A Rejoicing God

This week was a sobering one in our national life. We marked yet another anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th – many people pausing for a moment at the time the first plane hit the twin towers. 9/11 has now supplanted the Kennedy assassination for its power to invite us to remember where we were when we first heard the news of the attacks. On a Sunday when our gospel speaks of finding what was lost, 9/11 was a watershed moment – causing a communal sense of loss of our seeming invulnerability from experiencing terrorism up close. If we had grown up watching violence on television in Belfast, Beirut, and Israel, the events of six years ago changed our perceptions.

In addition this week in Washington testimony was given by a general and an ambassador and a presidential address was delivered in prime time to offer an assessment on the ongoing events in the war in Iraq -- now the longest war in our nation’s history. What was most unsettling to me is a growing awareness by many in government that there appears to be no easy solution to ending a war that that still divides so many. Stay, go, re-deploy: none of the solutions seems to make peace a guarantee or protect innocent lives caught in the crossfire and left behind when and if we leave. Am I naïve or hopeful to want it all to just go away -- our soldiers to come home, to learn from past mistakes. I want peace to be lasting. I get a sinking feeling that this hope is now just a prayer. To be sure, the events of this week were heavy and sobering.

Yet, as followers of Christ we are not to live our days as if everything happens to us. We need not be victims or bystanders to history or to the events that fill our lives. The familiar prayer of St. Francis begins by asking that the Lord make us instruments of God’s peace, and Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians that we have been given the ministry of reconciliation. God works in and through us to shape our world. Our world can become not just better because of our actions, but it can become good. The readings from Luke’s gospels these past weeks have pointed to a way of living and a glimpse of heaven where all will be welcomed, where outsiders go to the head of the line and where a true leader is measured not by power, but by humility and mercy.

The theme in today’s gospel reading from Luke is the immense joy that comes about when finding what had been lost. The parable is introduced by the uncanny ability of Jesus to attract outsiders – and we could even go so far as to say – the losers of society. The winners, or the Pharisees and the scribes, were grumbling. There is a lot of grumbling in the Bible. Grumbling continues to this day as religious score-keepers like to keep track of who is in and who should be out. As someone said recently: “The church is like a swimming pool – most of the noise comes from the shallow end!”

A shepherd loses track of one sheep and abandons the other 99 to find the one. It is a wonderful parable, but not a recipe for career success for would-be shepherds. Then a woman, who loses one coin, does all she can around her dark and cluttered house. When she does indeed find it, she rejoices. Both of these discoveries lead Jesus to state that there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than all others who need no repentance – or so they think.

The idea of God rejoicing – heaven rejoicing – on such a small victory – one out of 100 – should make us think again and anew about how we think about God, but also about how we experience the holy. Remember, we are to believe that God is not some remote supernatural figure that wound up our world like a top and let it go through eternity. Our God is a God of history, a God of creation, a God in whom we live and move.

The challenge for us when we face things we can not understand, or feel lost ourselves, or come to know that the evil of war and terror and violence is all too real and comes all too close to home, is that we may find more comfort in a weeping God than one who is filled with joy. Many of us have been taught to imagine that God must be weeping over our misdeeds, our blindness, our lack of concern for those who come after us, our carelessness with love and with the beauty of creation. And if we would only pray harder, work harder, learn and read more, then somehow we could stay on the right track. But we lose sight of something important and lasting when we cast God as the disappointed parent. What we lose is finding that God is pleased with us even as we are lost.

Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, who writes extensively about parables, sums it up this way: “In none of these parables is anything (except the will of God) portrayed as necessary to the new life in joy. God alone gives life, and he gives it freely and fully on no conditions whatsoever. These are parables of grace and grace only. There is in them not one single note of earning or merit, not one breath about rewarding the rewardable, correcting the correctable, or improving the improvable.” (Kingdom, Grace and Judgment, pg. 187)

Sometimes it is easier to stay lost than it is to be found. We can just get by, melt into the crowd, avoid attention and imagine that our voice does not matter and that our actions can’t possibly bring about change.

These stories reject this impulse.

These stories tell us that God will come after the lost again and again and again. The unrepentant and the repentant. 99 sheep may even be left behind for a while to find the one who needs to gathered in. A whole house will be turned upside down to find one coin.

If there is a message to take away and carry with us this day is that we are always worthy to be found and loved and made a big fuss about. Our lives, however ordinary and uneventful and conflicted, may not matter to the movers and shakers in this world – but they mean everything to God. And that awareness changes everything.

So if we know God will come after us, why not make it a little easier. Come out of the darkness into the light, throw up a white flag and surrender the notion that we have everything under control. Because, we don’t. Be open to changing directions, learning something new, allowing God to smooth out our rough edges. Each one of us is being discovered by the One who made us and heaven rejoices.