When I was in seminary I was given the opportunity to
preach at a federal corrections facility.
It was the most incredible worship experience I have ever had. Those men were a light to the world. They
worshipped. They all knew they were beloved children of God in Christ. They all had felt new life given to them by
the Holy Spirit; forgiven, accepted. And
so they lifted up their hands, jumped for joy, sang with tears in their
eyes. They celebrated. I had been to charismatic services before, but
their worship was beyond that. That
worship service was their freedom.
Preaching there was incredible. They were awake, leaning forward in their
seats, and listening carefully wanting to learn and grow in Christ, wanting to
hear a Word from or even just about their Lord who had shown them so much love
and not withheld his presence them. The
preaching experience was very much like it is in an African-American
church. When I spoke they
responded. I literally had to pause at
the end of every sentence for someone to say “Amen”, “Preach it, brother.” or
“That’s right”. The sermon that I wrote
to last for 12 minutes took over 30 and it never felt long.
These men were from all walks of life. In a way, they looked very much like a first
century church. There were no lines of
division. They were African-American, White, Hispanic, young, old, rich, poor,
educated, dropouts; but no women. It was
a men’s prison. These men all had two
things in common: a conviction for a crime and Jesus. They were drug dealers, domestic abusers, sex
offenders, thieves, murderers; you name it, they done it. They all had accepted responsibility for what
they had done. They also accepted that
even though God loved and had forgiven them, there was still time to do. Living in prison is hard. There are both hardened criminals and
hardened guards and they don’t care whether you’re a Christian or not. Yet, these men still walked the walked. They did unto others as they would have had
done to themselves, forgave as they had been forgiven, and loved as they had
been loved, prayed together, studied the Bible together, and on Sunday they
rejoiced.
There was such joy there. That worship service is my image of what
Jesus meant when he said, “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents
than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” and “there is
joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents”. Each one of those men knew what it was to be
a “lost sheep” or “lost coin”. And more
so, they knew that Jesus—that God—was the type of god who left the fold behind
to come and find them; who searched all night by lamp light and swept the house
clean to find them. Such joy!
What about us?
What about yourselves? Have you
ever been lost? It is likely we have had
panicky experiences as children of being separated from our parents that we can
remember. Or, that bewildered feeling of
being geographically turned around in a city or out in the country when you
think your heading north only to be going further south. There’s also being emotionally and
spiritually lost. Stuff happens – a
diagnosis, an accident, a job ends, an addiction befalls you or someone you
love – and your life is no longer your life and you spiral out of control into
a dark place. People watch you. People talk about you but rarely to you. You feel utterly alone…lost.
We have a cultural default belief when it comes to
God and how or why we got lost. It goes
something like, “If I’m lost, then I took a wrong turn (sinned) and God (the Judge)
is holding me accountable for it.” It’s
pretty black and white if you’re in prison and convicted of a crime. You took a wrong turn and the God who
punishes wrong doers is punishing you. But
– and hear me on this – if you spend some time talking with prisoners and hear
their stories, in time you discover they suffered emotional, physical, and
sexual abuse in the course of their formative years and patterns repeat
themselves over generations. Compassion,
unconditional love, is needed to break those cycles, not punishment.
But then there’s being lost and where your wrong turn
was is not so black and white. You desperately
preoccupy yourself with the question – the very heartfelt prayer – “What have I
done to deserve this?” and honestly the answer is “Well, not anything that
deserves this”. What if you’re lost-ness is due to the wrong
turns of others or there really was no wrong turn at all? When that is the case you have to then find
some way to reconcile how it is that God, who is supposed to be all-loving and
just, is treating you like you’ve been wicked. How can God in his great love be so
unfair? Many people stop believing in
God at this point.
I think Jesus here in these two parables presents us
with a different way of understanding God.
Instead of God being the Judge and we being the Sinners, God is the one
who in love finds the lost and restores them.
God is the one who brings order out of chaos. Look at the parables, God doesn’t ask the
sheep or the coin what its wrong turn was or punish them once he found them. He puts everything at risk to go and find the
sheep and when he does he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices and celebrates. He sweeps by lamplight until he finds the
coin and he rejoices and celebrates.
Consider the parable of the lost sheep. I’ve had brief moments where in the midst of
a crowd of people I’ve lost track of one of my children. That is scary, particularly in this day and age
when kids don’t just get lost in the department store but often get taken. I don’t want to imagine what it is like to
lose a child. Could it be that God in
his love is desperately and personally and really searching for us in the midst
of our lost-ness. Could it be that God
isn’t a Judge who gets angry at us for getting lost? Could it be that God doesn’t regard us as
“sinners” who deserve punishment? Could
it be that God rather sees us as little lost sheep who are quite vulnerable in
a world full of danger and wants us safe?
Consider this parable of the lost coin. The coin didn’t lose itself. If anything, it was lost because of the
woman’s carelessness. Yet, this lost
coin has value. It was silver and worth
about ten days worth of work. Even if you
were just earning minimum wage in Ontario, that coin would be worth over $1,100. If I lost a coin worth that much, I lost would
turn my house inside out looking for it.
I think it is safe to say that sometimes we are lost not because we took
the wrong turn but because God lost us.
In God’s great scheme of things, he loses us. Still, God desperately and personally and really
searches for us and what joy it is when he finds us. Sometimes, the only way some people in their
lost-ness can be found is that God profoundly gives them the sense that reason
they are lost is his fault and not their own.
But he finds them and he celebrates.
Notice the invitation there: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin
that I had lost.”
To repent is to have a change of mind. The word in Greek literally means “to become
with-minded”. To repent is to become
“with-minded” with God in his plans and purposes and in the way he regards
people. It is to see the world and the
people there in with the same compassion and patience and kindness and
seriousness as God does and to act accordingly.
Sometimes, in order to become “with-minded” with God
requires changing what we believe about God.
Sometimes the things we believe about people can keep us from seeing a
person for who they really are. Unfortunately,
we have a hangover from Medieval Catholicism in our tradition that defines
repentance as turning away from one’s moral baseness and becoming a faithful
church participant. That understanding
of repentance requires an image of God as being primarily the Judge who
punishes the wicked. Unfortunately, that
image of God as Judge creates believers who look at others and say, “I’m
thankful I’m not like that tax-collector.”
It creates believers who sit and grumble in judgment of Jesus for his
keeping company with “sinners”.
We need to repent of that image of God. In fact, it is quite likely that the current
dispute we are having in the PCC over human sexual identity could be more
healthily dealt with if we repented of our belief that God is primarily a moral
Judge. What if we truly became “with-minded”
with the God who is like a shepherd who risks everything to desperately search
for his sheep that has wondered off into a world of danger? What if we truly became “with-minded” with
the God who is like a woman who frantically searches for the dearly valued coin
she lost? What if we became “with-minded”
with the God who rejoices and celebrates when he finds us in our lost-ness. Grace celebrates. It does not judge and grumble. I suspect that if we become “with-minded”
with the God we see in Jesus, the God who welcomes sinners and eats with them,
that we will rejoice like prisoners set free and people we least expect will come
out for the celebration. Amen.
