“Why do you speak to them in parables?”  This is a question that was asked of Jesus by his disciples.  “He began to teach them many things in parables” is how Mark describes Jesus’ teaching near the beginning of his Gospel.  The parables of Christ.  These are what we are going to be looking at over the coming weeks.  Scenes from everyday life which Jesus used to illustrate something else.  “To place alongside something else” - this is what “parable” originally meant.  They’re not simply morality tales or fables whose purpose is to teach a lesson.  They go beyond one meaning.  They’re stories that contain multiple levels of significance that spoke to the people of Jesus’ day.  They’re illustrations that have spoken to followers of Christ in many and diverse ways through the centuries.  Through them, God continues to speak to us.

Parables are stories that are meant to cut us to the heart.  One writer has called them “arrows of God.”  They invite us to come to an understanding of everything in a whole new way – God, ourselves, life, death, everything.  Stories that cause us to see everything in the light of the one who is telling them – in the light of Christ.  The meaning in a parable can be hard to pin down.  They are stories that are meant to reveal something of what is, at heart, a mystery.  Something which is beyond our ability to understand.  One writer puts it like this – “We need parables because of two equally deep mysteries:  the mystery of God and the mystery of human life.”  Parables are stories that are meant to fire our imagination.  What is God like?  What does it mean to live in God’s grace?  Who might God call us and enable us to be?  In this way, they’re a lot like poetry.  Aristotle thought that poetry was a more serious pursuit than history.  History, he thought, is limited to what has happened, while poetry is free to explore what might happen.

What might happen to us as we sit with Jesus this summer and hear his words?  One of the great truths of our faith is that God is revealed in the everyday.  No matter where we stand on matters of faith (or what we put our faith in) we don’t need anything more than experience of life to begin to come to an understanding of Jesus’ words as he speaks in parables.  Well, the experience of life and the help of the Holy Spirit.  Let’s pray.

We really should be known for our joy.  At the heart of the good news of Jesus, there is joy.  At the heart of these two parables, there is joy.  There is joy in being found.  There is joy in finding.  In order to begin to understand this, we need only know what it’s like to be lost or what it’s like to have lost something.  I have a vivid memory of wandering away from my mother on a shopping trip to Albion Mall when I was about 5 years of age.  Looking around and suddenly realizing the woman you’ve been following is not your mom!  They took me to the security office and made an announcement over the mall’s PA system.  I remember losing my wedding ring in the house and looking for it frantically.  I couldn’t find it.  Nicole assured me, “It’ll turn up,” but lost in the house is still lost, right?  Some weeks later, Nicole would find it under the bedroom radiator, and I remember vividly her calling out to me through the bedroom window one afternoon as I was in the backyard to tell me it had been found.  Someone has said that when one is lost, there is no thought more dear to us than home.  When one is searching, there is no thought more pleasing than finding.  We have joy in being found.  There is joy in heaven in us being found.  What else could we do but have a party?

 Before we get there, we have a problem going on in our story.  Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem.  We remember how people have grumbled about who Jesus eats with and who Jesus welcomes at his table.  These grumblings are being made known publicly.  We like to separate ourselves up into categories and pit ourselves against people who belong to different categories.  On one side, we have religious authorities who are holding up signs that say things like “Jesus – Who Did You Eat With Last Night?!” and yelling things like “Unworthy!”   On the other side, we have a group of people yelling back, “Hypocrite!” and “Self-righteous!!”

Jesus is having none of this talk about camps.  We have called ourselves Christians, which started in Antioch according to Acts 11.  Literally “little Christs.”  In the past few years, some have rejected this label.  You will hear people say “Follower of Christ “ or “Christ follower”.  I’ve used those terms myself, and there’s nothing wrong with them.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of considering myself something like a “recovering sinner” in the same way that Alcoholics Anonymous uses the term “recovering alcoholic.”  We are all in the same flock when it comes to our need for God’s grace.  The only difference between people is our level of acknowledgement of our need for grace – an acknowledgement that we are called to make daily/hourly/minutely.  In days like this in our church, we find ourselves remembering those who have gone before us, those whose faith shaped our own.  I keep this file folder among my books.  My father had kept it – a record of my school-age accomplishments.  This is what he wrote on the outside of the file – “Various honours re. David M.J Thomas in this file.  Someday he may identify with the apostle Paul re. the value of the same (Phil 3:7).  Nevertheless, these honours signify a lot of character and hard labour.  From the point of view of an old soldier/sinner/Saint.”

