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4th Sunday in Lent
March 14, 2010
“The Crazy Shepherd”
Reverend Michael D. PowellLuke 15:1-7 |
We’re over half way there! This morning is the 4th Sunday of our 7 week journey through the season of Lent and we’ve been focusing on how we practice our faith. We’ve talked about belief, but also about how faith is going deeper, from our head to our heart, where we enter into an intimate experience of trusting Christ through prayer. I am so pleased that there are a good number of you who have been going more deeply into an experience of the Lord’s Prayer through our Lenten covenant groups. The goal is to arrive at a vision of faith, an awareness of the big picture that comes to us when the eyes of our heart are opened. Meister Eckhart once expressed his faith by saying, “The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same – one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.”
We practice spiritual disciplines during the season of Lent because we’re seekers! I assume that’s why you’re here this morning. I assume you’re hoping and praying to catch just a glimpse of God’s presence, to hear just a snippet of God’s Word, to experience something of God’s gracious, reconciling love in Christ and through one another. It may come to you in a song, or a prayer, or during the passing of the peace. Maybe God will be revealed to you in the coffee hour. The point is – God is right here, right now, in this time and in this place. God’s everywhere. If we’re not aware of God it’s not because God is gone. We’re the ones who have all too often gone missing in action. We are such active people. We’re the ones who have a tendency to be absent without leave! Part of the reason I love the season of Lent is because it challenges us to be seekers, to focus our attention and to open the eyes and the ears of our hearts to the awareness of God’s presence.
People joke about fasting during Lent, but fasting is one of the essential spiritual disciplines that deepens our awareness of God. The whole point of fasting during Lent is to prepare us for the feast, the Easter feast of New Life through Christ. Jim Welty is going to be talking about resurrection next week, and fasting is one of the spiritual disciplines that make us more sensitive to the resurrection experience that is always and everywhere available to everyone! James Earl Massey writes, "Fasting is not a renunciation of life; it is a means by which new life is released within us."(1) But we’re too literal in the way we think about fasting. Abstaining from food isn’t the only way to fast. Think also in terms of a deliberate fast from overworking or over-worrying. Consider fasting from seeking recognition, of thinking about yourself all the time, or accumulating more material possessions in order to assure yourself that you’re a person of worth! This kind of fasting has the ability to release the energy of new life within us as we cut down on the distractions that separate us from the awareness of God. What we just may discover is that there’s a wonderful feast of awareness, a banquet of God’s joyful grace that has been set before us. So, here’s a Lenten prayer. Let’s pray it together:
"I will fast from worry, and feast on trusting in God.
I will fast from complaining, and feast on appreciation.
I will fast from pressures, and feast on unceasing prayer.
I will fast from bitterness, and feast on forgiveness.
I will fast from idle gossip, and feast on purposeful silence.
I will fast from judging others, and feast on the Christ living within them.
I will fast from thoughts of illness, and feast on the healing power of God.
I will fast from discouragement, and feast on hope." (2)
We tend to think of spiritual discipline as beginning with us, as we seek an experience of the living God. But consider for a moment that God is also a seeker, seeking an experience of the real you! That, I believe, is the real point of what I like to call the “Lost Parables of Jesus.” Here’s the context: In the first verse of Luke 15 we read: “Now all the sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” I once heard Laron Hall describe a Pharisee as somebody who was always suspicious that someone, somewhere, might somehow be having a good time!
So Jesus is hanging out with a bunch of sinners, and he’s under suspicion by the self righteous. In response he tells three parables, in rapid succession: the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the parable of the Lost Son (also known as the Prodigal Son). It’s important to hear these parables at this particular point in Lent because they help us to understand that we’re not the only ones doing the seeking! Yes, we’re seeking God, but God is also seeking us! The point Jesus makes is similar in each of the lost parables, but let’s focus on the lamb this morning.
Many of you grew up with some of the same images of Christ as the Good Shepherd that I did. Here are a couple of traditional depictions of Christ holding the lamb: (1st & 2nd image) But this particular image is a lot older than our Sunday school days! Here’s an icon from the Greek Orthodox tradition, and another image that was actually painted in the catacombs, dating from the 3rd century: (3rd & 4th image) Notice the lamb is on the shepherd’s shoulders in the earlier depictions, which is more historically accurate!
I want to reflect a little on this parable according to Robert Farrar Capon, who has written over twenty books, including works of theology, novels, and even a couple of cookbooks! He’s been an Episcopal priest and the dean of a seminary, a professor of theology and Greek, a teacher of cooking - and a freelance author for the food section of the New York Times! He’s been described as a “maverick writer who explains traditional Christian teaching with freshness and unexpected insights.” But not everyone likes Capon. One reviewer writes: “Reading Capon is like drinking something I know is going to mess me up, but I have to have just one more.” Another wrote: “Robert Farrar Capon may be crazy, but reading him is fun.”
Capon says that Jesus never told a story about something that people already knew. His whole point was to tell a truth that you didn’t know, or maybe didn’t even want to know! Capon believes that most of the time we don’t get the real point because, in typical fashion, we think the parable is about us. But it’s not about us! A parable is a story about God, and about how God works in mysterious ways. The thing to look for is the odd, unexpected twists that catch us by surprise. The best thing about parables, according to Capon, is that they’re outrageous!
So, here’s how Capon approaches the Parable of the Lost Sheep. He begins by noting the context. He says there are two kinds of people in the world - the lost who know they’re lost, and the lost who don’t know they’re lost. Jesus is hanging out with those who know they’re lost, the loser crowd, and for this the Scribes and the Pharisees, who consider themselves among the “found and the saved” are judging Jesus by the company he keeps. So Jesus spins off a couple of stories about how God’s lost and found department actually operates.
Jesus challenges the self-righteous, saying: “Imagine you’ve got a hundred sheep, and one of them gets lost. Which one of you wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine and go searching for the one?” Well, do you want the truth? Not one of them would do that. We probably wouldn’t do that either. It’d be crazy. No sheep rancher in his right mind is going to leave ninety-nine perfectly behaved sheep to the coyotes and go chasing off after one that’s stupid enough to get lost. It only makes good economic sense to cut your losses and go on with the ninety-nine. The Scribes and the Pharisees knew how to count. They were scorekeepers. This parable is outrageous. And then Jesus goes on: “And when the shepherd finally finds the lost sheep, he takes him home.” Note that Jesus doesn’t say he takes the lost sheep back to the ninety-nine. He says he puts the sheep on his shoulders and goes home - to throw a party!
Now, here’s where Capon thinks we usually miss the point. The ninety-nine sheep are a set-up, he says. They represent the whole human race as we’d like to think we are! And what about that one lost sheep? Capon believes that he stands for the whole human race as we really are. Who among us has not wandered? We all, like lost sheep, have gone astray.
So far, it’s an interesting, but not particularly radical interpretation. But then Capon offers a rather unorthodox opinion. He says that the Good Shepherd is crazy! No shepherd who wants to stay in the sheep business would do what he did. “The Crazy Shepherd is a metaphor for God, who is even willing to go out of the God-business in order to search for the lost and bring them home to the party, to the banquet feast.” So, the logical question is, what does he mean by the “God-business?” The answer he gives is that it’s the kind of practical, accountant, business-like image we all too often project onto God. It’s the book-keeper, score-keeper God who focuses on the records and checks them twice looking for who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
That God of rewards and punishments haunts a lot of us. When things go well we almost unconsciously say, “Thank God.” When they go badly, it’s “Oh, God, why me? What have I done? Am I being punished?” That’s the kind of God who keeps count and says, “Three strikes, you’re out.” A God like that obviously wouldn’t go searching for one lost sheep, it’d be crazy. But the surprising, unexpected, impractical God that Jesus is teaching about is a Crazy Shepherd - a God of grace who goes searching for the lost, who forgives and even welcomes sinners, a Good Shepherd who is so impractical, so poor at the arithmetic of book-keeping that divine compassion is going to put him out of business.
And, finally, the Crazy Shepherd throws a party to celebrate the recovery of the lost sheep and the punch line, in Jesus’ own words, is that, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine persons who need no repentance.” There’s even proof of this, according to Capon. He asks, “Did you ever meet any of those ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance? No, you didn’t. There isn’t one in the whole world.”
According to Capon’s theology, what governs God’s behavior toward us is not our sins, and it’s not our problems. It’s actually God’s need to find us. God is also a seeker! A seeker after you, and me. The parable is about the need of the finder to find, not about the need of the lost to be found. The universe is driven by God’s very nature as a seeker and a finder.
I don’t think that’s crazy at all. I call that grace. And that’s the Good News of Lent, as we journey on our way to the Easter feast of resurrection. Have you ever been lost? Have you ever been found? Thanks be to God, who is just crazy enough to never, ever give up on us. May Christ, the Good Shepherd, be your shalom! Amen.
(1) James Earl Massey, Spiritual Disciplines: Growth through the Practice of Prayer, Fasting, Dialogue, and Worship
(2) Patricia Brown, Paths to Prayer: Finding Your Own Way to the Presence of God