Today the lectionary, our calendar of readings, brings us two well-known and important parables of Jesus: the lost sheep and the lost coin. But there’s a third parable that completes the set – the story known as the Prodigal Son. The lectionary breaks them up; we got that one in Lent earlier this year. But in Luke’s Gospel, it follows these two simpler stories. It’s printed in the Sunday Supplement for those who may not know it! In brief: there’s a man with two sons. The younger one demands his share of his father’s wealth, then leaves home and wastes the money on profligate living. When he’s flat broke, friendless, and feeding pigs for a living, he realizes that he could just go home. He thinks, “Even if Dad makes me live like one of the farmhands, I’d be better off than I am now.” So he heads for home, rehearsing his apology speech as he goes. His father sees him coming and RUNS to embrace him. The son starts his little speech: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you… But the father isn’t listening; he’s giving the servants orders to throw a party. Soon everyone’s celebrating – except the older son. He’s coming in from working in the fields when he hears music. When he finds out what’s going on, he’s furious. His father comes out to talk to him. The older son says, I’ve been working like a slave for you for all these years, and you’ve never held a party for me, but you do THIS for that irresponsible scumbag? And the father says, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.
It’s a complicated story; there’s a lot going on! But we grappled with some of that back in March. Today we’re looking at the set of three lost and found stories that appear here together – only in the Gospel of Luke. The similarities are obvious. Something or someone is lost – a sheep, a coin, a son. Someone is seeking what is lost – the shepherd, a woman, a father who stands on the road scanning the horizon.
And when the sheep, the coin, the son is found – there’s a celebration. A party! The shepherd brings home the wandering sheep, and calls together his friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost!” The woman finds the coin, and she, too, calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” Surely the party costs more than the value of the lost coin! And the father tells the servants, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
I’ve heard, read, and preached sermons on these parables that focus on the straying, and the seeking. Back in March, a friend shared a sermon on the Prodigal Son story that focused on the celebrating. I’m going to share some of his insight today – from a sermon preached by Eric Biddy, rector of St. Paul’s, Augusta, Georgia. Eric writes, “Luke often gives some interpretation for a parable in the setting, the context, that comes just before. And here, the setting is scandalized religious folks. ‘All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Jesus tells three parables in response to their complaints… I think this context of offended religious folks can help us see that the first point of the parable is not the ways that we are prodigal or resentful [like the sons]. Rather, the first and main point of the story is about the scandalous love, mercy, and joy of God.”
Last week – just a few verses before this text – we heard Jesus say, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” and advising people to sit down and consider whether they really have what it takes to follow the way of Jesus.
Whether they’re ready for everything that it could cost them – family harmony, earthly wealth and security, even their lives. It’s a pretty big pivot from all that caution, to all these parties.
Yet these passages don’t clash, exactly. The invitation to join Jesus’ mission to seek and find the lost is deadly serious. Let’s peel away – if we can – the layers of religious rhetoric that treat lost as a shorthand for not Christian. Look at the people Jesus hangs around with: people who are pushed to the margins, seen as unimportant at best, unwanted and unclean at worst. For the sheep in the story, lost means alone and in danger from harsh terrain, weather, and predators. For the coin in the story, lost means that its value may never be seen and shared, that it won’t get to fulfill its purpose. For the sons in the story, lost means broken relationships, broken hearts, broken lives.
When those are the stakes, the risks, the costs – then of course you throw a party when lost is found. When danger finds safety, loneliness finds belonging, pointlessness finds purpose. Last week I said that following Jesus isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs and s’mores around the campfire. But sometimes it is!
Eric writes, “[God’s] constant love for us and for others saves us and unsettles us, but it also throws a party. And that party I think gives us another chance to locate ourselves in [the] story [of the two sons]. Because, sure, we are used to finding ourselves here as people who know we need mercy, or who resent the mercy given to others. But I think that we together, as the church, might be the party that God’s outrageous love throws, out of sheer delight of being with us. There is more here than just the salvation of individual souls. There is also a communal party that is a kind of spilling out of the father’s love and joy… At that party we are certainly not the father, the source of mercy and grace. We are the partiers, sharing and sharing in that mercy, love, and grace.”
Maybe last week and this week’s Gospel texts together invite us to hold two things together: both the seriousness and urgency of following the way of Jesus – and the possibility, indeed the responsibility, of joy.
There’s not much joy in today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of the prophet Jeremiah – or the Psalm that echoes its themes of intransigence and calamity. Writing this sermon, I pulled out the folder from my seminary Old Testament classes, twenty years ago, to remind myself of Jeremiah’s story.
Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry, speaking God’s words to God’s people, in a particularly tumultuous time for Judea and Jerusalem. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered; Judea has become a vassal state of the Assyria, under their authority, forced to send their wealth to feed the appetite of the empire. Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry in the year 627 before the time of Jesus. He preaches through the religious reforms of King Josiah, and Josiah’s death. Through the Babylonian Empire taking over from the Assyrians, and the installation of King Jehoiakim as a puppet king for Babylon. Jeremiah preaches through Jehoiakim’s rebellion against Babylon, his defeat and death, and the first deportation, when the Babylonians took most of the upper classes away from Judea to live in exile, with the intention of further subduing the territory. Jeremiah preaches through King Zedekiah’s rebellion against Babylon, through Babylon’s invasion of Judea and destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587, and through the second deportation, in which most of the surviving population are dragged away from their homeland, their holy land. Jeremiah himself is taken to Egypt by a small group of survivors, but continues to correspond with the exiles in Babylon.
My Old Testament professor, Ellen Davis, described Jeremiah as prophesying over Jerusalem as her night comes down. The looming destruction of Jerusalem and Judea – as we see it in the terrifying poetry of today’s reading – is the central theme of the first 30 chapters. The text is full of oracles of warning and judgment: Turn back now, return to God’s ways! Though Jeremiah seems to have little hope that this will happen, and rightly so.
In this passage, Jeremiah has a vision of the future – a vision that will be catastrophically fulfilled by Babylon’s invasion, years later: darkness, death, and desolation. Cities ruined, land abandoned and barren. A future that feels inevitable because the people and leaders are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.
The Psalm picks up that theme: The foolish have said in their hearts, “There is no God” – meaning, here, that it doesn’t matter what I do, because there’s no power, no moral standard, to hold me to account. All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; everyone has proved faithless; there is none who does good – no, not one.
There’s a kind of grace in encountering texts like this, sometimes – anybody else feel that? Because it makes us feel less alone in the chaos and bleakness of our times. When we feel untethered, unprotected, un-led – at least Jeremiah and the poet of this Psalm are right there with us?…
Later in Jeremiah’s work – after the worst has happened – there is a shift in tone, towards imagining a future for God’s people beyond destruction and exile. This part of the book is sometimes beautifully called the Book of Consolation. In a few weeks, we’ll hear about Jeremiah buying a field while Jerusalem is under siege – a gesture of absurd hope. We’ll hear Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles in Babylon: Live. Don’t give up. Your story isn’t over. It reminds me of a favorite line in a favorite song, Tom Rosenthal’s Throw the Fear: Keep watering the plants, love.
Keep watering the plants, love. A gentle invitation to keep putting one foot in front of another. Not exactly a party. But: not giving in to despair, either. Holding onto life, love, the possibility of joy. And there are passages in the Book of Consolation that do imagine future celebration – like these verses from chapters 31: “Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O daughter Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!”
Which is all just to say that the Book of Jeremiah is one great big lost and found story. God’s people had wandered off like that wayward sheep: torn by thorns, menaced by lions and wolves, endangered by storms and the harsh, stony landscape itself. Lost.
But God does not forget them.
God seeks them out, and promises to bring them home.
God throws a party.
Eric Biddy writes, “…This is what it means to be members of the party that is the church. We are not those who have lived so righteously that we have deserved an [invitation]… We are those who were dead and have come to life again, to share in the scandalous joy and mercy that has brought us back to life, and to new and deeper life.To be a community made by this outrageous grace of God makes us a little odd. It should mean that at times our convictions and habits surprise and affront some of our neighbors. Because it means that we live by the currency of mercy, rather than esteem; of forgiveness rather than debt; of hope rather than reputation. It means that we think by the logic of resurrection, where what has seemed dead can come to life as long as the love of God keeps spilling out of all the containers within which we try to enclose it.”
There are a lot of metaphors for the church – the local parish church like this one, or the capital-C Church, the whole messy body of Christ’s people throughout the world. Maybe the church is like a family, or a household. The church is like a city, or a building, or a ship.
I’m taken by this idea of the church as a party. An ongoing celebration. Rejoice with me! Because somebody or something lost is always being found. And part of what attracts me about this idea is how strange and challenging it feels to think of church as a party, church as a place for the intentional cultivation of joy, when we’re living through such difficult times. When we’ve lived through a difficult freaking week! Is it OK to laugh? To be playful? To be planning parties and talent shows and community meals?
I think it’s okay, and more than okay. I think it’s necessary. My smart friend Kyle Oliver says, Joy is a catalyst for change, not a reward. Louie Crew, who spent decades patiently nudging the Episcopal Church towards inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks, lived by the motto, Joy anyway! Alongside the undoubted seriousness of striving to follow Jesus in difficult times, we need joy. We need the release of laughter, the comfort of friendly companionship. We need to feel cared for and celebrated, and we need opportunities to care for and celebrate others. We need the work that joy does inside us and among us.
Eric concludes, “We have been brought back to life whether we deserved it or not, and we keep hoping for the same among others, even our enemies, whether they deserve it or not.”
We have to celebrate and rejoice, because what was lost has been found.
Joy anyway, beloveds.
Amen.