Proper 19 Year C

I have missed a sermon or two...I will go back and track them down. I certainly did preach in August. Anyhow, this is my sermon from last week. An important and relevant detail is that it was homecoming. So many of the themes were about what it means to call St. Ann & the Holy Trinity home. I had a hard time figuring out how it might relate to these texts, but I did my very best.

Here are the readings: check them out! (also note we are using track b)

Way back, once upon a time, a long time ago, last spring we had an assignment from our Bishop to talk about how we do mission here at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity. A large group of people participated in this conversation--and talked at length about some of the work we do for our community. One of our wardens, Syd Farley, said something that day that is worth repeating today. In describing who we all are as a community, Syd said that we are an odd flock. It feels relevant this morning as we consider the shepherd and sheep in our Gospel passage. As an odd flock, we might understand that we are a congregation made up more of sinners and tax collectors than the average one. Being an odd flock means we are perhaps more likely to take in other odd balls--which does seem to be what Jesus is talking about this morning. Jesus is challenging his listeners then and now to consider what it means to be a community and what boundaries, if any, it has. Our identity is in part at least, that we are an odd flock, and that is a part of what it means to be this community.

            We are not the only odd ones that we encounter in our passage this morning. That shepherd is an odd shepherd. He leaves the 99 to go search for the one. I have to say, the shepherd is not really just an odd shepherd, he may even be a really bad shepherd. That seems like a really poor way to manage his heard. It's not logical to leave the 99 to go after the 1. This parable is easy enough to interpret as being about the persistence of God's love for  us. God--the odd shepherd--goes to the extreme to track down the one out on the margins. God's action is to seek out, and to restore. God finds the missing one, and God celebrates their return to the fold.

            We see who God is in this passage clearly, but who are we? We aren't really the missing sheep, because look around, we are home. As we read this passage on homecoming it has a little extra resonance. Homecoming for us tends to mean that we eat a meal together, and begin our fall season. It's back to school for our Sunday School kids who, having spent the summer doing crafts now return to learning about Bible stories. The choir is back, and what a blessing it is to have them as leaders in our worship once again. And homecoming means we go back to having two altar servers, and we use bells during the Eucharistic prayer. But more than those changes in schedule and personnel it indicates a return to our spiritual home. Many of you have indeed been here all summer. We are not the sort of congregation that spends their whole summer in the hamptons. No. We are the odd flock after all. What then might it mean to mark this Sunday and to think of this as a return home?

            First I suppose it might help to define home a bit. I suspect we all know what it means when we feel it. It might be a cozy feeling or a warm one. It might be related to a particular location, or might have to do more with particular people. It might rise up with in us when we smell a scent, or hear a piece of music. Home isn't always a good place. There are many of us who consider home a complicated or difficult place to be. But whether or not home is a positive or negative, it is familiar.

            For a very few of us here, St. Ann's is literally the church of our childhood, for a few more of us it is the Episcopal church more broadly that we joined as a child, and others of us have come more recently and made this our home more as adults. But regardless of when you first walked through these doors, I am willing to bet that if you've stuck around it is because something here felt familiar. Something here felt like home.

            There is a connection of home to childhood. Poet Maya Angelou, in an essay about what home is for her, talks about the home as something that a child creates in their mind and carries with them always. She writes, "Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parent, siblings and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen." Psychologists might tell you this is developmentally right, a child less than four understands themselves as the center of life, and thus home. The reality of home isn’t really what we are talking about when we are talking about home, but it is something imagined, something constructed. Though tht child understands itself as the only real inhabitant, I also remember that time when I suddenly realized that my home was not the only home. Perhaps said more clearly, there was this moment in elementary school when it suddenly became aparent to me that some of my friends did not know who The Beatles were. This was just pure blasphamy to young Sarah Kooperkamp, who could not understand what parents in their right minds would not expose their children to The Beatles on a regular basis. To me, at nine years old, it seemed that home was something universal, because my home included The Beatles, surely all homes would. Home is indeed highly subjective and filled with cultural particularlities. So then, how do we as a community all find this place to be home? And do we agree on what home might mean for us as a whole? We are after all an odd flock. And so I would say, we probably feel St. Ann’s is home for different reasons. We are a fairly diverse community in a number of different ways (racial, economic, gender). But through our Eucharistic meal we find a way of coming together, mindful of our differences, but respectful that we can all call this our home, and our community. It is our familar place, our remembered home. 

            The idea of the home as a familiar place also gets me turning back to our Gospel passage again. It is a familiar set of parables. Ones we know well. You all know about the shepherd, and that lost coin. We are perhaps familiar with this from childhood, and if you've been going to church for a while, I am willing to bet that you have both heard this passage before and have heard a sermon or two on it. The nature of our lectionary means we hear these parables every few years. And thus, in their familiarity, they become a little like home to us. Of course, there are many passages we hear over the course of our church lives, but it is not all of them that feel like home to us. I suspect there is something about history or tradion, or the way they might strike something in us that feels undeniably true. But it may even be the repetition of the lost object and Jesus’ use of language that makes this particular text familiar and home like.

            Sometimes, as a preacher, I find familiar texts, home-like texts, hard to preach on. What is there to say that the congregation hasn't heard already? What is there to say that I haven't said already? Should I go searching for a new angle to consider this? Or is the familiar place where I find the Spirit calling me? Sometimes I find that my familiarity prevents me from actually examining the actual text. I see it, "ah," I think to myself, "lost coin. lost sheep. more joy in heaven about the one sinner who repents." This reduction or simplification is often unfair to the familiar passage. I think we do this to home too. We often cannot see the totality of the home when we are inside it because we are so familiar with it. So with these home-like passages, I like to try to pay attention to things I did not expect.

            Looking at the trajectory of this passage, I saw something I haven't despite my familiarity with it. Once the shepherd has found his sheep, and once the woman has found the coin something happens.  "And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors saying to them, 'rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Rejoicing itself is the end or goal of these stories. After saving the sheep the shepherd invites his friends and neighbors to join, what I want to call this morning, the eternal celebration. We are all a part of that party, that celebration. Saving the sheep, salvation is not just about rescuing the one, but about restoration into this eternal celebration. The movement of joy pulses out from God's joy at finding those who are lost, and inviting them in to join in an eternal celebration. Each Sunday, when we gather here at home, we share a meal. Through that meal we are fed with God’s joy—and transformed in party promoters, sent out to share our bit of God’s joy, and tell all to come join in our eternal celebration.