Sermon
Text – Luke 15: 1-10
A few weeks ago, our three-year-old son had one of his
first really vivid nightmares. He was walking from his room to ours in the
middle of the night and took a wrong turn, getting lost in our hallway. He
called out “Daddy! Daddy!” and when David found him, he was hysterical. He
explained to us the next morning that he had been all alone, lost, and was
looking for us everywhere but couldn’t find us.
I told him that the dream sounded really scary. And I
reassured him that, in real life, I would never let him get lost. That I would
always know just where to find him and that we would always be together. Of
course, as I heard the words coming out of my mouth I suddenly realized that
these promises are not within my power to make.
People do lose each other. Parents lose their children – just
like those parents who lost their beloved children fifty years ago today in
Birmingham. So as I started to tear up at the thought of anything ever
separating me from my beloved children, I caught myself and tried to suck my
waterworks back inside. The poor kid was already scared from his dream. The
last thing he needed was me telling him that he actually COULD get lost, right?
I found myself relying on my Christian faith to bring me
back from a full-scale panic attack. All these years of going to church and
studying the Bible came to my rescue. And I was able to tell him something
really true. I was able to make a promise that is not mine to keep, but that I
know will absolutely be kept.
I told him that one of the truest things I know about God
is that God is the Greek Seeker. God will never allow us to be lost. We are
always found with God. We are never alone, even though we might feel like it
sometimes.
And I told him this passage from Luke. I told him that one
of the reasons I know God never loses a game of hide and seek is because Jesus
teaches about the persistence of God with these two parables. The shepherd
loses one sheep, but goes out to find that sheep and return her to the fold.
The woman loses one of her coins, but spends all night sweeping and shining a
light until she finds it. And that’s what God is like. Always seeking. Always
shining. Never allowing us to be lost.
This is why I keep coming to church, folks. This is why
I’m a Christian. Because when life gets big and scary and I realize just how
little control I have over everything around me, I need stories like the ones
Jesus tells today. They are what keep me glued together. They are the stories I
tell myself so I can get out of bed in the morning and keep putting one foot in
front of the other. And I am hoping that these stories will one day become my
children’s stories, too. Because if my child – God forbid – was ever lost, I
would want him to know – deep in his bones – that he can never be lost from
God. That he is never alone. These are truths I want him to carry within his
heart all the days of his life.
A God that seeks the lost. A God that shines a light in
the darkness to find one who has gone missing.
This is the God we, the Church, are called to proclaim. It
is the God that Jesus worshiped. It is our story to believe and to tell. More
importantly, perhaps, it is our story to live.
We are called to be a church that proclaims the One who
seeks and shines. But we are also called to be a church that actively seeks and
shines ourselves.
On the Sunday when we celebrate the five-year anniversary
of our communal commitment to being fully open, welcoming, and affirming these
parables seem especially relevant to our shared work.
Being open, welcoming, affirming is about even more than
welcoming gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people into our fold. For
starters, it is about a much bigger group of people than those who identify as
LGBT. Our covenant says, “we believe that God’s spirit calls us to
embrace diversity fully in our congregation and community and to affirm the
dignity and worth of every person without regard to race, sex, gender, age,
sexual orientation, faith, nationality, ethnicity, economic or marital status,
or physical, mental, or emotional disability.”
That’s a whole lotta folks, folks. It’s a covenant that
commits us to living out a gospel of radical hospitality and extravagant
welcome. I kind of wish our statement had an actual dot-dot-dot ellipsis in it,
too, because I just know that the statement will have to expand someday.
Because when we are saying we are called to affirm the
dignity and worth of every person – EVERY PERSON – that is a bigger group than
even our well-thought-out laundry list of “without regard tos” can cover. We do
not yet know who may become the “outsiders” of the future. We do not yet know who
we may need to faithfully name and claim ten or twenty years from now. But we
know that it will happen.
Being open, welcoming, and affirming is not a thing that
happened back on September 14, 2008. It is something we continue to live into
together every day of our shared lives. And it is a covenant that will continue
to expand as long as we are intentionally seeking to understand which people
society and the big-C Church have dismissed. And Jesus tells us this is where
our energy should be: seeking that one sheep who was lost.
Now, I do need to say that when I first read these
parables this week, my mind immediately went to what it means to be an open,
welcoming, and affirming church. Because I do think that so much of what we do
is invite those who are outside the fold for whatever reason to come in and
join with us as Church. Of course, the actual language used in Luke’s gospel
also talks about these lost folks as being sinners and I need you to hear me
loud-and-clear when I say that I’m not saying LGBT folks or mentally ill folks
or divorced folks or poor folks are sinners. Got it? Good.
