Sermon for Trinity 15
Sunday 12 September 2010
The God who Keeps on Looking (Luke 15. 1-10)
To be honest I’ve never really liked being thought of as a sheep. I’ve no great opinion of sheep. True, they provide great clothing and, at least in their youth they provide a succulent meal – apologies to all vegetarians. But your regular sheep in a field is a bit dull. Always timid and pretty dense. Well that’s how they seem to me. Maybe I’m prejudiced! So whenever the sheep metaphor comes up in the Bible or the Church I tend to go a bit onto the defensive. I’m not like a dim sheep. And today we hear about one that seems even dimmer than most. One that gets lost. Or maybe this is one sheep with initiative! Actually, though, when you look at this passage the focus of the parable is not really on the lost sheep but upon the attitude of the person who loses him. What Jesus is saying in both of the parables in today’s gospel is that if we lose something we value we will go out of our way to search for it. Luke places these parables and the following one, the parable of the prodigal son in the context of pharisaic grumbling about Jesus’ willingness to welcome sinners and eat and drink with them. The Pharisee’s approach was to safeguard their own personal purity by avoiding contact with people or things that might defile them at any cost. This is an understandable attitude. It is one that those of us who are established Churchgoers share to some degree. When new people join a church or when some wayward sinner returns to the fold, who can deny that the attitudes in the heart of hearts of many established Christians is not necessarily one of unalloyed joy? New members of a church, especially new members who are rather different from the old guard of the congregation, can portend changes in the life of the congregation (and we’re not always sanguine about change in the church, are we?). The wayward who return to the fold are sometimes regarded suspiciously. We may not reveal this at the time but it says something about what people were thinking all along when, in a case where a wayward person wanders yet again at some future point, some people react by saying, “I didn’t want to say anything but I wondered if this would last!” When we see a lost sheep return to the fold, sometimes we do rejoice with sheer joy but at other times we quietly think, “We’ll see how long this lasts.”
By contrast these parables tell us that God’s attitude to finding the lost is unlimited joy. The imagery is of a party of heaven celebrating the return of the lost sheep or the finding of the lost coin. The good news of these parables is partly that, unlike us, God is overjoyed when he recovers those who have moved away from him. It is also, of course, that God is totally committed to recovering those who have slipped off. Like the person who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, or the woman looking for the coin, God goes after those who have moved away from him. God never gives up on us. He is always searching, seeking to draw us back to him. I actually believe that this seeking and searching will continue until 100% have been drawn into the orbit of his love. It’s not that I don’t believe that people can turn away from God, of course they can. We see it all the time as people wilfully behave in evil ways. But God will keep on trying to bring us back. And I believe that eventually everyone will be drawn back to him, though they may resist for a very long time in this life and beyond it. For unless that is so God will not have been successful. I suppose it is possible, conceivable, that some may hold out against God’s love eternally, may if effect place themselves in hell forever. Free will must allow that to be so. But if that is so then evil would exist in creation for ever and surely that would mean that God had not won, had not prevailed over it. So my firm hope and belief is that God will continue to work to recover and recall all, so that, as Scripture puts it, the day will come when “everything will be subjected to God … and God will be everything to everyone.” (1 Cor. 15:28)
Richard Franklin
Richard Franklin
Trinity 15 | Sunday 12 September 2010
