Father Peter F. Hansen
Sermon for the 3 rd Sunday after Trinity
June 27, 2004
“ What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”
Ninety-nine sheep stay together, but one goes off and gets lost. The good shepherd is one who knows that, even with so many sheep milling about, someone is missing . He is so concerned that he will leave the flock where it is and seek until he finds his lost sheep.
There are lost sheep today. There are plenty of them . There are so many of them, as a matter of fact, that you fall over them in your own living room. Lost sheep don't become lost anymore by going off and never being heard from again. They can be lost right here in the center of our city. And while we may know their address, their cell phone number, their place of business and most of their friends; yet are they lost to us, lost to themselves, and worst of all, lost to God.
God's attitude : find them. Seek them out. Rescue the lost sheep . He is the good shepherd and He knows His sheep. He's not willing to let the wolf get them. He's not content to know they will probably fall off a cliff. As lost as they are, He loves them and wants them back, back to safety, back to life, back to Himself.
The rest of the sheep don't have the shepherd's attitude most of the time. They stay together and graze the same field for the sake of their own safety. That's the one way in which they have sense. Safety usually is found with the herd, found in numbers. People all doing the same thing must be right . But that's not necessarily so: just ask the lemmings . The sheep may all stay together and yet be where the shepherd doesn't want them to go. The sheep may follow the wrong shepherd as he comes along to steal the flock. They may stay together in the right flock, but among themselves is bickering, biting, jealousy, enmity and strife. Being in the flock doesn't solve everything. But it is safer.
The sheep who stay with the flock resent the lost sheep. Their shepherd seems to spend altogether too much time on them. He's always having to stop the entire procession and leave them while he goes off to find the lost sheep… again ! The lost sheep attract wolves and further endanger the good sheep. “Why not just let him straggle off and be killed, anyway? He doesn't want to go with us, does he? Let him perish. Better to save the 99 and lose the one than to endanger the entire flock.” So we hear the fearful flock muttering about the lost sheep. Their hearts are not in the right place.
We hear the voices and see the lifestyles of the lost sheep as well. Their hearts are for wandering, for leaving, for going any other path alone. The lost sheep doesn't understand the danger. He thinks he's found something for himself that's better than what the flock is doing. He sees their hatred and hears their resentment and it confirms in him why he went his own way.
We see people in the supermarket, on sidewalks, in the park, in restaurants and in our schools who are different from us and who apparently are headed the wrong way. I know a man named Jerry. His beard, stringy grey hair, sunken cheeks, withered body and weary look only begin to tell the story. Old Jerry has tattoos up and down his arms. These pictures drawn in his skin tell where Jerry's been. Jerry's been to prison . Jerry can't get a job now, because his convict status and the tales told on his arms frighten people. Besides, he's homeless and shiftless and undisciplined. He can't guarantee that he can get up at any certain hour of the day. He sleeps under a bridge over Chico Creek. Occasionally he scores some soap and gives himself a bath. More often, he manages to get some drugs and blasts himself off the planet for a while . People look at him strangely. There is fear in their eyes. Maybe they give him money so he will leave them alone. But they're fearful because he might be a wolf in sheep's clothing. He is certainly not with this flock . He refuses to join any program, any shelter where the discipline of work and Bible study and rules apply. God loves him, but he doesn't believe it. He's lost. He's a lost sheep . The shepherd has been chasing him for years now. Before Jerry dies, Jesus, the good shepherd, may just gather Jerry up and bring him home at last . Don't hate Jerry. God doesn't hate him, but loves His lost sheep.