I do think that, in Jesus’ time, labeling outsiders as
sinners was a convenient way to “Other-ize” them. It was an easy way for religious leaders to wash their hands of these lost
folks and put their energy elsewhere. This is, of course, what Jesus is trying
to argue against in this passage. He’s trying to convince those around him to
de-Other-ize those who have been kept out for so long. Now, I think we all know
that the modern day Church doesn’t have this outsiders-as-sinners problem,
right? Ha.
But even if we separate that loaded word of sinner out and
remember that Jesus is talking about Outsiders, those “Others” in his time and
place, we all still have so much to learn from these parables. Most of us are
Insiders in one way or another. And even if we don’t call our society’s Others
“sinners” we do have to continually work together as people of faith to
de-Otherize all of God’s children.
“What on earth is the preacher getting at here? She’s lost
me.”
Let me break it down for you with some real examples:
When we say we welcome GLBT people fully, that is a great
start. When we shift the conversation to a broader one about human sexuality
and gender identity, that’s better.
Because, of course, if “we” are welcoming LGBT people it
means “they” are the Other. Of course, the reality is, all of us – gay,
straight, trans, or cis – have a sexual orientation and a gender identity. By
the way, I recognize not everyone here may recognize the term “cis.” Cisgender
is basically when your gender identity matches up with your biological sex. So
if you are biologically a man and you identify as a male then you are
cis-gender because your sex and gender match up.
Vocabulary lesson over. But it’s an important vocabulary
word to know. Understanding these words is just one important way we can shine
a light into the corners. Make the invisible visible. We can only talk about
things when we have the words to do so. And I, as a cis-person, operate from a
position of great privilege. My reality is considered to be “the norm.” As a
person of gender-privilege, I can do a great deal to de-Otherize those who
identify as transgender, all-gender, or gender-queer by simply realizing and reflecting
on the fact that I have a gender identity. Being cisgender is a thing. It’s one
way of being gendered. It is not the only way. It’s not me and them. It’s all
of us recognizing that we all have gender identities.
How else can we de-Otherize?
Well, let’s look at race. Mostly-white churches often find
themselves stumped when they say aloud, “We wish we had more people of color
here. We would welcome them with open arms!” and then no people of color show
up. Or they do show up and they don’t stay.
But what many of these congregations fail to see is how
they live within a culture that is still dominated by white-ness and sees
white-ness as the “norm.” People of color are still Otherized. The message is
often, “you are welcome here – as long as you are interested in appropriating
our traditions, singing our songs, appreciating our art, doing things the way
we do them.” It takes a lot of work for people of all races to work together to
de-Otherize people of color in a society that still Otherizes them so very
much.
But I think it’s work that is worth doing. Because I think
that to step into the work of de-Otherizing is to take seriously what Jesus is
telling us here. It is to take a risk of being transformed. It is to walk every
more courageously towards a joy-filled life with a happy ending for those who
are seeking and those who have been lost along the way.
When we take seriously Jesus’s call to seek the lost and
shine a light into those dark corners, we discover that something deep within
us begins to shift. Our community is changed from a place where Outsiders are
welcomed in to a place where we are all Outsiders together. We all exist
together outside the “norm” that others find comfortable. We become the
misfits, the weird ones, the not-quite-good-enough ones.
I don’t know. Maybe this sounds scary to you. Maybe you
really want to be a part of the in group. There are days when I feel like that.
But then I remember these parables that Jesus told. You
know when the shepherd goes off in search of that one Other sheep – the lost
one – he is putting the other 99 sheep at risk. They could have wandered off or
been attacked. He risks the entire flock to go find that one sheep. It seems to
me that God is wildly in love with that one sheep. God so values the Other that
God is willing to risk those “normal” sheep to bring that one sheep back.
And when that one sheep gets back, I can only imagine that
she has stories to tell. Wild and fantastical stories about what it was like to
be lost. What is was like to be on the Outside looking in. And I can only
imagine that those stories, if properly heard, would begin to change the
majority. Those stories would shift the big group – ever so slightly.
In the Beloved Community – that ideal world that God
continues to dream for all of us – I have to believe there are no in-groups and
out-groups. No Outsiders to be de-Otherized at all. There are no found coins
and lost coins. There’s just us. Together. Whole. Beloved and Loving. Sought
and seeking. Seen and shining a light on others. Shifted and shifting those
around us.
We’ll get there someday. God’s never yet lost a game of
hide and seek.
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