Sermons

Lost Sheep

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
September 16, 2007                    Luke 15:1-10

Yesterday afternoon, stopped at a red light further east on East Avenue, I saw a spectacular thing that, whenever I see it, never fails to mesmerize A group of birds, a flock, I suppose, flying in a glorious and complex formation. There were 50 or 60 of them, winding their way across the sky, back and forth, swaying in harmony, appearing for all intents and purposes like a dark black wave in a blue-gray sea.

I watched as long as I could, until the car behind me was poised to offer some gentle and loving encouragement to move ahead.

And then I saw it. One lone bird. One lone bird flying out of formation, apart from the group. Had I had the time I would have watched that large, graceful group some more; but I would have wanted to track the lone, lost bird as well. What was its story? Not being a biologist, or even much of a bird watcher, I wondered about its behavior. And I wondered if it ever made it back to the flock.

The world in which the Bible was germinated was a largely agrarian world. That is why the Gospels are infused with parables and references to farming, and seeds, and wheat, and, particularly, to sheep. Psalm 23 remains a core biblical affirmation, even though most of us don’t know a real live shepherd, or wouldn’t know what do to with a sheep if it sat next to us in a pew and opened up a hymnal.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus has been thinking aloud what it means to follow him. His crowds are growing. And they are growing in a way that has the respectable religious types worried, because “respectable” might not be the adjective used to describe Jesus’ expanding congregation. Tax-collectors and sinners, cultural and religious rejects – not the people of whom great religious movements are made.

Pharisees and scribes, today’s ministers and bishops, are none too happy. But the crowd is, in large part because they are being welcomed into a conversation that has sought to shun them for so long. But no more.

Jesus tells them some interesting and provocative stories, parables, we call them. Remember there are at least two audiences in that moment. Those to whom the stories are being told, and those who are overhearing it. One group being issued a radical welcome and one whose agitation quotient is off the charts.

He tells a story about a woman finding a lost coin, and how happy she is and how happy God is when even one person repents. But before that, he tells a story about sheep. And the listeners would have understood it clearly. They would have understood the economic implications of chasing down 1% of the inventory and ignoring the other 99%. They would have understood the risk to reward ratio. They would have been amused, bemused, at the notion of a shepherd dropping everything to track down one lost sheep. And they would have understood, I believe, that the one lost sheep was them, and the revolutionary shepherd was the very one telling them the story, and that right before their eyes and in their very hearing was the possibility of new life, transformed life, found life.

Catholic scholar John Donahue calls Luke 15 “the gospel within the gospel.” Forgiveness as the response to repentance. Even then, Donahue writes, there is a tension. “Repentance," he writes, “suggests return or conversion, but neither the wandering sheep nor the lost coin do anything except get lost. The dramatic surprise in each comes from the seeking shepherd and the searching woman, which make us realize that repentance is much more a matter of being found by a searching God than of anything we do.”1

Episcopal scholar Jo Bailey Wells writes that if one reads the Bible in a certain way, that is, the way of the scribes and Pharisees, that it is a story of lost things. So we identify with either the 99 sheep who play by the rules, or the “hard-working shepherd who labors over his irresponsible and sometimes unreliable sheep. I confess as a priest and professor,” Bailey writes, “I can lapse into the same mode: why don’t people show up when they say they will? Why can’t students get their papers to me on time?”

But Bailey reminds us that the Bible is a book about found things, not lost ones; about God, not us. She concludes: “The point of these (…) parables is not for us to identify with the shepherd… We are not the shepherd: we are the lost sheep. God is the shepherd…God is the one who takes the astonishing risk of leaving the 99 sheep and coming to look for us, a journey of danger, daring and devotion. This story about God is also an invitation to become a part of God’s story—if we can stop running away and hiding from the one who yearns and searches for us.”2
Beverly Gaventa writes that this parable is first and foremost about the “compassionate concern of a searching God…God pursues confused and rebellious creatures (and therefore) gives value to those being sought…treasured and significant because they are not left for lost, but are made the objects of divine concern.”3

I thought about all of that as I watched that lone bird glide across the sky, in isolation. Was it lost? Would it be found?

And I wondered how we are all of lost? And what does being found look like? Jesus found people: he ate with tax collectors, prostitutes. He touched the physically ill when doing so was viewed with great horror. Look at all the people Jesus encountered, all the people Jesus found.

