In today’s reading from Luke, we hear the parable of the lost sheep. It’s about losing, seeking and finding, and it’s also about joy. We know I’m sure what it feels like to lose something precious to us. And we know what it feels like to be lost. But we, as Christian believers, also know what it’s like to possess something that can never be lost, and that’s the love of Jesus. And we know that, no matter where we are, we can never be lost, because we follow the good Shepherd. We are blessed in this understanding.
The Pharisees criticised Jesus because he mixed with people they called sinners. According to the standards of the Pharisees, sinners were those who lived contrary to their interpretations of the law; and this kind of godliness was not easy to achieve for most people. Sinners were people like tax collectors, and prostitutes, who were looked down upon, but sinners were also people who may have been ritually unclean, and who didn’t cross the t’s and dot the i’s with respect to the laws of Moses. People who did not, or could not follow these external observances, were out of the main stream, they were unconventional, and so they were shunned. They were put outside the temple by the hierarchy, alienated from their faith and the word of God. Even the beggars, the blind and the lame were looked at as being in a state of sin because it was thought that their problems were a punishment for something they’d done or something their parents did.
It was these people that Jesus came to rescue.
In Luke 5:32 Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” These outsiders didn’t have access to the word of God. Did they feel lost? For sure, that’s why they listened to Jesus. Without a guide, or directions, or a path to follow, they would have found themselves far from God. Jesus gave sinners directions back to God, back to the faith from which they had become estranged, often through no fault of their own. These sinners weren’t bad people, they just didn’t know where they were in relation to where they needed to be. They needed to be in a place of love, belonging, safety, comfort, and spiritual satisfaction, things that the temple authorities couldn’t give them. They were a long way from home.
A sheep when it’s lost is vulnerable. Because while it’s wandering in foreign territory it can stumble, and hurt itself. And this is what was happening to the sinners; they were at risk of doing damage to themselves, through addiction, self abuse, or just being with the wrong people, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the time they were hurting themselves more than they were hurting others. Jesus himself is the shepherd in this parable. He went after the lost sheep of Israel, he went outside of the temple, to where these people lived and gathered; this is what upset the Pharisees. He saw so many who needed to be put back on the right track, so that they could stay safe and be saved. Jesus was there to show them the way to where they needed to be. No one else was going to do it. When people understood and accepted the words of Jesus, they could say, “yes this is where I am, and I know where I need to be, and how to get there.” Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And how happy would Jesus have been if even just one of these lost people looked to him and followed him.
These days, being called a sheep is a negative thing. “Sheeple” is a current term for people who follow the crowd without thinking. And this may be true in many cases, some people agree with things that they don’t understand simply because everyone else is thinking a certain way. Christians often, unjustly, get lumped into this category; we’re accused of not thinking for ourselves, believing blindly in dogma, or being brainwashed… we’ve heard it all before. This is because we follow one faith and have a united belief, and because we have a regard for, and a loyalty towards each other, because we have feelings that are motivated by this set of values and beliefs. Personally, with Jesus as my shepherd, I’m super happy to be one of his sheep. But this idea of the primacy of independent thinking and uniqueness for its own sake can be detrimental. I’ve noticed that these days, everything is about the individual. If you have an online account, it’s called my this or my that. I go to Mysawater to pay my water bill. It’s a bit ridiculous really. Everything these days is about I and me, not we or us. Advertisers, the media, you name it, want you to think that you are the most important person on the planet and your opinion, wants and intentions are supreme. Sharing common beliefs and submitting oneself to a higher power, is incompatible with this trend. I think this trend is a type of toxic autonomy, and it shuts people off from true communion with others, and God. If everything is about an individual’s ideas, wants and desires, then where is the regard for what other people think or feel? In the end if people are only motivated and driven by their own sense of self, the end result is social breakdown.
A few minutes scrolling through Facebook will demonstrate this, so many posts involve people arguing with each other over whose opinion is right; and it’s the ego, the self, that pushes them to enter into these conflicts. If a person’s direction points only inwards, and not outwards to God and others, then this is no direction at all. We find ourselves dealing with a lost generation. It’s similar to the generation of men and women who came of age during the Great War; the following years, the roaring twenties, for many, were empty, materialistic and decadent. The author F Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this social enviroment in his novel The Great Gatsby. Many were disillusioned and had nothing to believe in, so they ended up living moment to moment, in the pursuit of pleasure or the next high.
