Hilton Head Island, SC – November 6, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 53:1-6; Luke 15:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" - Luke 15:4 (RSV)
The entire fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke is the response by Jesus to what we are told in the first two verses of that chapter. Let us therefore listen again to the opening verses. "Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to (Jesus). And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'"
In the Middle East two thousand years ago, to show hospitality to people was to pay them high honor. It is still true to this day. So if you invited someone to your home to have dinner with you, you were implying by the invitation that this person was somebody very special. The reverse was also true; if anyone invited you to dinner, it meant that you had been paid a great honor. The significance of this social custom cannot be overemphasized. Hospitality was and is one of the most important aspects of Middle Eastern culture.
Is it surprising, then, that the scribes and Pharisees were amazed that Jesus not only accepted invitations to the homes of widely acknowledged sinners, but that He also deliberately and openly spent time with them? Of course they grumbled! What kind of rabbi was this who so brazenly associated with tax collectors (who were hated because they worked for the Roman occupation), and with self-declared sinners (who were despised because they refused to follow the dictates of the religious law, and their behavior was brazen)?
Jesus did not directly answer the Pharisaical grumbling. Instead, as the master teacher and storyteller, He told three parables, each of which is focused on the concept of "lost-ness": the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the two lost sons. From now through December 18, I will be preaching a series of six sermons on the general theme, In Search of the Lost. Today we begin with an initial investigation of the parable of the lost sheep, and we are thinking particularly about the nature of sheep, both the actual wooly baa-baa-black-sheep variety and the human variety, which is the kind Jesus was really talking about in his story.
The manner in which Jesus chose to begin his first parable was deliberately provocative. He said, "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" "But what's provocative about that?", you ask. Just this: to the Pharisees, to be a shepherd was to engage in a forbidden occupation. Proper Jews were not supposed to be shepherds. But here Jesus was speaking of shepherds in a very positive manner.
What about the 23rd Psalm; doesn't it proclaim that the Lord is our shepherd? And what about Moses; wasn't the most important person in the entire Hebrew Bible a shepherd? That's all true and well and good, but by the first century CE, sheep and shepherds were considered unclean. And we would have to admit there is much to justify this notion. After all, sheep are pretty dirty and smelly critters. If you don't dunk them in sheepdip they become infested with vermin, and if you do dip them, they smell like a cow that's been dead for three weeks. Even if you don't dunk them, they smell anyway. Furthermore, they unceremoniously leave their calling cards everywhere they go. I have read that they have about as much intelligence as an earthworm. Sheep probably get a much better press in poems and songs than they deserve. When God was passing out animal smarts on the sixth day of creation, sheep were definitely at the back of the line. They were probably munching the luxurious Edenic grass, which is what they do best. Because they were paying no attention, they didn't realize they were supposed to be moving forward.
So here was a very unorthodox rabbi telling some very orthodox Jews about a lost sheep. And instantly they knew he was not talking about sheep at all, that he was talking about people. People get lost! They make mistakes! They sin! They fail to keep God's law, they hurt one another, they do foolish things! So what are we to do about that - - - ignore them? Shun them? Ostracize them, drive them away from us, anathematize them? That’s what the scribes and Pharisees did. They had nothing to do with shameful sinners.
You don't ostracize people, says Jesus, not if you know all of them are valuable. If you think anyone is worthless, you can forget that person, but if you believe everyone has value, if you believe that in the sight of God every person is of infinite merit, if God loves each of His children so much that He will go to any lengths to win back that person when she or he is lost, then you go out to seek the lost sheep of humanity whenever and wherever they get lost.
Listen, pristine people of Hilton Head: everybody gets lost, sooner or later. Sin is a very potent force, more powerful often than even God's love, and we all fall off the celestial wagon. You may find it hard to believe that you have ever been lost, but if you can't believe it, you're probably pretty lost right now. We all fall short! We all foul up! All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way!
It starts early. We begin our lost-ness when we are children. In the very beginning it is innocent, but then it turns willful.
Let me give you an illustration of innocent lost-ness. Nancy Hoff and Roger Wiebe were two of my best friends from high school. Nancy and Roger married early, and they had three children just about as fast as is humanly possible without having two or more in a single obstetrical performance. Nancy and Roger attended the University of Wisconsin. They lived in an apartment in the Bethel Lutheran Church in Madison, in which they had grown up. Roger worked there as a jack-of-all-trades and the 24-hour-a-day man on call.
One Sunday morning, just as the first service was about to start, Nancy was bathing the three children. First she did Jon, the first-born, then she worked on Mark, and then Kristi. What she did not know is that after she was through with Jon, whom she had dried but not dressed, Jon went downstairs into the church, looking for his dad. As the congregation was singing the opening hymn, an almost-three-year-old in his Sunday-best birthday-suit came strolling down the center aisle, searching for his father. Fortunately, an usher who knew Jon saw him, retrieved him before anyone else saw him, and took him back to his mother, who, needless to say, nearly expired when she found out what had happened.
At the risk of offending your opinion of yourself, I would like to suggest that every Sunday when we come to church, we are all like the youthful Jonny Wiebe. We stand naked in the center aisle, which in this non-church church is not very wide or long, and the One who knows us best, the One who sees everything we do and is aware of everything we have ever done, nevertheless welcomes us in our behavioral and spiritual nudity. He shows the warmest of hospitality toward us when propriety would seem to dictate that we not be allowed in, let alone invited, and He is happy to see us. If we are not now lost, for certain we have been lost, because we are human; we are like that. We abuse our freedom of will, we deliberately botch up our lives and the lives of others, unintentionally we hurt others or ourselves. No matter how hard we try, we do it all over again and again. And yet the Galilean rabbi and the One for whom he was the chief spokesman, the One who sent Himhim, continue to invite us into their restoring hospitality. It is amazing; it is ultimately beyond reason; it is the Gospel.
