Sermons

“Uses and Abuses of the Lost Sheep”

Psalm 14; Luke 15:1-10 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 15, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might open our hearts to being found by the Good Shepherd.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Preachers – well, let’s be honest, Christians in general – love this story about the lost sheep, but we tend to do something with it that isn’t really faithful to the context: we make it about ourselves.  ‘If I ever get lost, Jesus will come looking for me.’  I mean, we like to do this with most of the stories Jesus tells, right?  If they didn’t apply to our lives, why would we bother?  But sometimes, the most faithful application of a parable is one that resists the urge to put ourselves right in the center of the story.  Keeping that in mind, I want to explore some uses and abuses of the parable of the lost sheep and its companion story about the lost coin.

First of all, the context of this story makes very clear that it’s not about us.  Why did Jesus tell the story?  Because the Pharisees and the scribes – that is, the equivalent of good, regular church-goers – were complaining that he was hanging out with other people.  And not just other people – the wrong other people, sinful other people – but mostly, people who weren’t them.  The whole point of this story is to explain why it’s more important for the pastor and other church leaders to spend time and energy on people outside the church instead of people inside the church.  And pretty much nobody inside the church really loves that that’s the point, do we?

This parable is one of the foundational scriptures for the idea that the church exists not for its own sake, but for the sake of the world.  We are not here to make ourselves feel better, but to help others find their way home.  There are, of course, plenty of other places in scripture to support a ‘both/and’ approach here, where we don’t neglect the needs of those within the community.  But this passage?  It’s squarely in the ‘we’re here to serve others’ camp, regardless of how we might try to spin it.

Given that, there are two ways this can go astray.  First of all, have you ever wondered what happens with those other 99 sheep?  Jesus says that the shepherd “leave[s] them in the wilderness” to go look for the lost one.  Are we just supposed to assume that they stay right there?  Nobody wanders off or gets stuck in a bush or falls into a ravine?  If this flock that has been trusted to take care of itself for a bit while the shepherd goes looking for the other sheep is a congregation – which is the point here, right? – then the assumption is that things will be fine while the pastor focuses in other directions.  But as we know, this isn’t always how things go.

Sometimes sheep that are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves get antsy for some attention and wander off precisely so they can become the lost sheep the shepherd has to attend to.  Sometimes they even convince a few other sheep to wander off with them, in hopes of commanding all the shepherd’s attention.  Or sometimes they just stir up trouble by picking fights with some of the other sheep, so that the flock ends up going off in two different directions. What is it about sheep that makes them so hungry for personal attention?  Is it so hard for them to remember what the shepherd looks like when she or he has gone off looking for a stray?  Is it so hard to remember that the shepherd loves all the sheep equally?  Luke says the Pharisees and the scribes were “grumbling”. Sadly, it’s a word that fits in way too accurately with our experiences of congregational life.  And when grumbling escalates, a sheep that was a present-and-accounted-for sheep decides that since the shepherd gives the most attention to the lost sheep, it’s going to go get lost.  You can see the logic, but it doesn’t make the flock safer.

The other side of this question is what happens out there wherever the shepherd finds the lost sheep.  Or tries to. What if that lost sheep prefers to be chased than found?  What if that lost sheep picked its way down into a rocky crevice and got its hoof stuck, in a place the shepherd can’t even safely climb to?  What if that sheep waits for the shepherd to almost catch up, and then gallops further ahead as if the shepherd has no other sheep to attend to? Is there a point at which the shepherd should stop chasing and just wait for the sheep to decide to come home? Are there times when we are tempted to abuse this parable to imply that the shepherd has to keep looking for us, no matter how hard we’re working to avoid being found?  Like last week’s metaphor of the Master Potter and the clay, this concept of ourselves as sheep offers us an easy out, a reliance on Jesus that asks almost nothing of us.  But to lean too hard in that direction is an abuse of the parable.

For three weeks now, I’ve been preaching on our need to cultivate spiritual maturity.  I am convinced that in this moment of our growth as a congregation, spiritual maturity – growing up in every way into Christ, as we called it two weeks ago – is our most important focus.  In our flock gatherings, we talked about our responsibility for developing our own sense of belonging and helping others feel that they belong.  This image of the shepherd being able to leave the 99 in the wilderness and count on them to be okay is a good example of what that looks like.  It’s when we refuse to accept that we belong that we start to act out like a sheep going astray in order to get the pastor’s attention. As we move toward spiritual maturity, we are more able to recognize that we are part of the community without constant attending to, and we’re even able to help search for those who have wandered off.

So we’ve seen that there are appropriate uses of this parable that help us ensure our focus as a congregation is adequately directed beyond ourselves and abuses of this parable that tempt us to demand attention by acting out in ways that deny our identity as part of the flock and insist that the responsibility for drawing us back in lies entirely with someone else.  How do we grow toward living out our role in those dynamics faithfully?

To explore that question, I want to leave the sheep behind and look at the second parable, about the woman who lost her coin.  If we’re imagining the coin as a dime, we might not fully comprehend the weight of the drama here.  Let’s think, instead, of that coin representing one-tenth of the woman’s resources.  That makes clear what the stakes are here.  Finding that coin is supremely important.  So who are we in this scenario?  If we’re using the same assumptions we used with the sheep, we must be the coin.  But if we’re trying to find lessons that encourage spiritual maturity, it might be more helpful to imagine ourselves as the woman and all the coins put together.  Or more precisely, we are the woman and the coins are the different parts of our souls, some more hidden than others.

With this frame, we are invited to remember that God wants us to bring our whole selves into our relationship with Jesus.  If we’ve stuffed certain parts of our hearts or our history under the bed, pretending they’re not part of who we are, we can’t be in relationship with God as our whole being. Like the woman in the story, we’re invited to light a lamp in our hearts and sweep out all the corners and search carefully to make sure we’re bringing every part of who we are.  We may find things we’d forgotten about.  We may think we know what we’re going to find, and then find other things we didn’t expect.  There may be things under that bed that we’d rather not face.  But did you hear what Jesus said?  It’s when we bring the lost parts of our souls into our relationship with God that the angels truly rejoice.

One of the many honest approaches to scripture is to hear the story the way it’s told, recognizing how the context sets limits on how we use it.  This encourages us to admit we may be more like the Pharisees and scribes than the lost sheep in the story.  But another way to approach scripture faithfully is to employ our imaginations and open the parable up wider, allowing us to recognize ourselves in the coins and the woman with the broom.  It’s only when we try to use scripture to justify our own bad behavior that we veer into abuse rather than use.  Don’t pretend to be a lost sheep when you aren’t really, just because you want to be the main character.

Yes, Jesus will come looking for us.  But we are not helpless in that search.  We have lamps.  We have brooms.  We have a community that is waiting to rejoice with us when the lost parts of our souls are restored.  As we “grow up in every way into Christ,” we will be more and more able to join Jesus in seeking out the lost things – in others and in ourselves – by the power of God’s love.  Alleluia and Amen!