seeking the lost and finding joy
Proper 19C  |  Luke 15:1-10

Good Morning, Disciples, Apostles, Saints! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? And I’m sure a lot has happened for each of us in the last three months. A time of fun and exploration and stress and humbling encounters with our own mortality, you know, life, right? But you are here and I am here and we are together again and I am grateful for the blessing of opportunity, for the joy of community. It is wonderful to be home.

As I sat down this week to put these words together, I realized how much rust needed kicking off. It was like coming back into the building after a year of streaming — the ritual of habit, the physical experience of doing the same thing each week, makes things seem like second nature. Normal. The usual. And when we break these things, these norms and expectations, we have to adjust our expectations, right? Maybe overcome some fears (can I still do this)? 

Mostly, though, it is a pattern that reflects our common pattern, the fabric quilted, woven, stitched together as community. That we gather each week to pray and hear part of the story that is the Good News, that doesn’t just help us out that week, but connects the narrative of the gospel to the narrative of life — our personal lives, this community, these people, these streets and buildings and jobs and lunches and coffee dates and events. That it all goes together as part of a grand story. One that is not yours or mine alone, but ours. And we fit into it like a theme, a line in the sheet music that repeats, that is us, a signal to the listener, to God, that we are here and look at how beautiful we all are together.

These last weeks

A couple of weeks ago, we heard about Jesus visiting some Pharisees for dinner. It is a moment rich with powerful undercurrents. Power. Place. Tradition. Culture. Expectations. Wealth. Status. It is performative, right? They invite Jesus because they see him as one of them. 

And as much as we might focus on what they expect of him, we have to consider our own expectations of him, of anyone we consider a guest. The we, of course, being Terre Hautians, Episcopalians who desire to be more open than others, right? Who want to be compassionate and generous. And yet, dinner parties, like high tea, are where our sense of obligation and expectation will rear their ugly heads and we’ll say, he better behave himself!

Hint: he doesn’t. But not because Jesus is rude, but because the Pharisees want to ignore the suffering of the man outside their door. And it is easier to be mad at Jesus for making them think about those not invited.

Then Jesus heads back out on the road, and describes that the cost of discipleship is straining our relationships, pulling ourselves toward Jesus’s Way of Love over familial expectations. That our commitment to this Way of Love is the challenge. That people will reject it, wanting to pull us toward protecting family, toward wealth and inheritance. 

This is the stuff we’re working with when we enter this morning, to talk about these two short parables. But first, make sure you don’t skip the opening line.

The Tax Collectors and Sinners lean in.

They want to hear what Jesus is saying. They don’t see the cost of discipleship as too high. They are looking to pay up like an entrance fee. They have been broken and pushed aside. Regulated against and demonized by the state. Hunted by gestapo and pushed into the borderlands. People who have no homes and their very lives are considered disposable by the Pharisees, the zealots of faith and order, who know the right way to do things and want everyone to just know what that is.

These people lean in and the Pharisees and scribes lean out.

This is the dynamic when Jesus speaks. When he tells a collection of parables that speak to losing and finding. Clever parables that situate the hearer in different places, different characters and situations, different values and priorities, and yet, in all of them, Jesus makes it clear what the throughline is: joy and celebration in finding the one who is lost.

And this tension is always there in the parables and in the context in which Jesus tells them. This is a message that is loved by the outcast and loathed by the gatekeepers because the former is being promised a shred of comfort and the latter is being reminded that they need to share in it.

We can really hate to share, can’t we?

The beauty of parables is that they have layers and we can find ourselves situated in them differently depending on how we’re reading them. And maybe we get to be the lost in these stories a lot. Maybe we get to think of ourselves as pursued by God and found and loved and given all of the grace God has. Because when we are suffering and feeling lost and alone, we need someone coming to find us, seeking us out in the wilderness, rescued, loved, enveloped in those great big arms of love. I think we all need that.

And yet here, among these friends, in this community of love and protection and joy and celebration, where we embody the gospel in word and deed as our normal, we are so often the Pharisees and scribes, the gatekeepers who are just trying to get things right and make sense of the rules and order things the way we believe with all our hearts is the way God wants us to. Where we don’t get to always be lost. Because we’re here. We’re found. Loved. Supported. Here. Among friends, like chosen family.

