CEC News and Father Riley's homily from September 15, 2019

 CEC News

… Mrs. Jane Barnett will lead us in Morning Prayer September 22^nd.  Father Riley will lead us in Holy Eucharist September 29^th.

…The vestry has approved a contract with Pearl River Glass Studios to repair our stained glass windows and to add new exterior protection.  Work will begin soon.

…Please check out the diocesan website at  http://www.epiwla.org/  and register for  the upcoming evangelism event at Camp Hardtner, September 28.  Some of us have already registered.  The event features The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers. Here is the note from the diocesan website:

Come to Camp Hardtner  on September 28 to discover a fresh, humble, effective and Episcopal approach to the spiritual practice of evangelism. The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers - Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism, Reconciliation and Stewardship of Creation - will lead an engaging and practical workshop that will offer basic training in evangelism as well as the Way of Love. This workshop is for everyone: clergy, lay leaders, and anyone else who desires to deepen their faith and learn how to share their faith story with others.

14 PENTECOST, PROPER XIX - C - 19                              LUKE 15. 1-10

One of my favorite stain glass windows, and one of the more popular ones I might add, is that which depicts Jesus carrying the lost sheep that was found across his shoulders. Each time I read this passage that image comes to mind, along with one of my favorite hymns, “The King of Love My Shepherd is.”

Luke’s 15^th chapter contains three parables of “lost and found.” In today’s gospel, we are presented with the first two. Jesus is relating these little stories in response to a group of grumbling Pharisees and scribes that do not approve of the company he is keeping, namely, those they considered “sinners.”

Tax collectors are lumped in with the sinners as well, as the Pharisees and scribes making no distinction between the two. Tax collectors were Jews who had sold out to the Romans and were making a profit off their own people. The “sinners” were those the religious elite viewed as being “unchurched.” They did not keep the law as prescribed.

Neither of these two were the types that any respecting Jew would keep company with. So why was Jesus? His telling of these two little parables should have silenced his critics.

Luke stresses the repentance of the sinner and contrasts that with the self-righteousness of the Pharisees and scribes. Their view of God’s mercy and the worth of the individual were all wrong. Jesus makes that clear in today’s parables of the lost sheep and coin.

It always seems to be the case that when our idea of God is skewed, we fall for the temptation to discriminate, to see ourselves as somehow better than another. There must have been a lot of that kind of thinking going on among God’s people at the time of Jesus.

For the gospels contain more than one teaching on the subject. In addition to today’s parables, what follows in Luke is that of the prodigal son. In it, we hear of the stay-at-home brother who resents the return of his younger sibling who has squandered his inheritance in riotous living. He now comes home with hat in hand and only to be received by his father with open arms and the throwing of a grand celebration as if his return was something to celebrate.

The older brother sees himself as somehow better, more worthy of his father’s love than the one who has returned. After all he has, in his own eyes, been the faithful one. Then, there is the story Jesus tells of the two men praying in the temple.

One sits up front and turns to view the one sitting in the back. The self-righteous one sitting up front thanks God that he is not like the other one who he deems a sinner. However the Jews of Jesus’ day were not anymore self-righteous in their thinking than we are today.

There is a reason why pride is the number one deadly sin. Its by-products are impenitence, which is a refusal to face one’s own sins and confess them to God, and hypocrisy, arrogance and snobbery that all go together to make up a self-righteous attitude.

As human beings we promote such thinking when we fall for the temptation to discriminate. Just look at our own society where do the divisions lie? Is it not race, creed, culture, religion and politics? Pride and its accompanying sin of self-righteousness build walls that separate.

The self-righteous have no need for repentance for the eyes of their soul have been blinded by their sin. In their own eyes they are fine just like they are. What alienates from God is self - satisfaction which leads us to imagine that there is nothing so very wrong with us, and to treat with contempt those who differ from us, or worse yet, those we deem as unworthy of God’s love.

Such was the case in today’s passage as the Pharisees and scribes watched Jesus sitting down to eat with those they deemed unworthy, not only of Jesus’ company, if he was who he said he was, but more especially their own.

Often when we read this story we think that being found by God is all that is necessary and is worth rejoicing. But the point of the story is that the sheep and the coin were lost. Sinners must repent.

Jesus’ idea of repentance and that of his critics differ.

For them, nothing short of adopting their standards of purity and law observance would do. For Jesus, when people follow him and his way, that is true repentance. Christ says that there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repents.

And that is the way it should be here. After all, isn’t that the point of praying that God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven? The joy of God is in the recovery of the lost who know their own misery. Imagine the impact of this on the repentant sinners who heard these stories.

They didn’t have to earn God’s love or Jesus’ respect. He loved looking for them, and celebrated when he found them. And what Jesus did - this is the deepest point of the parables, and the ultimate reason why the Pharisees objected to them - was what God was doing. Jesus’ actions on earth corresponded exactly to God’s love in the heavenly realm.

What Jesus is doing is offering kingdom hospitality. It is not entertaining, it is evangelism.  The real challenge of these parables for today’s church is what would we have to do in the public’s eye, if we were to make people ask the question to which stories like these are the answer?

What might we as Christians do that would make people ask, ‘why are you doing something like that?’ that would give us the chance to tell our own story of our having been lost but now are found.

Our calling to follow Jesus is to follow his example, to welcome the stranger and the sojourner in our midst, even the sinner and the outcast. To reach out to the hidden places where “lost coins and sheep” tend to hide. To invite all to accept God’s hospitality and to celebrate with those who come the realization of all our need of continual repentance.

For we were once lost but have been found by Him who is the King of Love. Through the merits of His life, death and resurrection we now enjoy the hospitality of God, and live with the Hope that at the last Day He will bring us, with all the saints, into the joy of His eternal kingdom. AMEN+