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                                                                                 The Church of the Redeemer

                                                                                         September 16, 2007

                                                                                             Proper 19

                                                                                 The Rev. Dorsey McConnell

Occasionally, in the Bible, you run into bad advice.  Take these two little parables of Jesus, for example:  the shepherd who loses a sheep, and the woman who loses a coin.  In each instance they set aside what they have, and go off in search of what they have lost.  The woman just uses up a lot of time in the search, and the coin does represent ten percent of her assets, so her obsession does make a little more sense, though her joy over finding the coin might have struck the neighbors as an odd occasion for a party.  But the shepherd goes further; the shepherd actually abandons ninety-nine percent of his equity, putting it at serious risk, on the off chance he will be able to find the missing one percent.  And when he does, he goes ahead and makes his foolishness public by inviting all his friends to a celebration.  Now I have taken up this parable with a shepherd or two over the last twenty years, and I have discovered that real shepherds are notoriously unsentimental about their sheep.  Lost sheep are not sought after at the expense of the others.  They are not brought home with glee.  Parties are not thrown in their honor.  Lost sheep are a write-off, period.  I suspect the shepherds of Jesus' day were no different.  So, unless it is just bad advice, the apparent nonsense of the parable must be part of the point the Lord is trying to make, something to do with what we might call the economy of the Kingdom of God.

            The fact that the behavior of the shepherd and the woman go against the expectations and conventions of the world, actually sheds light on the twin topics of the parables namely the repentance of sinners, and the joy of heaven.  Repentance itself is countercultural.  Repentance begins by acknowledging wrongdoing and ends with an apology .  To repent, I must first say, It’s my fault, I did it; then, I am sorry.  And Jesus teaches elsewhere that, more important than the words is the attitude underlying them: genuine grief over one’s sin, and genuine humility in asking forgiveness—without these qualities of the heart, the words mean nothing.  The world around us, however, has other teaching to offer. Pick up a newspaper on an average day, especially the national political pages, and you will find a smorgasbord of alternatives when it comes to the confession of sin.  There is simple denial.  There is blaming someone else.  There is even, apparently, claiming you aren’t guilty in September even though you admitted you were in June (that, from a sitting United States Senator, happens to be my personal favorite).  Perhaps it is just me, but I can’t remember a time when the simple act of admitting responsibility and seeking mercy has been so out of fashion, that something so basic to ordinary family life—what we hope all of our children will know before they are five—is so obviously and publicly unsupported by those who claim to be our leaders.  Since politics and culture go hand in hand, this must reflect a deeper malaise, which can be simply stated.  I think repentance is no longer an American norm, because mercy is no longer an American virtue. The admission of wrong is the beginning of a lawsuit, not the prelude to forgiveness.  Sinners are persecuted, not absolved.  Those who are caught falling short beyond any hope of denial, are ridiculed, lambasted and paraded in the media; the public square gives private permission.  On the personal level, we are so afraid of losing face, that we will do everything to deflect an accusation away from us and onto someone else, while protesting our innocence, even though it would be obvious to a casual observer that those things we do not tolerate in others, we readily excuse in ourselves.      

Now, this is serious.  A culture in which being right is more important than being humble, has snuffed out something crucial about the way we grow into complete human beings.  The economy of the Kingdom proposes that this growth happens, not through our accomplishments, our strengths, even our virtues, certainly not through our appearing to be good, but through the giving and receiving of mercy in the places of our weakness and failure.  Repentance and forgiveness become the currency by which human beings, through countless transactions, become built up by degrees into everything that is admirable.  The reason for this is that God has intended this to be the chief means by which we—mortal, finite, and frail—become partakers of his own life—eternal, infinite, all-powerful.  It may seem to you like an odd way to run a universe, to claim that the weakness in us is always the key to our strength, when it is unlocked by the power of God in Jesus Christ, but if you want to live in the best possible human world, rather than in some triumphalist fantasy, this is the way.  

