God seeks out the lost – Luke 15:1-10

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant.

Have you seen the AT&T ads about times when just OK is not OK? There’s one about a carnival worker who claims he did an “OK job” assembling a thrill ride, and so the fair goers swiftly walk away. There’s another about a tattoo artist who says, “Don’t worry, your tattoo is going look OK.” And when the tattoo-recipient asks him if he’s meant to sketch it first, the artist replies, “Stay in your lane, bro.” Well, I’ll admit that sheep care is not exactly my lane, but I think I’d do a pretty OK job at it. I mean, if I managed to keep 99% of my sheep, I’d view that as a pretty good batting average, actually. I’d probably do a pretty OK job at looking after the 99, and sell some wool to make reasonably OK sweaters now and again. If one wandered off, I’d probably say to myself something like, “Oh, don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Well, none of us, no-one, is small stuff for God. And “just OK” is never enough for God. No, God dreams big. And God sweats the small stuff. God bled for the small stuff. God leaves the 99 and goes to seek the one. And that might seem reckless, and in a way it is. (There’s a great recent Christian pop song, Reckless Love, by Cory Ashbury, by the way, you can find it on YouTube if you don’t know it).

It might seem trusting, like God trusts the 99. And in a way, it is. God does trust humanity with a bewildering array of things. Free will, the sacraments, the Church’s mission. God’s God, after all. He could take any of that out of our hands, but for whatever reason He chooses to keep on sharing responsibility with us. Not because he trusts us naïvely, like He doesn’t expect we’ll ever let Him down, but because He’s willing to be let down because somehow it matters for us to be trusted with at least a little, that this trust is actually part of how God sanctifies us.

Fundamentally I think, God walking away from the 99 seems like invitation. “I’m going this way, to seek and to save the lost, will you come?” We see that in the two parables when both the shepherd and the woman with the coins invite their friends to come and celebrate with them. Now, coins don’t make great party guests, and somehow, I doubt if sheep do either. So, in the world of the stories, the parables, these two people invite friends to the party. But in the world the parables point to, God has chosen us as his friends. We are the sheep, we are the treasured coins, and we are the friends, invited to come and celebrate when the lost are found.

A party sounds fun, but scouring a house for something that’s lost, or walking away from the 99, into the desert for the one, doesn’t. It doesn’t sound pleasant or fun, it sounds scary. I think when we hear these stories about Jesus going to dine with tax collectors and sinners, part of us wants him to say, “Well, I dine with them because they’re just so much more fun than you religious fuddy duddies.” But, Jesus didn’t come to earth to have fun, but to shepherd us and to save us. I’m not saying Jesus never had fun, I’m sure he did, but we really can’t be too sure when and where he did. We can be sure that that wasn’t a driving motivation behind his actions and his choices. Seeking the lost often involves leaving the comfortable and going to the unfamiliar, the scary.

And that’s where we go, because Jesus invites us, but more fundamentally because that’s where Jesus is. Because when we talk about the “lost” we don’t necessarily mean those who have gotten themselves lost or wandered off, whether deliberately or through carelessness. Sometimes we mean those whom others have very deliberately made lost. We are invited to see ourselves as sheep, as coins, as friends, but we’re also invited to see ourselves as seeking.

Tomorrow is September the 15^th, the Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows. Our Lady under that title is the patroness of my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross. And while most churches will celebrate the Sunday liturgy tomorrow, and I do today because I’m here really as the “hired help,” in our own churches, we’d celebrate Our Lady of Sorrows. Under this title, we celebrate Mary’s willingness to keep on loving her son even when that brought her real pain, most especially by standing by his cross, which has been called her own living martyrdom. She could have stayed with her 99, but she went and stood with her one. And she’d have to wait a while for the party, but she was there, we know for sure she was there at Pentecost. We know for sure she’s been welcomed into Heaven and crowned as Queen.

We know she stands by our crosses, and she bids us stand by one another’s.

God is searching for us, and Jesus bids us go and search too. But, now, now we enjoy this celebration, this feast, this banquet. For in this place, we are found. We stand by the cross re-presented to us in the un-bloody sacrifice and at the same time we know we are found and we celebrate.