to get down and outside of the floors above the attacks.  These people turned to what was finally most important.

Stuart Meltzer , aged thirty-two, on the 105^th floor, told his wife: “Honey, something terrible is happening.  I love you.  Take care of the children.”

Kenneth Van Auken of Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 102^nd floor said: “I love you.   I’m in the World Trade Center .  And the building was hit by something.  I don’t know if I’m going to get out.  But I love you very much.”

Moises Rivas , a chef at Windows on the World restaurant: “I’m okay.  Don’t worry.  I love you no matter what.  I love you.”

Veronique Bowers: “I love you, Mommy, good-bye.”

Lucy Fishman , calling from AON insurance to her home in Canarsie, Brooklyn : “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Hundreds of messages like these went out that day, and all used the word that dwells in the souls of all on earth.  Love.  In the beginning and in the end, this is the message of Christ .

This is the message that Christ gave two thousand years ago and is giving us today from the parables he spoke so long ago.  That we are to love one another and rejoice in the face of God’s grace and God’s mercy.  That we are not to spend our time as the Pharisees did, comparing their righteousness against the next person’s, comparing their level of service with the guy next door, comparing their meritorious behavior against someone else’s who they perceive is lacking.  No.  We are called to open our arms to all in God’s kingdom, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not, whether we think they are deserving or not.  We are called to be God’s eyes and ears and loving arms in a world that is sorely lacking in compassion and love.  We are to be the body of Christ with Christ as our head.  We are not to be thinking, “What would Jesus do?”  Then we are doing the thinking for Jesus .  We are simply to be doing the acts of mercy and love and justice – the justice that proclaims all are worthy of being loved – and allowing Jesus as Holy Spirit to flow through us in the acts.  And most of all, we are to be happy while we do it.  We are to praise God, to laugh out loud, to rejoice that we are given the opportunity to love everybody.

Will we do it perfectly?  Absolutely not.  Can we try?  Without a doubt.  Can we start today, right this very minute?  I certainly hope so.  Shall we do it together?  It would be a heck of a lot easier that way, don’t you think…

Finally, I tell you now, as Jesus as the shepherd and the woman, told the people long ago and far away: