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Scripture Readings: Ps 51, I Tim 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10

           We on the Christian Left are quick to point out the dangers of an individualistic faith and salvation.  So often the focus on our own personal salvation leaves the rest of the world to go to hell.

We know the conversation well, the examples, the justification for our polemic, for our emphasis on peace and justice.  We pride ourselves on being inclusive, welcoming the outcast and eating with sinners.  We like to show our Christ like love for others.

As important as collective sin and righteousness are, as important as extending grace to others is, searching for the lost sheep, we ought not allow this to detract from God’s desire for relationship with us personally.

We like to think of ourselves as like Jesus, the shepherd going out after the lost sheep, or like the woman searching for the lost coin.  But what about when we feel like a lost sheep?  Sometimes, in those moments when we run into those parts of ourselves that we would rather not see, it may appear like we are a lost sheep ourselves, masquerading as a shepherd searching for a lost sheep.  We not only eat with sinners, we are the one who sins.

Now this is not an attempt to make you feel lousy, but an attempt to address those issues in our lives that we already know we have.  “I know my transgressions,” says the psalmist, “my sins are ever before me.  Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” 

The psalmist is not laying out doctrine here.  We need not claim that the newborn is a sinner to identify with the psalmist's prayer.  Psychology tells us that our sense of guilt and shame are developed very early.  History and sociology demonstrate that our acculturation is a mixed bag, and that there is no question that every human being will internalize ways of perceiving and behaving that are less than helpful for the individual and society.  We need not claim that every child is born a sinner to acknowledge that every child being born into this sinful world will sin.

But as I said, doctrine, psychology, history and sociology are not the subject our psalmist is addressing.  He is expressing an existential sense of shame and guilt.  These are his feelings in the moment.  Whether anyone else knows his issues or not, he feels accountable to God.  At a very deep level the psalmist suffers the consequences of his sin and senses that his suffering is justified, that God has the right to punish him.

Again, we are not holding up the massive question of the doctrine of suffering, or the suffering of humanity or God’s role in hurricanes and holocausts.  This is just about the psalmist's immediate sense of guilt, about our own complicity in thoughts and actions that don’t do us good.

And as if we need another warning against diversion, we are not talking about a checklist of sins.  The sins we are talking about are those things, thoughts, relationship patterns and habits that prevent us from being all that we can be, all that God and we ourselves would hope. 

Often feelings, thoughts and actions that become problematic start as helpful responses to difficult situations.  But then over time the thought or behavior reaches a point of diminishing returns, and it begins to increase the anxiety or problems, which it originally relieved.

Presbyterians are fond of saying, “all things in moderation.”  And, “Everything decently and in order.”  Both are quintessentially middle class ideas, showing our fear of sticking out or appearing out of control.  But there is wisdom and grace in such thoughts.  It allows us to judge the appropriateness of a behavior or action within the context.  Free from the law in Christ, as Paul would say, there is very little that is absolutely and at all times a sin.  Or, as Ecclesiastes said, “there is a time for everything under heaven.”  But while all things are lawful, not all things build up.  All things at one time or another may be appropriate for the circumstances, but the opposite is also true.  Something that may have been helpful or at least not harmful at one time may become inappropriate, sinful and destructive at another time.  Does it work with the divine order of our lives?

Another key indicator of the appropriateness of a thought, feeling or behavior is our degree of freedom with respect to it.  Again back to Paul, “We have been set free in Christ, do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.  We may be able to justify our reasons for doing it, but are we free not to do it?  No matter what, slavery begets a sense of shame and powerlessness.  Few but the enslaver would argue that slavery, shame and powerlessness are good things.

As we get beyond our justification and denial and run into our pain, the next step is the desire to change and asking God to help.  The psalmist writes, “You desire truth in my inward being, therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.”

Another way to apply the parables of Jesus is to view our mind and soul as sheep and coins.  Most of our mind is on the right track; we have integrity through most of our lives, perhaps 90 or even 99%.  But still there is that one sheep that wonders off, that one coin that gets lost.  Often we ourselves would rather have God ignore that lost sheep, to leave that one coin under the bed.  We just leave that part out of our relationship with God; nonchalantly omit it from our prayer.  But God loves that part of us too, the lost part, the sinful part.  And you can bet, God is going to go looking for it.  When we are lost, the gracious and loving God comes looking for us.  

As Francis Thompson suggests in his poem, “The Hound of Heaven, fearing that we would have nothing else, nothing of our own, we flee from God.  And as the satisfaction of our desires, and the relief of our fears are fleeting without God, we find ourselves lost.  I share with you the first two and the last paragraph of his poem.

The Hound of Heaven

I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears
I hid from him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot precipitated
Adown titanic glooms of chasmed hears
From those strong feet that followed, followed after
But with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat, and a Voice beat,
More instant than the feet:
All things betray thee who betrayest me.

I pleaded, outlaw--wise by many a hearted casement,
curtained red, trellised with inter-twining charities,
For though I knew His love who followed,
Yet was I sore adread, lest having Him,
I should have nought beside.

But if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of his approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars,
Fretted to dulcet jars and silvern chatter
The pale ports of the moon.

Now of that long pursuit,
Comes at hand the bruit.
That Voice is round me like a bursting Sea:
And is thy Earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest me.
Strange, piteous, futile thing;
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of Naught (He said).
And human love needs human meriting ---
How hast thou merited,
Of all Man's clotted clay, the dingiest clot.
Alack! Thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art.
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save me, save only me?
All which I took from thee, I did'st but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.
All which thy childs mistake fancies as lost,
I have stored for thee at Home.
Rise, clasp my hand, and come.
Halts by me that Footfall.
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
Ah, Fondest, Blindest, Weakest,
I am He whom thou seekest.
Thou dravest Love from thee who dravest Me.

Francis Thompson

This relationship with the personal, .loving God is not a question of conservative and liberal, intelligent or not so intelligent. In Traveling Mercies Anne Lamott has a wonderful account of the loving Jesus not as a hound but a cat. A gifted writer, progressive intellectual struggling with, among other things alcohol and drug addiction, she makes frequent trips to the Marin City flea market, and is drawn by the music into St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church: 

I never stopped believing in God…Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

“Then one afternoon the cracks webbed all the way through me.  I believed that I would die soon, from a fall or an overdose.  I knew there was an afterlife but felt that the odds of my living long enough to get into heaven were almost nil.  They couldn’t possibly take you in the shape I was in.  I could no longer imagine how God could love me.”

But somehow Anne managed to call the new minister at the Episcopal Church and he waited for her to come in and talk.  He told her, “’God has to love you, that is his job.’”  “He was the first Christian I ever met,” Anne says, “whom I could stand to be in the same room with.  Most Christians seemed almost hostile in their belief that they were saved and you weren’t.  Bill said it bothered him too, but you had to listen to what was beneath their words.  What did it mean to be saved, I asked, although I knew the word smacked of Elmer Gantry for both of us.  ‘You don’t need to think about this,’ he said, ‘just tell me.’ I guess it is like discovering you’re on the shelf of a pawnshop, dusty and forgotten and maybe not worth very much.  But Jesus comes in and tells the pawnbroker, I’ll take her place on the shelf, Let her go outside again.’”  Anne said she wanted to “fall to my knees, newly born, but I didn’t…I wasn’t willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.”

A few years later Anne started wandering into St. Andrews, drawn in by the wonderful music.  “During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people would come back to where I stood to shake my hand or try to hug me; I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon.  After this scripture was read, and the minister named James Noel who was as tall and handsome as Marvin Gaye would preach, and it would be all about social justice – and Jesus, which would be enough to send me running back to the sanctuary of the flea market.

“Eventually, a few months after I started coming, I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself.  Then the singing enveloped me.  It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s heart.  There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.”

After an abortion she starts to bleed heavily, but she says, “I was so disgusted that I had gotten so drunk one week after an abortion that I just couldn’t wake someone up and ask for help…Several hours later the blood stopped flowing and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill.  I had a cigarette and turned off the light.  After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone.  The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there – of course, there wasn’t.  But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.  I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

And I was appalled.  I thought about my life and brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen.  I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.”

I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with…I thought it was an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood.  But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.  But I knew what would happen; you let a cat in one time, give it milk, and then it stays forever.  So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.

          And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape.  It was as if people were singing between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me.

“I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “Fuck it; I quit.” You can come in.”

“…If I were to give a slide show of the next ten years, it would begin on the day I was baptized, one year after I got sober…My family and all my closest friends came to church that day to watch as James dipped his hand into the font, bathed my forehead with cool water, and spoke the words of Langston Hughes:

          Gather out of star-dust,

          Earth-dust

          Cloud-dust

          Storm-dust,

          And splinters of hail,

          One handful of dream-dust

          Not for sale.’”

Perhaps some of us are in a dark place, lost or hiding.  Perhaps we are not in as deep a pit today as Anne had found herself in, and we manage church, family and the business of life, more or less.  But beneath it all, the meetings and bills, trips to school and sporting events, deeper even than our good works and social justice is our relationship with a God who loves us and desires truth in our inward being.  As ridiculous as it may seem: Pray, talk to God about the difficult things, the embarrassing things, the dark places, the lost parts.  God will find us, and God will give us grace, strength, freedom and new life.

          A crazy idea maybe.  But give God a chance to be true.  May Jesus find us and take us home. 

Let us pray.  Dear God, we struggle with faith and Jesus and the Church.  We struggle with how you and they have been used.  We are not sure about theology and doctrine.  Our rational minds try to make sense of you and fail.  We value freedom and sound thought.  Still we sense your presence in our lives.  We sense you calling us to righteousness and integrity and fear we have failed you.  Through our freedom we have chosen thoughts and actions that have enslaved us.  We feel lost.  Cleanse us with your grace.  Create in us a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within us.  Set us free from sin that we may be free to love you and others and know true joy.  Amen