Sermon Archive
Readings for 16 Sept 07
Proper 19
Year C
Exodus 32:1,7-14
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, "Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him."
The LORD said to Moses, "Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, `These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!'" The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation."
But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, `It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, `I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'" And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
I am grateful to Christ Jesus 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. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners-- of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
Luke 15:1-10
All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."
So he told them this parable: "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? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, 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 than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
"Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, `Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
Sermon
The Rev. Jack V. Zamboni
Rejoice with me, for I have found what I lost.
Have you ever lost your glasses? Your car keys? Cell phone? Date book? PDA? Wallet? Worse, have you ever lost something irreplaceable that mattered to your heart: a piece of jewelry left you by a departed loved one; a photograph of your first-born’s first steps; a keepsake you picked up on your honeymoon years ago?
If you’ve ever lost anything of importance, whether practical or personal, you’ve probably gone through the house, car, handbag, backpack, desk, whatever again and again: looking for what you’ve lost, filled with the anxiety and dread you feel when some vital piece of your life has gone missing.
But you also know the relief and the joy when after all your effort, you finally find what was lost – and you want to tell someone. Maybe you yell to the person in the next cube at the office or to your spouse down the hall, or you get on the phone or online to share with some friend who knows about your loss how happy you are that what you’d lost has been found. You are so happy you’ve just got to share the good news.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that this joy is what God feels when one lost sinner has been found. God, Jesus says, is like a shepherd who goes out to look for the one lost sheep, because every sheep in the flock is precious to him. God, Jesus says, is like a housewife who goes on a cleaning binge to find one lost silver coin, because it is so valuable to her. There is, Jesus tells us, more rejoicing in heaven over one lost sinner who is found than over all the righteous folk who never got lost in the first place.
Our reading from I Timothy this morning says the same thing in different words: The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. God, Jesus says, is as passionate in looking for lost human beings as we are in looking for our keys, glasses, cell phones, date books, PDAs, wallets, mementoes and keepsakes; and just as we rejoice when we find our lost stuff, God is delighted when lost sinners are found. This is Gospel truth we all, I hope, know.
But there’s a problem for many of us when we hear these classic Christian words about Christ Jesus saving sinners or are reminded of God’s delight in finding the lost. That problem is this: we don’t routinely think of ourselves as people who are lost and need to be found. And there is that word “sinners” -- a word that just might cause us to pause a moment or two or more before applying it to ourselves. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother's womb – so the psalmist prays. But do those words often come to our lips easily and naturally? I suspect not.
“Sin” and “sinner” are normal parts of the vocabulary we use in Church – but my guess is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as lost sinners anywhere else very often, if at all. We have churchy language about sin and being lost – but it doesn’t connect with much of the rest of our lives.
There are reasons that is so.
As I listen to how language about sin gets used these days, it seems to me that it is hard for us to relate it to the lives of folk like ourselves. On the one hand, language about sin is often trivialized: chocolate, we’re told, can be sinfully delicious; perfume can be sinfully seductive – but none of us takes the moral implications seriously in these cases.
On the other hand we use words like sin and evil to describe the overwhelmingly horrendous acts we witness in our world: deadly acts of terrorism; a misbegotten and unending war; needless starvation; preventable genocide. There are evils so huge that they seem beyond us, and maybe not quite our responsibility.
Neither the trivial nor the global language about sin speaks directly to our own experience of being lost and our own ways of sinning. And that makes it hard for us to hear that Christ Jesus came into the world to save us sinners; and that we are the lost sinners whom God rejoices to find.
But the truth is, even though we may not speak of ourselves in those terms very much, we do sin and we do get lost. Often, so often, we fail to love. Maybe it is in a marriage, a friendship, or a working relationship that goes sour; maybe it is those times when we get so caught up in our jobs that we don’t give our kids the time they need; maybe it is the indifference to others and absorption in ourselves that keeps us from reaching out or pay attention to somebody else; or simply the selfishness that makes us put our felt “needs” ahead of the real needs others.
