I can’t think that there is anything that would be more terrifying than looking into the eyes of a mother who thinks that she has lost her child. I recall years ago seeing that very sight. Believe-you-me, it is daunting! The mother in question was in a mall in Ottawa and she came down the escalator in a great hurry. Standing next to me were the security people for the mall. She was seeking them out. The look in her eyes of fear – pure, raw fear – was something to behold!
She explained how her daughter has simply just mysteriously walked away from her and that on the level that she had been she had gone into all the stores to try and find her, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t there. She was now desperate! Well, I was impressed by the mall security police. First of all, they decided immediately to make sure that there was somebody on all the exits and entrances to the mall. They immediately alerted store owners and managers, particularly of the big stores, that there was a child missing. They got her particulars – what she was dressed in, what she was like, her name, her height, all the information they needed – and they kept assuring the mother that it would be all right.
Finally, they pulled out a map of the mall, and they said to the mother “Where do you think your child would go in such a circumstance?” The mother thought about it. She thought the child would go to Toys R Us, for that was in that mall and it seemed like a natural place, or she would go to one of the big candy stores in the mall. Maybe she would go there. They were places she liked. The mall people said, “No. No. Where would your daughter think that you would go, because chances are she is also not sure of where she is, and she will go where you would go. So, where would you go?”
The mother thought about it. She said, “I would probably go to the shoe store.”
So the mall police and the mother went to the shoe stores, there were two in the mall. Lo and behold, in the second one she was there, fumbling with the Ferragamos, innocently playing with the shoes, and enjoying herself. What an incredible lesson this was for everyone! This is because this child, who clearly was lost and was really ecstatic to see her mother, went where she thought her mother would be and was looking for a place that would be safe.
But it was the map that was laid out by the mall police that really made everyone focus on where they needed to go. The joy, the rejoicing of that mother and daughter was memorable! I think when Jesus, when telling the parables that he told so often throughout the Gospels, was capturing that same sense of fear and awe and relief in what he was trying to tell us, because in many ways I think that after Easter we Christians need a road map for the Church. We need to refocus on what it is after we have celebrated the glory of Holy Week that we are to do and what the mission of the Church should be.
This, of all times of the year, is the time for us to think seriously about our mission and its road map. In many ways, Holy Week has given us the source for all of this. After all, Holy Week is all about God coming after us: God coming to seek and to save humanity. From the moment that Jesus rides into Jerusalem and there is the singing of “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday to the moment that Mary and the disciples realize that Jesus is raised from the dead, God has been reaching out to humanity.
He has been reaching out to us in Holy Week, not only through the events that took place, but most especially through the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus himself, for it is the Cross that is the ultimate symbol of God reaching out to a simple and a broken world and redeeming it and forgiving it. The Resurrection is a statement of hope beyond death to the life that we find in God eternally. It is God reaching out to us as Cross and Resurrection.
Even more than that, in Holy Week God has given his witnesses: it is in Mary, it is in Peter and James and John, and as I am going to be looking at next week even Thomas, who are confronted by the reality of the living Christ, and they bear witness to God reaching out to the world at Holy Week through the Cross and the Resurrection. Christ not only then actually enacts these things, but shows and reveals how he fulfills his very own teachings when he said, “I have come to seek and to save that which is lost.” He is actually doing it. He has done it and he has his witnesses to it.
What is more fascinating is to realize that Jesus had touched upon this even before the events of Holy Week. He did it in a trilogy of incredible parables. The parables are about the lost son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep. All three of them are powerful in their own way. All three of them have an essential message to them. But the one that I think is really the road map for the Church is the parable of the lost sheep. This is a triptych for us to follow, and a narrative for us to embrace.
In many ways, it was said the scene was set by what occurred in the Gospel of Luke, and to show that this is the road map we need to look at the opposition that Jesus was receiving, and the context in which he said it. Jesus was being confronted by religious leaders who were opposing him because of the way he ate with sinners and the way that he associated with outcasts. I love the word that is used: best translated, “They murmured about him.” They didn’t like the fact that he associated with people who were ritually unclean or who seemed to be morally impure. They “murmured” about him, because not only did he associate with them, but he was intimate, in the sense that he had dinner with them, and they couldn’t stand it.
What does Jesus do? Does Jesus defend himself and get haughty and angry? No. Jesus tells a story, as was often his response. The story was the parable of the lost sheep, and there is more to this parable, as we are going to see, than often meets the eye. The parable was a classic Palestinian event: it is rural and it is agrarian. It talks about shepherds, and he addresses the people as if they are the shepherds in this parable: “Which one of you, if you were a shepherd and found that you had one lost sheep wouldn’t ignore the ninety-nine and go and find that one sheep because that one sheep is valuable?”
