September 11, 2022: May God’s words be spoken, may God’s words be heard. Amen.
It would seem a lot of things get lost these days. I say that because I can’t seem to find my keys anywhere, but had I put an Apple air tag on them…well, I might have had a chance. The fact that there are a lot of these things around now – things you can put on your keys for example that will send an alert to tell you where they are, chips that can go in your car, or even in your pet – would seem to indicate that we are really good at losing things.
We are also good at being lost ourselves.
No, I am not talking here about the need for GPS devices, though again – way cool! I have to say though that sometimes I just like to torment the GPS voice into repeating over and over “Rerouting…rerouting…rerouting.” I expect one day to hear my GPS say “Listen, you idiot, if you aren’t going to follow my directions, than I quit!” I couldn’t blame it really. But in all seriousness, I am not talking about GPSs, or air tags, or apps. I am talking about what Jesus is telling us in the passage from the Gospel of Luke we heard today.
In the gospel, Jesus tells us that a shepherd, having lost one of his 100 sheep, leaves the 99 in search of the lost, and rejoices once the sheep is found. Now, generally, who do we think Jesus was talking about as the shepherd? God. Right? Jesus is giving us another analogy for the how the kin-dom of God works. Jesus then continues and tells the story of the woman with 10 coins, who realizing one is lost, searches the house until she finds it, and then rejoices with her friends over finding it. So, if the shepherd is God (or Jesus)… then the woman is…?
This twin set of shepherd and woman searching for something lost is both a masculine and a feminine image for God. Kinda cool when you think about it, and makes sense, given that we are all created in God’s image. But while that isn’t the underlying message I want to focus on today, I will always point it out because of our continued patriarchy in the church, as a reminder that God is not a boy’s name.
Getting back to the parables themselves, the thing about this whole lost and found stuff is that, while we like to think we are the found ones, many of us are really lost. We are all lost – from the moment we are born really. That is why there are so many seekers in the world…all of us are here, not because we have all the answers, but because we know we don’t, and we are seeking to find something…to find ourselves and our place in the grand scheme of creation. It is part of our very human condition. It is also not something that gets fixed somehow for all time. We don’t get found, and then never lost again. If only life were that easy.
Now, there are the very real times in our life when we are actually lost – can’t find our way to wherever we are hoping to go. But for all of us, it is the metaphorical loss that is at work in our lives – times when what we want most of all is to find our way out – out of depression, out of addiction, out of loneliness, out of despair, out of grief, out of poverty, out of oppression.
We may also feel lost in jobs that pay the bills, but leave us worn out or unfulfilled. We may feel lost in the constant shuffle of life as a parent. We may feel lost as a senior, struggling to know who we are now after retirement and how to live on meager savings. We may feel lost as kid in school trying so hard to fit in, but seeming not to, or perhaps worse – fitting in, but not being who we truly are. We feel lost when someone we love has died – who are we now without them, and how will we ever survive (if we even want to). We felt lost a bit during the pandemic – or at least not connected in the way we once were.
And we all felt lost 21 years ago this very morning of 9/11 – what was next, are we safe, what does this all mean, where are you God?
People often come to a place of spiritual seeking in these lost times – to churches, or synagogues, or mosques, or temples, or out in the woods, or to the ocean, or on a vision quest…and that is one of the things these places are for. On 9/11, as I watched the smoke rise from the towers, my thoughts went back to my own experience of walking into the North Tower in 1993 as the terrorist bomb went off – thinking about what it was supposed to have done even then. Like so many of you, I traveled those buildings nearly every day at one point in my life. And so, on 9/11, along with many of you, horrified, and filled with grief, I sought refuge in the church, in scripture, and in Christ Jesus – and I found it.
But sometimes it is the church or synagogue, temple or mosque that is the source of our disorientation – or more to the point – that it is not the individual that is lost – but the religious institution. Because being lost is in a very real sense the degree to which we are disoriented from feeling God’s love and sharing that with the world, and that disorientation can, and has, sometimes come from the church – the very place where we hope to feel found.
On this day, 21 years ago, many people in this area lost someone we knew, someone we loved, and we lost something else too – a sense of security. We also found things – about ourselves – about our ability to come together, to rebuild, and sadly, to direct our anger in hateful ways towards the Muslim community. We also found out about heroes of that day. I want to share with you a story about one of them.