In the consumer culture of which we are all part, we sin in our relentless pursuit of more stuff; in our unwillingness to be content with what we have; in our willingness to consume far more than our share of the world’s riches; in short, by committing that ancient, deadly sin, greed. More insidious, still, is our silence about and hence our complicity in the great evils that afflict our world: the violence that permeates so much of our globe; the ongoing genocide in the Sudan; the millions who are dying of preventable causes throughout the world. I read an email just this morning that said that for the first time since its kept records, UNICEF reports that the number of children dying from preventable causes is below 10 million annually. It is now “only” 9.7 million. If that’s progress, that’s sad.
And I’ve said nothing about the place we give God in our lives. Sure, we don’t make idols out of golden calves as in today’s Old Testament reading, but we do make idols out of money, success, security, and power, which we so often out ahead of God.
Can you recognize yourself as a sinner, lost and in need of saving, in any of these ways?
I know I can.
Yet to face that we are lost sinners is hard and painful – which is a major reason we don’t talk about sin except when the Church’s liturgy makes us do it. We don’t want to see ourselves as people who can – and do – do such things. If we did, we just might cry over how fitfully we love God; how poorly we love our neighbors.
A story is told about one of the early desert monks who was once found weeping by a younger brother. When asked why he did so, the elder monk replied, “I am weeping for my sins.” The young man, knowing the elder had lived a holy life for many years, said, “My father, you do not have any such sins.” The elder monk replied, “My son, if I were allowed see my sins, three or four men would not be enough to weep for them.” Honest seeing of our sins can be painful indeed.
But oddly enough, it is only when we take our own sin seriously; only when we are honest about how far from God’s ways and our own best selves we’ve strayed that we can hear the news that God in Christ has come to find and save lost sinners as good news for us. Only when we know that we are the lost sheep, the lost coin that God looks for with such energy can we feel ourselves embraced in the wideness of God’s mercy, accepted by the generosity of God’s love. I don’t know about you, but it is when people love me when I’ve behaved badly that I am most deeply grateful for their love. The same thing is true when God finds and saves me – yet again – when I have sinned.
That is why as Jesus tells us, the bottom line in all of this is joy: God’s joy in finding us, our joy in being found, especially when we don’t deserve it. And the thing about joy is that it has to be shared; it must be celebrated. That is why God the shepherd calls his friends and neighbors together to rejoice over the found sheep; that is why God the housewife calls her friends and neighbors together to celebrate the found coin. And that is why God calls us together as a Christian community to celebrate that we all have been lost – and, like stupid sheep keep on getting lost again and again – but that our God searches for us, finds us, saves us, and brings us home again and again– together.
If you’ve ever wondered what the Church is, or even what a Church, this Church, Grace-St. Paul’s is, here is one answer: the Church is a group of lost sinners who have been found and brought together by God in Christ, a group of people who with each other and God rejoice that they have been found.
And if you want a picture of what that looks like, there is one in front of you every week when we worship. I mean, of course, that group of 12 apostolic figures gathered together around the crucified & risen Jesus above the altar. Of course, this picture has serious limitations as a picture of this parish: for starters all of the figures are male and all are of the same indeterminate race. We, thank God, are more diverse than that!
But I hope you can look beyond those limitations to the basic pattern of the image: a group of lost sinners (and all of the apostles were lost sinners just like all of us) gathered together around Jesus who has found and saved them. That is who we, the Church of Grace-St. Paul’s, are: a group of people gathered together around the Christ who has found and saved them, and who calls them to a new, transformed life together.
And that, too, is why we do the things we do: why we gather each week to worship in thanksgiving, rejoicing with each other and God that we were lost and have been found; why feasting and fellowship are so much part of our life; and why, too, when we leave this place, Deacon Cornelia tells us to go into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit to love and serve the Lord. For we ourselves are also to be shepherds and housewives. Like our God, we are to seek out the lost, and invite them to the party -- rejoicing that God has found and saved us all.
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