What is fascinating about this is that in the economy of Palestine in the first century, as all the sociologists and archaeologists are now pointing out, the industry of caring for sheep was one of the mainstays of the economy outside of the other things such as farming and, of course, fishing. The care of sheep was one of the main movers within the economy. That is why it is fitting that shepherds were there in Bethlehem at the very beginning of the whole of the story of the New Testament.
Shepherds then were powerful forces within the economy. Historically, the idea of shepherds was also powerful because in The Old Testament Jesus was compared to a shepherd: in Psalm 23 “The Lord is my Shepherd.....”, and in Isaiah 40, “He will feed his sheep.” This notion of God and the shepherds is an Old Testament image, and one which people understood very readily. But, in the New Testament it is not emphasized. In fact, only in allusions to parables, and most especially about himself as “The good shepherd” is the association between God and the shepherd there.
Why is that so? It was because shepherds belonged to the hall of shame. We think of shepherds as nice people wandering the hills, taking care of the sheep, but for many of the people of Palestine in the time of Jesus, they were dirty people, they were morally impure, they did not meet all the ritual and cleanliness laws, and they hardly ever came to Temple because they were always caring for their sheep. Along with gamblers, sailors, tax collectors, shepherds were a group of people that were looked down upon.
When Jesus makes the analogy of a shepherd going after his sheep and he identifies himself and his ministry with that of a shepherd, he is making those who have been criticizing him even more furious! Jesus is saying, “I am like one of those shepherds. I am like one of those outcasts, and I am going after those lost sheep. I am going after those tax collectors. I am going to seek and to save that which is lost. I am going to reach out to them.” This must have sent those who were standing in judgement and “murmuring” about him crazy, because he was actually identifying as one who was going to seek the lost with hardly the finest credentials of being a shepherd. That was Jesus’ great passion.
The reason that he told this story and others like this is because he wanted to give the Church that would follow in his name the roadmap for what its ministry should be. There are really two forces behind this. The first is that the mission of the Church is always ecstatic, and by ecstatic I mean outside itself, which is the literal meaning of the word “exstasis” or “outside of yourself.” The Church should always in its mission be “outside itself.”
Some would say that the ministry of Jesus was his ministry and the Church’s ministry is something other than that, but that is actually not so. Jesus in the great commission in Matthew 28 makes it abundantly clear, and he does elsewhere in other parts of the Gospels as well, that those who bear the name of Christ must share in the mission that he had. He said, “Go into the world baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And lo, I will be with you always.”
In other words, the mission of the Church is Christ’s mission, and if Christ’s mission was to reach out to the lost and to seek and to save the lost, then the Church’s mission is the same. No one knew that more than the Apostle Paul. The whole of his mission to the Gentile world was borne out of the notion of reaching out to the lost, reaching out to the pagan world, reaching out to the world that was beyond the bounds of the Synagogue and the Temple. This was the mission of Paul, because he understood the mission of Jesus. He understood that it was outside ourselves.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a wonderful dinner at the Institute of Evangelism at Wycliffe College, the Anglican College. Speaking, almost as his farewell speech as the Director of it, was John Bowen, who is well known and well loved. David has had him come and speak here at the church and give a lecture I think on more than one occasion. John, in his final presentation in that position said something that I will never forget. He said, “In the life of the Church we have spent a disproportionate amount of time caring about the 99 per cent and not reaching out to the 1 per cent. We have become absorbed and obsessed with the 99 per cent that are already in our fold, and not the 1 per cent who are not.”
He didn’t mean this in literal numbers of course. We are talking about emphasis here. He said, “It is fine and it is right to pastor the 99 per cent and it is right to make sure that those in the fold are looked after and nurtured and cared for. So it should be! That is what a Christian community is. But, oftentimes, we forget about those who are not within the fold, and it is those who are not within the fold that the Church should seek and engage and embrace and reach out to in all that we have celebrated in Holy Week.”
I had something similar happen the week before. When I was in the United Kingdom, I was part of a group of scholars from all over the world that met together. One of the men, who was absolutely outstanding, told me that he was Dean of the Bethlehem Bible Institute. I thought he meant Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “No! Bethlehem!” he said to me, “THE Bethlehem!” That is where he teaches the Scriptures. I thought, “Well, this is a dude I should take seriously.” I listened to him talk. He talked about the passion in his life.