When it comes to questions about who is welcome, who we eat with, who is included, perhaps we should think of the church as a kind of Sinner’s Anonymous and ourselves as recovering sinners/Saints.  I believe that Jesus is speaking some heavy irony in his parable when he speaks of the 99 righteous ones who need no repentance.  None of us is righteous on our own.  I inherited a love for the writing of Frederick Buechner from my father.  Frederick Beuchner had this to say about AA and the church:

“A.A. is the name of a group of men and women who acknowledge that addiction to alcohol is ruining their lives. Their purpose in coming together is to give it up and help others do the same. They realize they can't pull this off by themselves. They believe they need each other, and they believe they need God. The ones who aren't so sure about God speak instead of their Higher Power.

When they first start talking at a meeting, they introduce themselves by saying, 'I am John. I am an alcoholic,' 'I am Mary. I am an alcoholic,' to which the rest of the group answers each time in unison, 'Hi, John,' 'Hi, Mary.' They are apt to end with the Lord's Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. Apart from that, they have no ritual. They have no hierarchy. They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no buildings of their own, they meet wherever they can.

Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories with the candour that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong and how day by day, they are trying to go right. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes one of them will take special responsibility for another—to be available at any hour of day or night if the need arises. There's not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made.

You can't help thinking that something like this is what the Church is meant to be and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous. 'I can will what is right but I cannot do it,' is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. 'For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do' (Romans 7:19). 

'I am me. I am a sinner.' 'Hi, you.' It is the forgiveness of sins, of course. It is what the Church is all about.   No matter what far place alcoholics end up in, either in this country or virtually anywhere else, they know that there will be an A.A. meeting nearby to go to and that at that meeting, they will find strangers who are not strangers to help and to heal, to listen to the truth and to tell it. That is what the Body of Christ is all about.”

The heart of heaven is God seeking us in love.  “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?” (15:4)  In reality, not many of us.  It doesn’t make sense.  Leave 99% of your flock in danger to look for one that you might never even find.  It’s just a sheep.  It doesn’t make economic sense to us who want to commodify everything and everyone.  This guy is crazy about that sheep!  God is crazy with love about each and every one.  No wonder the image of the shepherd means so much to us.  Listen to how the prophecy of Ezekiel is borne out - “I myself will search for my sheep” (Ezekiel 34:11). “I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered” (Ezekiel 34:12). “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak” (Ezekiel 34:16). “I will rescue my flock; they shall no longer be a prey” (Ezekiel 34:22).  “Oh, save your people and bless your heritage! Be their shepherd and carry them forever,” the Psalmist sang (Psalm 28:9).  Throughout our lives - “Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs, I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:4).  The sheep on its own is lost, in danger, defenceless.  It’s not wilderness-smart.  The search is relentless.  There’s this beautiful image of the sheep’s owner laying the sheep over his shoulders.  We can imagine him running his hands over the sheep’s limbs, making sure it’s ok, picking brambles, thorns, burrs that might have become stuck to its wool as it wandered about now, knowing if it would ever be found.  Who would mount such a search for one sheep? 

We might have wandered off.  We might simply be misplaced.  God is the ultimate seeker.  Blaise Pascal heard the Shepherd say, “You would not be searching for me had I not already found you.”  God is like a sheep owner.  God is like a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps her house, and searches carefully until she finds her lost coin.  We don’t have too many images of God as a sweeping/searching woman in the windows of our churches (or elsewhere), and maybe we should.  The equivalent of a day’s wages.  One-tenth of this woman’s savings.  If imagining an extravagant search for one sheep out of 100 is beyond us – if the ways of God seem too far beyond us – perhaps we can imagine not settling for something being lost in the house.  Lighting a lamp, sweeping, upending things, moving furniture until that precious coin is found.  Some might have said, “Why doesn’t she just wait until it turns up?”  Some might say “She spent more on the party she threw than the coin was worth.  Again, economics is not the point.  The point is the joy in something lost being found.

What else could we do but have a party to reflect the joy that’s going on in the heavens?  “Your kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven,” we pray.  How could we not want to gather around a table which is in part a reflection of the joy going on in the heavens? 

At the same time this sheep owner and this woman are proving themselves to be models of discipleship.  Someone has said, “Each of them works hard to find the lost; neither of them is dissuaded by the cost of discipleship; each of them is a generous host, ready to think of their own property as a gift to be shared with others.” 

So as we gather around God’s table, may we not be scandalized at the scope of Jesus’ welcome.  May we remember that we all stand alike here as people in need of grace?  Over the next couple of months, as church activities have lessened, may we seek opportunities to extend and accept welcomes around tables, whether it’s for a meal or for something to drink and a snack.  May the joy of being found and finding be with us no matter our circumstances, and may this be true for all of us. Amen