Sunday, September 11, 2016

We are lost; then we are found; and then what?




Lectionary 24, Year C – 11 September 2016
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Grand Prairie, Texas

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When our gospel story opens today, Jesus is surrounded by tax collectors and sinners. They are surrounding him in order to listen to his teachings and presumably to learn from him. Also gathered nearby are the Pharisees and the scribes and they aren’t happy. They see all these “undesirables” gathered around Jesus and they cannot believe the company he’s keeping. They start to grumble against Jesus, saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So, Jesus responds with some parables, and he talks first about a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to go look for the one who’s wandered off. Then he talks about a woman who turns her house upside down to find a lost coin. When both the lost sheep and the lost coin are found, there is joy for the shepherd and the woman. Jesus likens that joy to the joy in heaven whenever a sinner repents.

In other words, to Jesus, finding the lost is a really big deal.

On a theological level, these parables remind us that God finds us because God loves us. Like our Hymn of the Day, which we will sing in a few minutes, says – we once were lost, but now we’re found. God is the shepherd, searching for the sheep. God is the woman, searching for the coin. We are found by God, we are saved by God, we are lifted up by God.

And these are all helpful reminders to those of us who live lives of faith.

 But this past week, I reflected pretty intently upon the life of a woman who was recently canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. The woman we know as Mother Teresa of Calcutta became Saint Teresa of Calcutta officially last Sunday. We remembered this saint in our Wednesday worship this past week, and I was so moved by a particular story of hers that I am sharing it in part here again. These were Mother Teresa’s words, from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1979:

“The poor are very wonderful people. One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street…[There was a] man whom we picked up from the drain… and we brought him to the home. He said: ‘I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.’

And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming anybody, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel - this is the greatness of our people. And that is why we believe what Jesus had said: ‘I was hungry - I was naked - I was homeless - I was unwanted, unloved, uncared for - and you did it [for] me.’”[1]

She is here referring to Matthew 25 when Jesus is telling his disciples that whatever they do to care for the least of these, they do for him, as well. And whatever they don’t do to care for the least of these, they are not doing for him.

This man whom Mother Teresa found – the one who died in her care – she knew he could not save him physically, and she knew that saving his spirit was in the hands of God. And so, she did what she could to provide for him so that he could die at peace, knowing love and care.

Mother Teresa lived her whole adult life searching for the lost, searching for the poor, searching for those whom everyone else in society had discarded. She spent her ministry looking for and caring for those whom Jesus calls the least of these. Moved by the very Spirit of God, Mother Teresa realized something very early on in her long life of service – she realized that God finds us because God loves us, and she realized that God wanted her to search for the lost. And so, search for them, she did.

We are lost; then we are found; and then what?

Our baptismal lives are not to be only lived for ourselves. Our baptismal covenant puts it perfectly: We are to live among God’s faithful people, learning the word of God and receiving the holy supper, having our faith strengthened by teaching and nurtured through prayer so that we trust God, proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.

God finds us, and God uses us to search for those who have seemingly been lost to everyone. In today’s gospel lesson, the Pharisees and scribes complain that Jesus is keeping company with sinners. Yet Jesus doesn’t just keep company with sinners – Jesus seeks them out! And not only sinners - but also the sick, the poor, the hungry, the despised, the forgotten. Jesus seeks them out!

The world at times seems very big to me, and very full of problems. There is no way I can fix them all – there is no way that anyone can. But what we can do is serve the part of the world that God has entrusted to us, and we can serve it faithfully and with love, so that our little part of the big world shines brightly with the light of Christ.



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[1] From her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1979. Found at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html

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