Copyright © All Saints Memorial Episcopal Church

Proper 19 C

It’s all about sin and salvation.  Actually, when I say that, I want to launch into an imitation of some kind of Hollywood preacher with some kind of indeterminate Southern accent, holding a Bible and using a very dramatic tone of voice.  But I’ll just let you imagine that.

But anyway, it is all about sin and salvation.  Way back a long time ago, when I first started going to church around the age of 13, I attended a Baptist youth group.  There was an emphasis on hearing people’s testimony, or reading testimonies--testimonies in this case being a kind of churchy word that meant telling your story particularly in relation to your faith journey, and usually particularly a conversion experience.

Well, these testimonies always seemed to center around sin and salvation.  Someone would tell about how they had been in with the wrong crowd and going the wrong direction, or been mixed up in bad things like drugs or gangs or whatever, and then there would be a turning point in the story.  Somehow they encountered a Christian who talked to them about Jesus, or maybe they picked up a tract somewhere, or maybe they just read the Bible.  They came to understand that Jesus loved them and would forgive them, and they became Christian and everything turned around for them.  

The thing that bound all these stories together was the dramatic nature of the turnaround that the people experienced.  They had been way way down, and now they were way way up.  They had been in the depths of sin, and now they were blissed-out in the heights of salvation.  

The message that I got was that this was the natural order of things:  first there was dramatic sin, then dramatic salvation.  But then I was faced with a problem.  I was basically a good kid.  I wasn’t into drugs or gangs or whatever.  I was missing the first piece, the dramatic sin.  I didn’t want to get involved with drugs or gangs or whatever other dramatically bad things, so it seemed to me that I was closed out of this story, that somehow the whole sin/salvation thing wasn’t for me.

Well, I’m sure that wasn’t the message that the organizers of those various testimonies were trying to get across!  I imagine that they chose the most dramatic stories both simply because they were dramatic and would keep people’s attention and because they illustrate the depth of God’s love, that no one is beyond the reach of salvation in Christ.  But in leaving out those of us who aren’t particularly dramatic, they created a hole to fall into.

Just what do sin and salvation mean for those of us who are basically decent people, without dramatic stories of deep sin, repentance and conversion?

Well, back in the desert, when Moses was up on the mountaintop talking to God, the people who he had led out of slavery in Egypt began to panic.  They figured that Moses had abandoned them, so they asked Moses’ brother to take over, to supply gods in the place of the God that Moses seemed to have disappeared with.  God saw what was happening, and it was only Moses’ intervention (which included some pretty slick fast-talking and persuasion) that prevented God from destroying them in the desert.  

So there’s an example of sin and salvation.  But since most of us haven’t been going around worshiping golden calves, what does this story mean for us?  

You have to remember that this story takes place after God had really clearly demonstrated solidarity with the Israelites.  This is after the pillar of fire that led them through the night, this is after the deliverance at the Red Sea when the Egyptians were drowned, this is after the ten commandments.  God has clearly been with the Israelites the whole time.  And then Moses goes up on a mountain and doesn’t come down right away, and the Israelites panic.  They panic and look around for the next best thing, which is Aaron, Moses’ brother, and whatever idol he can come up with to replace God.  

Well, who can’t relate to panicking and making a poor choice?  We’ve probably all done that at one time or another.  And it’s quite possible that at times when we’ve panicked, we have turned from looking for God to whatever the next best thing is--probably not a golden calf, but maybe some other substitute.  In our case it may not be as dramatic as it was for the Israelites in the desert, but it is sin just the same.

Then there’s Paul, who always speaks in dramatic terms about his sinfulness before his conversion to following Christ.  After all, he had one of the most dramatic conversion stories we know, with being struck on the road to Damascus and so on.  He says in this morning’s reading that he was a “blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.”  He lists himself as the foremost of sinners.  And he also goes into what was behind his sin:  he “acted ignorantly in unbelief . . . .”  

Acting ignorantly, there’s something I can relate to.  Not that I can point to a past like Paul’s, but I’m sure that I act ignorantly all the time without realizing it--that’s the whole thing about ignorance, that you don’t know any better.  At the time, it may be unavoidable.  But if whatever you are doing in ignorance is something that gets between you and God, then it counts as sin.    

And what does Jesus say?  Well, today we heard him tell the the story of the sheep who wanders away and the shepherd who goes to find it, and the story of the coin that gets lost and the woman who looks for it until she finds it.  

Take sheep.  Well, sheep are pretty stupid.  They don’t know what’s best for them.  They wander away because the grass looks a little greener over on the other side of the field, and then a little greener further on, and then further and further until they are thoroughly lost.  It’s not intentional, it’s just a kind of wandering without thought to the bigger picture.  It’s something that probably a lot of us can relate to, just kind of going along and doing whatever the next thing seems to be, without realizing that the overall direction we are heading is one that we probably wouldn’t choose if we were actually thinking about it.  But if that wandering takes us away from God, it is sin.

And the coin.  This is my favorite one, because it’s the least dramatic and the one that is  easiest to relate to.  This coin got lost somewhere in the house.  Well, think about how that might have happened.  Did the coin get up and walk away?  No.  Coins can’t walk.  Did the coin get tired of being with all the other coins and decide to take the first opportunity to go off on its own?  No.  Coins can’t think, they can’t make decisions.  The coin probably fell out of a pocket or purse as it was being carried through the house.  In other words, the coin, through no action of its own whether intentional or unintentional, got lost.  Sometimes this happens to us.   We get separated from God by the circumstances around us, and there we are, in a state of sin.  

So what about salvation?  In our Exodus reading this morning, God was merciful to the people of Israel after Moses gave a good argument in their favor.  But in both 1 Timothy and in Luke this morning, we see a different image of God’s salvation.  In Paul’s personal story, Christ came after him.  It wasn’t a matter of Paul realizing that he was ignorant and that his ignorance was bringing him further from God--Christ literally knocked him off his horse and told him to get with the program.  As Paul tells it, God’s grace overflows with the faith and love that are in Christ--sinners can be saved through that love, that faith, that grace.  Even sinners who are merely ignorant, not deliberately evil.  

In the stories that Jesus told in our gospel reading this morning, God acts much the same as Christ does in Paul’s conversion story.  God is the shepherd who goes after that lost sheep until it is found.  God is the woman who misses the lost coin and lights a lamp and searches the house until she finds it.  God actively looks for each one of us, and if we allow ourselves to be found, that is salvation.  

Let’s allow ourselves to be found.