And here, too, that obsession with getting it right, even to the point of loving people right, protecting people right, supporting people right, gets us lost. Because it doesn’t feel loving or protecting or supportive to the people we’re gatekeeping. To the people wanting to learn how to love better in this school of love. To them, it often seems as if we are all rulers and they are all hands to be struck.

So maybe we do lose ourselves, too. Lose ourselves in our ways and demands and expectations. Expectations that are supposed to facilitate learning and loving. 

Losing and Finding

There are exquisite contrasts between the first two of the three lost parables. A shepherd with one hundred sheep represents a giant flock, true wealth, while ten coins represents a handful of days’ worth of food. So one seeker is rich and the other is poor. One is a man and the other is a woman. And in them both we think of the seeker as God. And we are sheep and coins and sons, lost and found. We are always losing ourselves and God is always finding.

And what we must take from the parable of the lost sheep is how obvious Jesus thinks the lesson is. He is incredulous in his telling. 

“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?”

Who wouldn’t leave his wealth in the wilds, to seek that one who wandered off and screwed up and threatened everyone’s safety? Who wouldn’t imperil the whole gambit because one stupid sheep left? The answer is clearly a lot of the people we know who treat human life as disposable. Like the cost of freedom is a few lost sheep. Even when they are hunted and slaughtered. 

This isn’t saved behavior, but lost thinking. Jesus trusts the herd in the wilderness to take care of each other. They are safer there together. We are called to care for each other, friends! Jesus trusts us with each other. To love each other.

And then we party.

It is always time to party. Because every Sunday someone who is lost is being found. And we celebrate with extravagant joy and gratuitous grace. This, too, is essential. As the woman/God who turns over her apartment looking for a lost coin in the middle of the night, wasting oil/electricity/energy to find something that a sensible person would say could wait till morning. But she can’t. There’s no waiting. We must seek the lost, always. And then, when we find them, we call up our friends, even in the middle of the night, even if everyone should be sleeping, and we say, come to my party! 

And because this probably isn’t your first encounter with these parables or your first encounter with Jesus or your first encounter with a Jesus-following community it should be so obvious that this is what we do. That we party when we are reconnected. We party when lost things are found. We party because life is a celebration and this is what is most important. This is what we order our lives for. Not in the manner of the party, but in the need to party itself.

So if you are one of those lost Pharisees today, worrying about the right way to behave, holding each other to a standard that isn’t actually set by Jesus and are suddenly finding yourself a little more lost, this story is for you. To know that God loves you with all of their heart, all of their soul, all of their mind, and all of their strength.

That’s the same message, of course, to the one who always feels lost, too. Especially if they turn their lostness into community, into a sense of order. That love is for you and is unconditional. It is there and we, like deputized shepherds, are here for each other. To love and celebrate. Together. Because parties are always the answer.

Which means right now: it is time to party.

We party every week. That’s what it means to be Christian. Every Sunday is Easter. So each week, we remember the resurrection and celebrate it like it is fresh, like it happened again today. So partying is supposed to be our normal.

But like normal things, we get too used to them. It comes from a process psychologists call hedonic adaptation, which means that humans adapt quickly to anything we perceive as normal and then, over time, we get less and less joy from it. So if we party all the time, we will lose joy with each one. Because our brains, like God, prefer variety, cleverness, and creativity.

So we must infuse our sense of ritual with fresh joy. Especially something so important as our ritualized celebratory dinner: Holy Eucharist. 

And then we will gather in the Great Hall for a new party. A celebration of reunion, of returning and reuniting. A party that is for all of us, together.

And finally, when it is finished (or we’ve had our fill), then we go out to throw more parties, celebrating finding and being found, with our neighbors and families and friends and coworkers, maybe the nice person in the Dunkin drive-thru or Robert who does a good job with your latte or whoever knows what joy is, who will join in celebrating in unity, in joy, in love for the grace that abounds everywhere, in everything. Invite them to celebrate with you for there is much to rejoice and much grace to be grateful for.