Many years ago when I was waking up to my Christian faith, I took a Bible study course that used a particular method for reading scripture. Bible scholars call that a hermeneutic: a lens though which we consciously (or unconsciously) interpret a sacred text. So in this case, for each Scripture passage we studied, we were asked to look for indications of God’s original good intention, when people made bad choices, how they became aware of their bad choices and changed, and the vision of God’s peace and shalom that their change made possible. The shorthand for those interpretive steps were creation, sin, judgment, repentance and redemption.
Familiar theological words, although all too often we hear them and glaze over, because they are not much used outside of church these days. Especially judgment and repentance, which are linked like, say, sheep and a shepherd. You don’t have one without the other. But at the time I started this Bible study, these were words that had not yet become personal to me.
So I can still remember the morning I woke up to this blinding flash of insight. Judgment is a good thing, I suddenly realized. God’s judgment—that term so misused by people who want to claim God’s authority for themselves—is actually a blessing. Because without it—without that awareness of our bad choices—we would not have the incentive to change.
Today we just heard two beautiful and beloved parables of Jesus, the lost sheep and the lost coin. The church has historically interpreted them as metaphors for God’s relentless pursuit of God’s people, which is utterly and completely true. And faithful to the whole witness of the Bible, from beginning to end. That’s a vision of God’s peace and shalom, no? The place and time wherein all that has been lost is restored. And the shepherd and the housewife and all creation will rejoice.
Parables can be such powerful bearers of good news. But good news is related to bad news, kind of like shepherd is related to sheep and repentance is related to judgment. The one follows the other. We rejoice in the good because we’re familiar with and want no more of the bad. So let me pause for a moment and ask what’s the problem these parables seek to remedy. Or rather, what’s the bad news for which they come as good?
This is where that complicated theological language of sin, judgment and repentance comes into play. Is the problem with the missing things in these stories—the sheep and the coin—that they represent sinners in need of repentance? Or is it simply that they were missing?
Recall that the backdrop of these two parables is a conversation Jesus was having with tax-collectors and sinners, who had come near to listen to him. Which is our first clue to the problem the parable addresses, because these people were themselves perceived to be the problem. Every culture has its problematic people, the ones shunned by polite religious figures: tax collectors and sinners in Jesus’ day, or in our day people who are gay or divorced or gender non-conforming or even just young and noisy.
So if Jesus was eating with and teaching the problem people, he was guilty by association. To which the obvious solution would have been for him to send the tax-collectors and sinners away. But Jesus failed to do what any self-respecting religious leader ought to, and instead he told a series of metaphorical stories in which the problem seems to have nothing to do with problematic people.
There is nothing to indicate that the lost sheep or coin represent sinners. Rather than the problem being someone’s category or behavior is bad, these parables suggest that problem is that someone is missing. And being lost is indeed a problem, but not because the lost one did something wrong. Rather, the problem seems to be that the whole—the flock, the treasury, the community—is damaged and diminished by their absence. And God wants nothing less than the whole thing.
This is indeed good news, because any one of us could be the lost one. I am thinking of the people buried by the recent earthquake in Italy, and the bravery of the first responders who sought them in the rubble. Or on this 15th anniversary of 9/11, of the firefighters who rushed into the doomed World Trade Center towers to evacuate survivors. This kind of relentless seeking represents the best of who we are, even when it’s risky. There’s something profoundly Godly about the one who searches for the lost, and about the community that refuses to let even one remain lost.
Losing, seeking, finding, rejoicing. The parables of the lost sheep and lost coin are almost identical in their structures, which makes their modest differences all the more intriguing. Casting a woman in the role of the seeker—in the role of God—rarely happens in our scriptures. But because she is in the story, searching just as intently as the shepherd, we learn that God’s relentless mercy is at work inside the house as well as outside in the pastures.
Even if we’re never the one lost in a disaster or an act of war—and I pray that we’re not—these parables are true for all of us because some part of us, something of our integrity, is always prone to go missing. That’s the human condition ever since Adam and Eve lost their capacity to say “ no thank you” to temptation. They lost their way and they suffered the consequences—that’s the compassion of judgment—but God kept right on seeking their descendants to bring them back. A mercy that extends to us. So if there’s something about yourself—some hurt, some grief, some shame, that’s lost in a dark corner of your soul—know that the God who is like a housewife is lighting her lamp to search your inmost self even now.
No person and no aspect of our personhood is outside of God’s love and longing that we be made whole. That we be whole as individuals and whole as a human community—sinners, tax-collectors, Pharisees and scribes, women and men, queer and straight, refugees and republicans—alike. God’s judgment is not on the outsiders, but on the fact that there are outsiders at all.
The morning I woke up to recognize God’s judgment as a blessing is in some sense the morning that I went looking for you—a community that knows how to make outsiders speaking other languages welcome—and it was also the morning that began my journey towards priesthood. Which now sends me out of my own comfort zone to serve the Episcopal Cathedral in Portland. I don’t really know what I’ll find there, which is a little scary for me. But what I do know that I will find nothing that God is not already seeking.
Sinners and tax collectors that we are, let us come near to Jesus: listen for his compassionate judgment and turn anew towards our God. Turning toward being the literal meaning of conversion, another peculiarly theological word. Turn toward the one who is already seeking us—and by that I mean the us all around as well as all that is within us—and let God make us whole.
