Sermons

Sunday 15th September 2013, Trinity 16, morning

Luke 15:1-10

by Nick Mayhew-Smith

I’m very pleased to be asked to preach to you today. I’m Nick Mayhew-Smith, from the other side of Merton, serving as a Reader in Mitcham Parish Church. Some of you will know me from the annual service we hold at Merton Priory in July, which I help organise.

We have already had three very successful years at Merton Priory. Do join us next year. I don’t know if it’s a more impressive feat to unite Catholics and Protestants in prayer or to unite Wimbledon Village and Mitcham in prayer. We live in a very diverse part of a very diverse city, and it’s always good to start a sermon in a warm glow of ecumenical unity.

Now today we are looking at the parable of the Lost Sheep, in the Bible reading we have just heard. This is a story that greatly caught the imagination of the early church, to such an extent that it was one of the most dominant images of Christianity. Nowadays we focus much more on the cross, but it wasn’t always the case.

One of the earliest portraits of Jesus , in the Catacombs of San Callisto in Rome, shows him as a young man dressed in ordinary clothes with a cooking pot in one hand and a sheep draped around his shoulders. This simple shepherd boy was considered an inspiring, uplifting and accurate way to depict Christ the Saviour, and is a popular theme in early Christian art.

And in today’s reading we hear why people considered this shepherd figure to be a suitable symbol for Christ. He is after all called the Good Shepherd in another passage in the Bible. And in this parable today Jesus compares himself to a shepherd going out to find and bring back one of his lost sheep. It is a really simple story. But as so often with Jesus the simpler the story the more profound the meaning.

Jesus uses this parable to answer some angry criticism that is being directed at him. At the beginning of the reading we hear Jesus being heavily criticised by the religious leaders of his day for daring to sit down and to eat with sinners.

The Bible makes plain on many occasions that our good Lord was perfectly comfortable in the company of thieves, murderers, prostitutes and tax collectors, the various ne’er do wells of society – and as a lay minister in Mitcham parish church I can only say amen to him for doing so with such exemplary good grace.

By mixing with social outcasts, Jesus’ behaviour was genuinely outrageous, sacrilegious even, flouting social norms and religious traditions alike. It was unexpected behaviour and not the sort of thing people expect in someone who is supposed to be a teacher of religion.

This parable is therefore a rejoinder to the finger-waving instinct in all religions, where people look down on others for not obeying various conventions, rules, customs and traditions. We do it ourselves in Christianity of course. It must have been great fun being a preacher in the old days, waving your finger and thumping the pulpit, but we’re not allowed to do that in the CofE any more. And a good thing too really because Jesus also refused to look down on anyone.

Jesus came to offer something different to the faith of the Temple leaders, indeed something that sets Christianity apart from all other human belief systems. This is what makes our faith special

The normal religious instinct if you look throughout history is for men and women to seek a spiritual dimension to their lives. People have always sought out a higher meaning in their existence, designing rituals, creeds, ideologies, theologies and theories to do that. This is a universal human instinct, and a good one.

The Pope this week raised eyebrows by saying that atheists should focus on following their principles and their ethical systems. And he’s absolutely right. Even non-believers and atheists attempt to construct systems that explain things in a grand over-arching theory. We all try to find a higher meaning for life. It’s a good instinct, and it will certainly take you some of the way there. This is the faith of the Temple leaders, for example, with their rules about social status – inspired by the divine, by their search for God, but ultimately created by humans.

Every religion and every creed is built from the earth towards God or to some other higher meaning or purpose. There is a vector moving upwards from the physical world to the spiritual and transcendent world. But as our parable today demonstrates, the coming of Christ is unique: it is a vector coming from heaven towards us. There’s no other religion in which our approach towards God is mirrored by God’s approach towards us.

Only in Christianity is our search for the sublime matched and mirrored back by God coming and searching for us. God becomes the Good Shepherd actively hunting around for us on our level. God comes completely into our world, sharing his table with the lowest of the low to give them his company, his compassion, and his love.

Ours is a God not afraid to get his hands dirty in reaching out to us. The Good Shepherd is not simply an abstract concept: this is a Good Shepherd who was actually born in a stable. This is not poetry or theology or allegory. This is for real.

The parable of the lost sheep is about this outreach of God to us. It is not about our repentance, however much it might sound like it at first reading. The lost sheep is not an active participant in the search and rescue that brings it home. It doesn’t even know it is lost; it is immune to the other sheep wagging their fingers at it.

It is always a shame that we only ever read tiny little sections of the Bible and miss the bigger context of passages such as this one about the Lost Sheep. It would be wrong to end my sermon by concluding that we can sit back and do nothing because we will automatically be found and brought home by the Good Shepherd.

If we were to read on from today’s reading we would immediately hear the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

This parable tells the other half of the important message Jesus is giving us, about us keeping our side of this two-way arrangement. God will seek us out like the shepherd searching for his sheep, but in response we need to seek God out too, like the prodigal son returning home to his father. This is ultimately a message of give and take, of receiving from Christ and responding to his love accordingly.

This is a message to bear in mind as we gather now for our own symbolic meal together in the Eucharist.

So let us not be like Judas who takes bread from our Lord’s hand and gives nothing back in return. Let us instead be prepared to meet the Lord half way as we approach his table now. Amen.