First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster 13th Sunday after Trinity Luke 15.1-10
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This morning’s gospel reading gives us two of the best
known parables in the Gospels. It’s little wonder St Luke is traditionally
thought to have been an artist, because he paints very vivid images in words. You
can picture that woman - probably poor – to whom one coin really matters. There
she is, in her little house, searching high and low, pulling the furniture out,
getting a torch to look for the coin in dark corners. And Luke’s description
has been drawn upon in Christian art associating the shepherd who has found the
sheep with Christ, the Lamb of God, bearing the lost sheep on his shoulders.
These parables come from the fifteenth chapter of St Luke’s
gospel which contains three parables in all: the lost sheep, the lost coin and
the lost son, often known as the parable of the ‘Prodigal Son’. They focus on
loss or estrangement, on being lost and, crucially, on being found. Because of
that they continue to speak to us today, speaking into our human predicament.
On an individual level these parables speak to a sense of
isolation and loss that many people experience in life. Young and old feel cut
off. Lost: searching, not for a coin or a sheep, but for meaning and purpose.
Often that search is internalised. So rather than looking out of ourselves we look
in. Archbishop Rowan Williams often described spiritual death and dying as
‘life shut in on itself’: literally introspective.
We are turning inwards as individuals and a society. We are
told that we have the resources to save ourselves. But that’s akin to the woman
searching for the lost coin in her purse and looking nowhere else for it; or
the shepherd looking for the lost sheep in a barn and not going out to find it.
These parables remind us that the search for meaning and purpose is to be found
beyond ourselves in God.
Writing in the twelfth century, so this is not new(!), St
Bernard of Clairvaux, said,
The
whole of the spiritual life turns on these two things: we are troubled when we
contemplate ourselves and our sorrow brings salvation; when we contemplate God
we are restored, so that we receive consolation from the joy of the Holy Spirit.
From contemplation of ourselves we gain fear and humility; but from the
contemplation of God, hope and love.
This theme of longing and desire located in God is at the
heart of the spiritual teaching of St Augustine of Hippo too. We desire, we
search, but we so often search in places where we will never find: in self, in
other peoples’ bodies, or in the trappings of ambition and worldly success.
Augustine knew that in his own life: ‘O God’, he writes, ‘you made us for
yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’. God
is the beginning and end of our search.
On a societal and global level these parables speak to our
disorientation as something that is precious seems to have been lost. Each
generation in time ends up feeling something precious has been lost. The
message of the prophets throughout the millennia is that we should not
nostalgically lament what we thing has been lost but that as a society together
we need to look to God, paralleling the personal search, and saying that we
must look outwards and upwards for salvation and not get sucked into ourselves.
In a time of reflecting of Care of our Common Home and the
giftedness of Creation we might also ponder what we lose as a human family as
we inhabit this world with the whole creation: I have in mind lost species,
that it seems may never be found again. Loss is real. Nevertheless the pain of
knowing something can never be found highlights the joy of finding something
assumed to be lost. And we get glimpses of this. Only in this last week I have
heard about the huge rise in the Painted Lady butterfly this year, so many more
have been found and counted, and the genetic possibility of reintroducing a
species of White Rhino.
So in these parables something or someone is lost and
something or someone is found.
These are parables of redemption. ‘Redemption’ is one of
those words that has fallen out of the day to day language of the church. Quite
why this is, I don’t know.
Perhaps it is because we are becoming so terrified of being
lost, that we cannot contemplate being found. Our society so often tells us: ‘if
you want it you can have it’ or ‘just believe in yourself’. It sounds
liberating but in the end it’s saying ‘sort yourself out, and there’s no help
beyond you’. That in itself cuts people off – loss and estrangement again - and
places a huge burden upon individuals to save themselves.
So what of redemption? Exploring the origins of words often
gives us insights into their full meaning and richness. The word redemption
originates for the Latin word redimere
which means to ‘buy back’. The word’s deeper theological meaning is about
deliverance and bringing back from sin. And that may be why we don’t hear the
word ‘redemption’ too much now: it sounds as if the church is dwelling on sin. Sin
abounds – don’t we know it? But where there’s sin, there’s redemption; where
there’s sin, there’s grace!
Redemption needs reclaiming. We need to be proud to be
redeemed sinners: found, brought back. The wonderful theologian Gregory of
Nyssa reminds us of the healing redemption of Christ, the Good Shepherd:
When
the shepherd had found the sheep, he did not punish it, nor did he get it back
to the flock by driving it, but rather by placing it upon his shoulder and
carrying it gently he united it to his flock.
Each parable ends with the deepest of joy on the coin,
sheep and son being found again. Redemption is not punishment; redemption is
not blame: redemption releases joy; redemption releases grace.
In each parable the climax is not self-satisfaction or
self-congratulation, but rather the redemptive moment - the finding of the
sheep, the finding of the coin - is met with absolute delight and gratitude and
the impulse to share that rejoicing with others.
The woman, the shepherd, the father, ‘call together’
neighbours and friends for a celebration. This is what our worship is. When we
arrive at church we are not simply gathering together as random individuals, but
we are, in the Greek of the gospel synkaleo’,
‘called together’ and we become a congregation, which literally means ‘a flock
joined together’.
As people who wander, err and stray, but now are found and
redeemed - declared worthy to be sons and daughters of the Most High through baptism
- let us rejoice that we have been found and are now coming together as the
Lord’s flock. Let us enjoy the foretaste of the heavenly banquet in bread and
wine, the supper of redemption; a pledge of the fullness of life and hope.