And these parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep suggest something even more astonishing: that we are found before we even knew we were lost.  Apparently the shepherd does not wait until the sheep asks for help, to go looking for it. When the hapless sheep is swept up onto the shoulders of the shepherd, only then, perhaps, might it sheepishly admit that it was in trouble.  So it is with us: the moment of our repentance, the recognition that we have done something awful, the cognizance of our frailty—that in itself is the result of God breaking through into our consciousness, our experience. The awareness of our need for forgiveness is the first evidence of Jesus Christ the Master’s strong hand reaching into the waters of indifference in which we were drowning without even knowing it, and pulling us up into the air and the light.  This is called prevenient grace, one of many surprising marks of God’s generosity.  Whereas, in a world where no one admits wrong, the good die for the good, and we mainly reward heroes who die for heroes, the kingdom of God has another goal in mind, as Saint Paul puts it, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly,  and as a result, from now on, all of us are called—small and great, rich and poor, the good, the bad and the ugly—all of us are called to lay down our lives for each other, which we can only do if we genuinely realize that all human life is exactly equal, that all stand in the same need of repentance, that all are intended for the same crown of glory, that the lives of a President in Washington, an Archbishop in Canterbury and a prostitute in Kampala, are worth precisely the same and inherit the Kingdom of God through the same door that has already opened in the moment before we can even speak the words, I am lost;  please God, if you are there, find me.

And through that door flows joy.  It is not only the joy that comes to the soul of the individual believer, the joy of a John Wesley who received the mercy of Christ for himself and in the moment felt his heart “strangely warmed.”  The joy to which these parables refer, is nothing less than the joy of Heaven.  Heaven rejoices over one repentant sinner.  Countless multitudes of the redeemed are delighted by one tear of regret.  The whole community of believers is blessed, deepened, encouraged, by one of its members who genuinely falls kneeling before the throne of grace.  The repentance of one person becomes the means by which others experience the freedom to do the same, and so the mercy one receives is like oxygen for everyone else in the room.  Such repentance and such mercy can work the joy of heaven across a whole community, like a contagion of grace passing from life to life, if we will only let it run its course.

I got a call the other night from an old friend of mine, the Reverend Doctor Ashley Null.  He had found my name on a website I am helping to establish, a website dedicated to holding together the fragile remnants of the Anglican communion, and he wanted to chat.  I was honored.  Ashley holds the title of Canon Theologian in the Diocese of Western Kansas, and was for several years rector in the town of Liberal, Kansas, which both of us always found funny, since Ashley is among the most conservative people I know.  Lest you ask whether anything good can come out of Kansas, I should add that Ashley holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge (the real one, not the one across the river), has published what is to my mind the most important book on Cranmer in the last fifty years, and is editing Cranmer’s journals for Oxford University Press.  Ashley’s fame as a Christian, however, lies not in his achievements but in the sort of behavior Jesus is talking about.  Ashley fairly glows with humility, kindness, a deep sense of his own unworthiness before God, and, above all, an overwhelming joy in the grace God has shown him. Just hearing his voice over the phone for the first time in four years made me smile from ear to ear.

Our association began over twenty years ago, when he was a graduate student at Yale and I was Episcopal Chaplain to the University.  Then as now, Yale was a pressure cooker of a place.  Kids who came there were relentlessly competitive, mainly with themselves; one of the sobering things about Yale was that, whatever you were good at, there always seemed to be at least half a dozen people who were better.  Performance was the key, and everybody made huge sacrifices to meet their expectations about being the best this and the strongest that.  The Episcopal Church at Yale was a worshipping community based on other values, however.  We were the house of the lost coin, the fold of the lost sheep.  Oh, we were glad to celebrate the successes of our members, but we mainly rejoiced in their failures.  As the poet Robert Frost put it, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” and we were that kind of a home to the superaccomplished, the overachievers, who hit the wall on their way to stardom and discovered that wall was the doorway to all that they might become.  In the desert of self-aggrandisement, self-justification, and self-centeredness that Yale could sometimes become, ECY was an oasis of relief.  Before long, we had over a hundred undergraduates and graduate students coming to weekly worship, a raft of Bible studies, outreach projects in the city of New Haven, all of which made me proud. 

