16th  September 2007TRINITY XV

Fr Julian Browning

**readings**

Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. Luke 15.6

We are the ones who wander off – more than ever before because there are no pressures from society or family to keep us Christian any more.

The Gospel is not about being good. It is about being rescued. Christianity is a unique religion. The focus is always on the one who is lost, not on those who are sure of their direction in life, sure in themselves. The shepherd leaves his flock in the wilderness to find the one which is lost. How irresponsible is that? If he'd lost the lot, he wouldn't last long at the enquiry. We appear to have a God who wanders off, leaving us. We don't want to be the ones getting rescued. We're fine, really we are. We are the ninety-nine persons, the great majority, who need no repentance. The lost sheep is always someone else. So down the centuries the usual interpretation  of Jesus' words has been along the lines of: the lost sheep, the outcast, the one who has strayed morally or physically, is eternally valuable to God, so we must be like the good shepherd and go and rescue them and bring them back to the fold. A good message, but not the whole story.

A couple of weeks ago, a chief shepherd, Pope Benedict, addressed a crowd of half a million young people at the shrine of Loreto on the Adriatic. He told them, “Go against the tide” and reject a lifestyle marked “by arrogance and violence, by overbearingness and success at all costs, and by appearance and 'having' at the expense of 'being'.” Go against the tide. Christians do not have to abide by a majority verdict. The trouble is that the pressure to conform, to go with the spirit of the age, is so strong that it seeps into our religious life, and we want to be among the ninety-nine righteous persons who have it all, who know it all, who are strong and keep together and make decisions. The Gospel says otherwise. The Gospel puts us in our place. We are the lost sheep, we are the lost coin, we are the prodigal son.

Now we sort of knew that, didn't we? What was the faint echo in your mind? In England's distant past, when Christian people gathered for Matins or Morning Prayer, they knelt down, and they said together, Almighty and most merciful Father: we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Then the modernisers appeared and said, There is far too much grovelling going on in church now, they always used that wonderful word grovel to put people down, so you can just say sorry standing up from now on, as if in the headmaster's study. So we have forgotten our identification with the lost sheep, the one who is vulnerable, the one who wanders off. For the early Christians the identification was automatic, because they knew the passage in Ezekiel which we read on St.Cyprian's Day. There in Ezekiel God is the shepherd, who rescues the sheep which have been scattered. I will seek the lost, I will bring back the strayed.

However, this is a Gospel for our time too. We are the ones who wander off – more than ever before because there are no pressures from society or family to keep us Christian any more. So we can follow the devices and desires of our own hearts, including the desire to wander off, like a sheep, take what comes. Whatever. Common speech always come up with the right word to describe the times: our word is whatever.

God hates 'whatever.' God can rescue us from that sheep-like trance. Christians have seen the archetype of that rescue worked out in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Just because we forget God, does not mean that God has forgotten us. He found the sheep, he carried the sheep on his shoulders, and rejoiced. What comes from God to each of us, I believe, is a desire for life again. Being forgiven, being saved, being rescued from the wilderness, call it what you like, the result is the same: a desire for life beyond what we see and know, a knowledge of a deep divine love for each one of us which leads the shepherd to find us wherever we've got to, and a consciousness of being part of a greater plan, a mystery which beckons us forward. What do people say when they've been rescued? I hope I would remember to say thank you. And so this great Parable of the Lost Sheep is a parable of our life. Our life on earth is not a matter of whatever, it is a matter of becoming somebody, an individual, going against the tide, apart from the group. But this becoming is not something we can do on our own in our wilderness. Becoming, life itself, is a matter of receiving love and forgiveness and saying thank you to the God who has saved us from ourselves. Then there's joy on earth for us, and, we're told today, joy in heaven too.