He said:
We live in Bethlehem there is this incredible tension all around us: the tension between anti-Semitism and the extremes of Zionism, the challenges of divided leadership within the Palestinian community, the extremists and the gentle moderates. We have Christians, who are caught in the middle and who don’t know which side of the wall to live on. We have all kinds of tensions and problems. But, one of the things that we have to focus on is Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus’ ministry in the middle of all of this is to seek and to save that which is lost: to go to the broken and to restore them, to go to the sinful and to give them the news of redemption, to go to the hurting and to bring them relief, to go to the poor and to lift them up from their indignity, to reach out to those who have lost their sense of God. This is surely the mission that we must embrace in the midst of all of this, because if we lose that mission and everything that we hold dear about this gorgeous place, Bethlehem – and it is really not that gorgeous! – but this place Bethlehem, and everything we hold dear about it, it can easily send us on the wrong road.
He kept his eye on the road map, and that is what is important.
There is something more, and that is that the mission of the Church is always God’s mission. The classic word in Latin that is used to describe it is the “missio dei”. It was talked about from the second century on: that the Church’s mission is “the mission of God” and God’s mission is the mission of the Church. You cannot separate or divide these. Therefore, because it is God’s mission, it is God always reaching out that must be the focus and the mover and the power behind the Church’s ministry.
Again, so often, we get caught up in all our missions and all our ideas of what we think the Church should be, and we play all these sort of sometimes games throughout the centuries, and we forget that we have no mission other than that which God had given us, and what God has given us, God has given to his Son. His Son says “My mission is to seek and save that which is lost.”
I thought about how powerful this is this very week, within an hour, in one place, here in Toronto. It was a fascinating hour! It confirmed what I have believed for a long time. Three things happened in one block in one hour. The first thing that happened was there was a gathering of religious leaders that I joined to oppose the building of a casino here in Toronto, along with people of all kinds of religious faith – Jains, Muslims, Jews, Christians, all there – all concerned, all deeply, deeply concerned for the welfare and the civic responsibility that we have. It was fascinating.
After making the statements that we made and having signed the petition that we signed, a group of us who were Christians, representing a wide variety of denominations, met in the rotunda at City Hall, and there we talked about what it is that makes us so passionate about this. What makes us passionate is our concern for the vulnerable. Our concern about what happens to the vulnerable and how, not just in addictions but in terms of what it constitutes our society and what we want to build it on, what we want people to be proud of, and we want particularly the weak and the poor to have their work treated with respect, their labour appreciated, and to lift them up not by false means and by false hope from the greedy.
You know what motivated us? The one per cent! Never mind the numbers. The Church is the Church that stands with the one per cent, and that speaks to save the lost. Sometimes it is hard, even in ministry, to take a moral stand on something, but you take it not just because of some blind or arrogant position that you take, but because you care about human life and human beings. I was impressed by some of my brothers and sisters who gather there and their courage to do it.
Then, I went to the Eaton Centre to grab a bite of lunch, and as I entered the Eaton Centre there is a preacher. He is standing on the side of the street with a hat and a cape on, and he is preaching. He is extolling the virtues of the Kingdom of God, and he says, “Repent! Change!” I am listening to his sermon, and I would make some adjustments if I were doing it: You know, maybe that wasn’t quite right on that biblical text, but then I am a snob, right? So, I just said, “Shut up Stirling – and listen!”
I listened to this guy and I thought, “God bless you, man!” There were people making fun of him; there were students laughing at him; there were people who just ignored him; but there were some who listened. I thought to myself that night, “If one person had listened to that street preacher, as bold as he was and as unorthodox as he might have appeared, more power to him! He has gone after the one per cent!”
Then, after I had my lunch and I came out and was about to leave, all of a sudden, two Chinese ladies come up to me. (I am wearing my clerical shirt.) They say, “Father, Father, can you help us?”
I said, “I am not a father of any one, trust me! But, I will help you.”
They said, “We would like to go to St. Michael’s Cathedral.”
So, I give them directions. I reach into my pocket, I pull out my Blackberry, I get my GPS, I show them on the GPS how to get to St. Michael’s Cathedral, and I said, “Why do you want to go?”
They said, “We are visiting here from China, but we don’t want to miss daily Mass.”
I thought, “All power to you!”
I thought, “There you go! In a microcosm in Toronto, in a block, all you need to know about the mission of Jesus! One: you do it for the vulnerable. Two: you preach his word to seek and to save. And three: you show people a way to a community that will love them and minister to them. You see, that is the road map for the Church: that is the parable of the lost sheep!” That is what our church and all churches should embrace in the glow of Easter! Amen.