That attitude of mine was a problem.  Yes, it hurts to admit it, but I must say that in that whole community I was among the least humble, the least likely to admit I needed help.  I didn’t see that as a problem at the time.  I was in the middle of what I call the Spokewell Period of my ministry, as in the Gospel text referring to Jesus that says, “And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that came forth from his mouth.”  I was too young to have experienced serious failure, or even to imagine it might happen.  I was thankful that God had given me such a successful ministry, and glad the Most High wanted to help.  But my pride made me restless, ambitious, and unhappy; no matter how many people we had, I wondered why there weren’t more.  I chafed at the tasks of fundraising and pastoral care (which was a lot of what I did).  In short, without even knowing it, I was well on my sheepish way into the far thickets and briar patches of pride.

One day, Ashley came to see me.  He wanted to talk with me about something I had said in a sermon.  He was worried that I was showing signs of Pelagianism, the notion that human beings can become righteous through our own efforts, with a little help from God.  He disagreed with me and wanted to explore our differences.  I loved a good debate, so I relished getting into it with him.  Ashley took about an hour to demolish me, and he did it in the most remarkable way.  While I was busy being brilliant, he was busy being godly.  He attacked me with humility, assaulted me with kindness, brought me with patience back to the Scriptures, to the touchstone of how much God loves us, to the example of his own wayward heart, to the constant work of his own repentance, redoubling, in the most gracious way imaginable, his insistence that I never settle, or teach others to settle, for anything less than the glory of God made available to us all through the Cross of Christ.  Well I have never been more glad to lose an argument in my life.  By the end of it, I was defeated—and, yes, smiling from ear to ear. 

That Sunday, I was still smiling.  For the first time in weeks, as my community celebrated the Eucharist, I was feeling joydeeply aware of the real treasure God had given me—not the success of the place, but the lives it contained--  the young woman (raised in this parish, actually) who had  burst into tears at the end of service because she had failed genetics and realized she would never be a physician (she became a first-class early childhood educator, wife and mother); the young man who escaped from under the thumb of his hard-driving father, a famous author, to become a missionary.  There was the child of artists who defied convention by applying to law school.  All had come to the end of their ropes; all had been found by the good shepherd, just as I had been (again) a few days before.  I knew then, and have known ever since, that it wasn’t the money or the numbers—they would take care of themselves, but the humble heart of each of the persons in the room that made for the joy we were feeling together.  As I broke the bread, I looked up and saw Ashley in the back row.  Eyes closed in prayer, he was smiling, too.

This is a miracle we need to pay attention to this morning.  I know we all find great blessing here, in the beauty of this space, the grandeur of the liturgy, the excellence of the music, and (occasionally) the preaching of the word.  But might it not be possible that all the blessing we receive on any given day might only be because God has chosen to honor the broken heart next to us, or the tender conscience in front of us, or the six-year-old girl in children’s chapel who, not ten minutes ago, was praying silently, please God forgive me for cheating my little brother, and please don’t let my parents find out?  Oh, the joy, the joy of heaven that flows into the Church and the world through the portals of such a prayer!  When such admissions commonly become public, when we become so used to seeing one another as works in progress, fellow travelers, sinners of equal worth in the hands of an all-merciful Father, when we really begin to believe we have nothing to hide, because we couldn’t begin to hide half of it, astonishing things begin to happen.  And such a community is a gift to the world.  So perhaps, before you leave here this morning, you might make a mental note of who is here who might need a special welcome from you at coffee hour this morning; but also, I would encourage you to notice who isn’t here, because they are not sure they have a place among us, on the mistaken assumption that only good people or successful people go to church.  They may have been members here for years, may only have recently joined, or may not yet have set foot in this parish.  Perhaps a word, an invitation, from someone exactly as fallen as you, might be the first step in their coming home on the shoulders of the Lord who made them, and made us all, for nothing less than joy.  In Jesus name.  Amen.