* Remember that they were lost to their culture.
* Remember that they were lost to their religion.
* Remember that they were lost to themselves, strangers to their own hearts, because they had been rejected, neglected, discarded.
* Remember that Jesus treated organized religion as the one doing the discarding – and remember how it can do the same now.
* And remember the best point, that the good shepherd risks it all, traverses the rugged terrain, to seek us out and track us down and hoist us on his shoulders and carry us home.

There are times when, by outward appearances, we might consider ourselves to be in the 99. To be sure, there are times when we might even consider ourselves to be the shepherd. But when we are honest, might we realize that we are lost. And might we also understand that being lost is not a permanent situation, nor a life sentence, nor a death sentence.

It happens in many ways.

Georgia Harkness was the first women theologian to teach at an American seminary. Her career, which spanned the middle of the last century, reflected the challenge of, literally, being the only woman in a man’s world. In the 1930’s, though, after having a series of books published, after receiving a number of invitations to prestigious lectureships, after securing an important academic appointment, things seemed well-ordered and secure.

But not quite. Her health suffered. Her energy waned. She could not sleep. She experienced a deep sense of depression. All of those things contributed to what Harkness described as a five-year “dark night of the soul.” We cannot imagine, except for the fact that we can, those moments in our own lives or in the lives of others whom we love, where forces are so great that we become lost in our own selves, lost in our own souls, lost.

What was most troubling for Harkness – more than the inability to work, more than her physical ailments – was the notion that God seemed to withdraw from her. In a fine Harkness biography, Rosemary Skinner Keller writes: "As her personal preoccupation mounted, Georgia realized that she was burrowing more deeply inside herself, feeling separated and isolated form God…she described herself …as being spiritually defeated, bereft of God’s presence in her life. The underlying cause of her dark night of the soul was spiritual depression, a sense of being cut off from God, of seeking but not finding…”

And things did not get fixed overnight, as they seldom do. What allowed Georgia Harkness to begin to emerge from her dark night came less in holding on and more in letting go, especially in letting go of the triumphal Christianity in which she had been raised and which had formed her.

These are my words: the journey began when she identified herself as the one lost sheep, rather then one of the ninety-nine. These are her words: “The Christian gospel is not that we can save ourselves by finding God. It is that God finds us and saves us when we let him…however dark the night, God’s love surrounds us…when we are assured that God ceases not to love us, we can watch in patience through the night and wait for the dawn…if with our hearts we truly seek him, we can know that God finds us and gives rest to our souls.”4

Getting lost, being lost, happens in many ways.

Anne Lamott tells a powerful story of John, a friend of her son, Sam. Lamott writes: “I called (John’s) father one day in tears, because Sam (her son) was in danger of failing a class. John’s father and I are allies: he listened, with the tough gentleness only the parent of another great kid in trouble can muster. He expressed love and respect for Sam. Then he said that John has just flunked advanced algebra, and so he could not get into any of the UC (University of California) campuses. ‘He’s been working for so long to get into a really good school,’ said his dad. ‘And then? It’s gone, in the blink of an eye.’ Neither of us spoke for a moment,” Lamott continues.

“…He continued haltingly: ‘It’s just the way it is. We talked about it last week when his report card arrived – that what we had all hoped for was probably not going to happen now. It was a sad conversation for both of us. And later that night, when I was in bed, he came into my room and told me quietly, in the dark, ‘Don’t give up on me, Dad.’’ His voice cracked. When we hung up some time later, we were both better.”5

I do not know what being lost looks like for you.

* Perhaps it is physical, or emotional, or relational, or spiritual.
* Perhaps your heart has been broken.
* Perhaps your dream has been deferred, or dashed.
* Perhaps a deep hope remains yet unfilled.
* Perhaps you are searching for whatever flock it is you are searching for, and cannot find the directions.
* Perhaps the religion you’ve known doesn’t speak to you as it once did.
* Perhaps, because of what the church has done to you, religion has never spoken to you like you hope it might have.

I do not know. In one way or another, all we, like sheep, have gone astray. And a shepherd, at the greatest risk imaginable, seeks us out and welcomes us home.

Frederick Buechner, who had virtually no official religious experience or affiliation, went to New York City to be a writer and was nor doing very well. He walked into Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church one Sunday morning because he had nothing better to do, and heard George Buttrick preach. Buechner later wrote, “At the end I am left with no other way of saying it than what I found was Christ—or was found. It hardly seems to matter which.” 6

It may not, for you, happen in a Presbyterian church. But it may. But remember this, and live into its truth: Your story, our story, the story is not about lost things, but found ones. Thank God. Amen.