Jesus actively sought out the lost generation of Judea, those who found themselves cut off from the roots of their faith. He actively went out looking for them, he went to where they were. I don’t think he preached to them like he preached in the temple. He ate and drank with them, he just talked to them, one on one. That’s how he connected; why would these outsiders trust a conventional rabbi or priest? After all, the temple priests were the sort of people that kept them on the outer. But they trusted Jesus because he wanted to be with them, to share their lives and to show them that they were indeed worthy. Some were exceptional witnesses: Matthew the tax collector, a prime example, Mary Magdalene, demon possessed and shunned, another one. And how important to Jesus’ ministry did these outsiders become, and how important to us in this present age. God bless Matthew and God bless Mary.
Jesus goes after his lost sheep, with an urgency and drive that is unparalleled. He doesn’t stop until he finds them. I know what it’s like when your child is lost and you can’t find him. This happened to me at a Christmas pageant many years ago. We were there with the school and our kids were going to be in the parade, so the teachers took them off to get organised, and we waited down the road for the pageant to come round. It was all taking a long time so we went around the corner to check on them but we couldn’t find our middle son, we didn’t know it, but a teacher had taken him to a different area with another group. We couldn’t see him anywhere. Panic is too mild a word to express how we felt, frantic is a better one. We found him about twenty minutes or so later. I think I must have aged about ten years that day. And I’ll never forget how relieved I was when we found him.
I imagine that’s how Jesus feels when he loses one of us. He loves us all with an intensity we can only imagine, he’s frantic to find us when we go astray. He is the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, and he’s never going to give up until all his sheep are back home and cared for, out of danger from the snares and pitfalls, back in community with their fellow sheep. Sheep aren’t the smartest of creatures and if they get lost they’re not going to use logic or problem solving to find their way back. Someone has to go and get them. We’re smarter than sheep, but we can still lose our way, or be led in the wrong direction. Sometimes we need someone to come and get us. It’s not unusual for people at some stage in their lives to experience doubt, loneliness, fear and isolation, in some form or other. Sometimes people make the wrong decision in life, they zig when they should have zagged. People drift away from God and they’re left with an emptiness; some people fill the vacuum with drugs or alcohol, sometimes it’s reckless behaviour and thrill seeking. But in the end this emptiness can only be filled by one thing, the love of Jesus Christ.
Jesus said, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” To repent means to turn around, and to change one’s behavior for the better. It means to turn back to God. Jesus preached that salvation comes with repentance. Repentance however is a choice, and many continue to ignore the calls of the Shepherd and continue to do harm to themselves and to others. Jesus said that even if only one person turned to God, how much joy would there be, how much relief would there be; so we can see that it’s not easy to turn the unrepentant around. But Jesus is always there, actively calling out to his lost sheep, reaching out to people in their darkness. There is always this constant: the unconditional love and acceptance that God offers, and which was made manifest in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Because we have decided to follow Jesus and to serve him always, we have our own parts to play in his saving work. The way that we serve Jesus in his role as the Good Shepherd is to keep the lost sheep in our hearts and minds, and to be an example of what it’s like to have direction and true lasting joy. Many of us have lost sheep in our own lives, some of them close and dear to us, who are far from Jesus, who have lost their way, alienated and suffering, with empty hearts and empty lives, anxious and without purpose and direction. We need to pray, pray always, just as Paul told us, pray unceasingly, for the lost sheep of God to go to Jesus, back to the Shepherd, the source of all meaning and comfort. This we pray in his holy name, Amen.
Before I continue with today’s service, I’d like to talk a bit about something that’s concerning me, and something that we can keep in mind during our prayer for others. I’d like us to spare a moment to consider the shocking situation of gun violence in America. Shootings are now the number one killer of children and teens in the United States. I won’t go into the details of specific cases because news sources are covering all of it, but I feel that we need to keep the victims and their families in our prayers, and pray also for an end to the hate and the evil that is cutting down innocent lives. In dark times Jesus is our hope. In John 16:33 he tells us:
I have said these things to you so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
Tell Out My Soul 
Leave a comment