You see them gathering in the park: the young, the restless, the disenchanted. They may take drugs, or just ride skateboards everywhere, or wear black clothes or baggy pants and chrome-plated chains on their wallets. They may pierce themselves and wear cheap jewelry on their faces and navels. They may get a tattoo, or dye their hair, or shave their head. They've heard weird stories about spiritual things, followed strange paths into parlors where psychics and so-called healers were floating around in clouds of incense. The follow whatever makes them feel alive now. Pain lets you know you're alive . Even being in bad trouble lets you know your life matters. Getting arrested can be a mark of courage—and gives you someone to hate . Their parents have given up on them, or led them to this passage by their own lost lives. Strange gods rise and demand appeasement. Strange appetites must be fed. Strange lives and the loud signals given by these wandering orphans make room for themselves as they plow through the flock of normal sheep and laugh to see the surprise on the faces of others . They turn radios up louder and the harsh sounds of hate drive the flock away. These young, these punks — as they call themselves —are our children. God doesn't hate them. They are just lost sheep. God loves them and wants them back. Will He be able to save them before it's too late?
His memories of his father are painful. Mom's been the only dependable one in his life, but she's sometimes hard on him. He loved his father, but he couldn't respect him. He is growing more and more like her . One day he lets his nagging thoughts break through to his conscious mind: “I'm gay. I don't feel about women like other guys do. Some of my friends seem to feel the same. I'm different than the jocks. I don't like the way they treat women, the way they talk about them, anyway. What kind of example is that? If being straight is being like my father, like so many callous-hearted guys. I'll be different. I'll be gay.” He begins, imperceptibly; to dress in a new way, to wear things in order to signal the change in him, to see what it brings to him. In so many cases, the break-through event for such a boy was an older man who showed him the only kindness any male ever did, but which led him into this kind of life. As he emerges within the flock as one sexually-oriented differently, he looks for reactions, and gets a few stares, and he is confirmed in feeling alienated. So he takes steps to be what he has imagined himself to be. “God's Bible, God's people, must have it wrong. God must love me, and so He must have made me this way,” or so he reasons.
Our society is reeling from the demands on us to accommodate differing lifestyles. In less than 2 weeks, the Senate will vote on a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman— a defense against the oncoming legal fiction of homosexual marriage . The fear and its attending language is rising with disgust by the flock that such a lifestyle could be mainstreamed. The arguments are, for the greater part, justified. Legalizing homosexual marriage is not about allowing two same-sex persons to live together and even consider themselves life-partners. That they can already do. It is about a legal demand that you and I call them “ married ,” and that all the machinery of our society: police, county records, tax codes, schools, churches, apartment owners, and boy scouts m ust regard such a union as equivalent to a married heterosexual couple . And it is something far worse: it is the ultimate achievement in a campaign to gain access to children. It mustn't succeed. The Congress will have to act to protect the flock.
But protect it against, not wolves, not aliens, not monsters : but lost sheep. The good shepherd is seeking them still. The flock can be fearful, resentful and mean—and drive the lost sheep out again, even after he is found. Or else, the flock can love the lost sheep, protect him even from his own waywardness, and let him feed with them.
Isaiah let the truth out, and now everybody knows it: “ All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him[self] the iniquity of us all.” Isaiah 53:6 There is no one good, not one. We have all been lost sheep, if you really tell the story the way it is. I once was lost, but now I'm found; was blind, but now I see.
The devil, like a roaring lion, walks around the perimeter of the flock, seeking stragglers, looking for lost lambs unattended, sheep rejected by the flock, at the moment unsought for by the shepherd. If God is joyful, and all heaven rejoices, whenever one sinner repents and is saved from his waywardness, rescued from that lion, even more than the joy God feels over the continued safety of the greater flock, why can't we be joyful, even willing, to seek and save the lost sheep of our wayward culture? The homeless convict, the young skateboard addict, the homosexual, the college professor, the store clerk, the mail carrier, the family next door, the people from your former church. Why is it that only about 5% of Chico is in church this morning? Where are the 95? Why is the flock so small? We have to seek, we have to make room, we have to love, we have to join God in His work. The good shepherd comes returning with a lamb upon His shoulders. It was lost, but now He has found it. Rejoice with heaven over a lost sheep that is found.
PFH+