He was born Robert Emmit Judge, and he died Victim 0001, but known to the firefighters he served as Father Mychal Judge, Chaplain to the NYFD. A Franciscan priest, “Judge, then 68, clad in a white firefighters’ helmet and black coat, remained in the lobby and mezzanine of the Trade Center’s North Tower, praying for firefighters who rushed past him and up the stairs of the wounded building and for office workers plunging to their deaths outside…When the nearby South Tower collapsed, Judge was killed by the tsunami of rubble that burst into the North Tower lobby. The photo of his lifeless body being carried from the rubble by grief-stricken emergency workers has been compared to Michelangelo’s “Pieta.”[1]
Fr. Mychal was a prayerful man whose ministry in the world did not begin on 9/11, but
was well known in New Jersey and New York. When others would not care for those with HIV/AIDS, Fr. Mychal held them in his arms. He was a visible presence in communities, literally giving the coat off his back to a stranger in need. And he managed to connect to people of divergent views – something some might call miraculous in these days.
Since his death on 9/11, there has been a move to canonize him as a saint of the church. He would seem a worthy candidate – taking up his cross to follow Jesus, laying down his life for others in Christ’s name. Yet, there is a slight hiccup because…Fr. Mychal was gay. He was not out to others, but his diaries were clear, and those closest to him knew it too. While the Roman Catholic church appears to be evolving and with it, pursuing the possibility of Fr. Mychal’s sainthood, it may be a very long road for those who support his canonization. Yet…even that the dialog is happening is a cause for rejoicing.
I share this story with all of you that we might ask a question in response to these parables. Who exactly is lost in the parables? Who was Jesus speaking to? See, we should know by now that whenever Jesus is giving us an example of things, that he is generally not telling us what we expect to hear. Not this table over-turning, temple leader smack-downing, holiness code breaking, itinerant rebel preacher & miracle worker that is our Savior. Nope – Jesus was all about flipping over expectations of society then and now, and perhaps he is doing it again here in these parables.
Through the centuries, we have come to think it was these outcasts that Jesus was being accused by the temple leaders of hanging out with – the tax collectors and so-called sinners – that they were the lost whom the great shepherd, Jesus, was searching for and found. The text certainly supports that too. But perhaps it wasn’t what Jesus was saying, or at least not all of it.
Jesus generally had a sneaky way of speaking on more than one level – the text and the sub-text – and given his life and ministry, let’s take a different approach. Perhaps it was those who accused him – the ones who derided him for being with “those” people. The “insiders” of the faith themselves who had become lost. And before we point fingers back at those Pharisees and Scribes, through the centuries, insiders of our own faith have often been as lost as they, perhaps even more so. The church universal has had a sad history of pushing people out – LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and women. It is the worst kind of lost-ness too – when you don’t even know you are lost. When you are standing among the 99 in your self-righteous pasture assuming you are the found ones, while Jesus goes to the one we have pushed aside.
Yet God, through the centuries, is always searching for us, yearning for us to open our eyes to see Christ, our shepherd, there beside us, hoping to lift us up out of the pit we have sometimes willing dived into. And with a very good reason too – because God intends to use us for God’s purpose, not for our own.
In both the parables there is rejoicing when all are united, but it is in the parable of the woman and the coin, where we really get a sense of what happens next – because in the end – she will spend it! She calls together others to celebrate, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine that some coins are used to buy food and drink for just that purpose. For these two parables are connected to a third – that of the lost son – where the celebration is a feast of joy.
And here’s the thing – God does the same with us!
We are never without purpose, we just sometimes lose our way. God finds us, and uses us. Uses us to find the lost, to proclaim that all are beloved children of God, all parts of creation are special, unique, beautiful in their own right, and precious to God. Uses us to let it be known throughout the world that all creatures of the sea, the air, the land – the plants and the earth – they are precious to God too. Uses us to build that dream of God for us all – the Beloved Community.
This is how God uses us when we are found (or really when we just open our eyes to see Christ the Shepherd always standing beside us). God uses us to proclaim this good news – to ourselves, to one another, and to the world. It is our purpose to be spent by God– to fight for justice, to work for peace, to share God’s love unconditionally, and with the joy of the shepherd who has found something so precious, to rejoice. For we have much to celebrate! We have found that we are deeply loved – just as we are, and we have a great purpose in life – to share that love far and wide.
As we consider all of this, I want to share with you a prayer written by Fr. Mychal, that many who admire his servant ministry and social justice gospel witness, have come to hold close to their hearts. “Lord, take me where You want me to go; Let me meet who You want me to meet. Tell me what You want me to say. And keep me out of Your way. Amen.”
May we, like Fr. Mychal, follow our great shepherd, to go where He goes, to seek and to be found, to love and to be loved, to be the people of the Way, and not the ones in the way.
For then there truly will be joy in the presence of angels in heaven, and all the world will rejoice!
Amen.
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[1] https://www.northjersey.com/in-depth/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2021/09/10/father-mychal-judge-911-attacks-fdny-catholic-saint/4939813001/
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
September 11, 2022
Pentecost 14 – Year C – Proper 19 – Track 1
1st Reading – Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
2nd Reading – 1 Timothy 1:12-17
Gospel – Luke 15:1-10