In a commentary I read in preparation for this sermon, it said that a lost sheep often is so traumatized that it will lie down and not budge, even when it sees the shepherd coming to retrieve it. So the poor shepherd has to carry the silly sheep the whole way home. I told you earlier that sheep seem to possess all the brains of a fencepost. And as that is the nature of sheep, so it is part of human nature that when we get lost, we may become so mentally and spiritually unmoored we don't have the slightest idea how to get found again. We just lie down in a catatonic stupor. And if we ever get back home, the shepherd will have to pick us up and carry us all the way. But the Shepherd is for two weeks from now; the sheep are for this week.
I recently read a powerful story in a magazine that began with these three captivating sentences. “My grandmother yelled at me twice in her 93 years of life. Once was because I used the wrong mayonnaise in potato salad. The other was the night she killed her husband.”
The story was written by a Black woman named Dartinia Hull, who lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing, and has written for CNN, The Bitter Southerner, The Charlotte Observer, and other publications. In her outstanding essay, she explained how it was that her grandmother happened to shoot her second husband, not once, but several times. From prison she wrote Dartinia, “I married him because he seemed so nice and kind. But there was that other side of him.” He drank more than she knew, and when he drank, he got mean. He had beaten her many times for what he supposed was marital infidelity, although there was none. Because he was so drunk the night he was going to kill her, she got the gun away from him. He came toward her, and she shot him, but he kept coming, so she kept shooting until he stopped coming.
Ms. Hull’s grandmother went to prison. While there she started a class for eighteen women who could not read at the third-grade level. Her grandmother had taught third-graders for years, so she figured she could help those women, which she did. Ms. Hull wrote, “Low self-esteem alone can keep a woman locked in a situation for far too long…. But if she is sent to prison, and is released and can’t read at a fourth grade level, …what’s left for her except to return to the swirl of what sent her to prison to begin with?” Then she quoted a statistic from the US Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy. It stated that two-thirds of children who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade will end up in prison or on welfare. Educationally they are lost. (Think about that with respect to the pandemic – and the Corridor of Shame in South Carolina.) Here is another sentence written by awomana woman with a master’s degree in writing: “If children are learning to read until the end of third grade, and then reading to learn once they begin fourth grade, then any child who does not properly learn words, phrases, vocabulary – all the things that go into reading – loses the ability to comprehend what they’re learning after fourth grade” (The Presbyterian Outlook, Oct. 24, 2022, pps. 22-27). In other words, up through third grade children should be learning to read, but afterward they should be reading to learn. If they can’t read, what will become of them?
Dartinia Hull’s grandmother’s husband George may have been someone in that category, a dysfunctional illiterate. Her grandmother was not. She was an educated woman who married a man who clearly was a lost sheep. When she killed him to defend herself, she too became a lost sheep in the minds of many, some who knew her, but almost everyone who didn’t know her. Extreme poverty produces more badly lost sheep than affluence does. No one can deny that. In this country, those who do deny it, and who believe everyone is capable of lifting themselves out of poverty, tend to vote for one particular party. Perhaps more of those who vote for that party tend to ignore or steer clear of poor people and their problems than those who vote for the other party. However, who, other than God, knows that? Without question, though, state legislatures that pass budgets with low funding for education tend to have more children who can’t read beyond a fourth grade level than those who pass budgets with sufficient funding for quality education.
The poor have always been easily lost in the societal shuffle. For too long, they have been systematically shoved into virtual oblivion, thus creating millions of lost sheep. Too few political candidates try to be shepherds for lost sheep.
One of the best college songs ever composed came out of Yale. It originated, apparently, “from the tables down at Maury’s, to the place where Louie dwells.” It told of the whiffenpoofs, “little lost sheep who have gone astray.” There are different kinds of lost-ness, and the human species has many varieties of whiffenpoofs. We can become lost in moral pratfalls or ethical insensitivities or political callousness or spiritual or psychological floundering. In the midst of it, however lost we may be or however hopelessly lost we may feel ourselves to be, we are never truly lost. We have a Shepherd who always has an eye on us, and we never leave His sight. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Bashar Assad are lost sheep, as are the mass killers at schools and parades and in places of worship, but God loves them as much as any of the rest of us.
Thousands of people feel lost on Hilton Head Island, and you wouldn't think that could happen here. You might be lost temporarily, but surely not permanently. How could anyone get lost on such a relatively small island?
But some people came here deliberately to become lost. Some came here trying to lose an old way of life, but it discovered them once again anyway. Some came thinking they would find just the right job, the right business opportunity, since they hadn't found it before. They did find it, but then they got lost in it, and they discovered their lives were going nowhere. Some came believing this must be Shangri La, but it just turned out to be Hilton Head after all. Some came to live happily ever after in a blissful retirement, but their retirement has turned out to be joyless instead. And many, many, many --- deep in their heart of hearts, where they live ---, feel lost.
St. Augustine said that faith is to believe what we do not see. Then he added an important postscript; the reward of faith is to see what we believe.
The nature of sheep is to get lost. The nature of the shepherd is to find the lost sheep. Jesus said both things, and each statement got Him equally into trouble. His theological enemies were reviled by the behavior of lost people. Nonetheless, do you believe Jesus is right about lost sheep? And if you believe it, do you suppose you might get found, if you feel lost, even if you doubt that will ever happen?