Losing It
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10

September 16, 2001

It was August 24, a Wednesday. There was no TV coverage or radio, but it took only a week for the Catholic bishop of Hippo to hear about it. The worst thing in the world had happened. The world would never be the same again.

Augustine was away in Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, when he heard the news. The year was 410. An army of barbarian Goths, led by the infamous Alaric, had entered Rome, and for three days burned and sacked the city.

Rome was not what it used to be, but it was still the centre of civilization. All roads still led to the Eternal City, but now it was emphatically mortal. Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, exclaimed, "If Rome can perish, who can be safe?"

A British monk, Pelagius, who would become one of the most significant and controversial theologians in Christian history - and an opponent of Augustine - wrote to a friend recounting the terror of those three days.

"It happened only recently and you heard it yourself. Rome, the mistress of the world, shivered, crushed with fear, at the sound of blaring trumpets and the howling of the Goths. Where, then, was the nobility? Where were the certain and distinct ranks of dignity? Everyone was mingled together and shaken with fear; every household had its grief and an all-pervading terror gripped us. Slave and noble were one. The same spectre of death stalked before us all." (Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 289).

Augustine, arguably the most influential thinker in Christianity outside of the Apostle Paul, was deeply shaken. The universe had now been altered; but he was a Christian. Soon there were those who blamed the sack of Rome on the fact that the Christian faith had undermined and undone the classical pagan gods of Rome. Augustine responded by writing his longest and perhaps most famous book, The City of God.

It was a Tuesday, not a Wednesday, that our world was crashed into by barbarians. Actually, except for George W. Bush, we don't use that word anymore. "Terrorists" is the word which carries the same fearful connotation of uncivilization now.

We have our modern-day pagans also. Jerry Falwell, trying his hardest to be as self-righteously fundamentalist as the most radical Islamic mullah, declared that the U.S. "probably got what it deserved." Falwell directly blames the American Civil Liberties Union, the federal court system, the public school system, the abortionists, the gays and lesbians.

If it had been a normal Fifteenth Sunday after Sunday the Gospel reading still would be the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. I intended this to be a normal Sunday, but if we are listening to these parables at all, God works in mysterious ways. In my whimsical fashion, I thought to call this sermon, "Losing It," with no particular target in mind, but how appropriate for our spirits today.

The shepherd lost a single sheep, the woman lost a single coin, but we wonder just how much we have lost. We certainly have lost the innocence of our invincibility, just as the citizens of Pax Romana in the early fifth century had lost theirs.

I haven't heard many people say it directly, but the question has oozed out of every pore: what is the meaning of all this? Have we, in fact, lost the meaning for our world, lost into some darkest corner of chaos?

We tremble to hear how many people died in those couple of hours. Natural disasters have in the past claimed as many lives, and tragic and soul-wrenching as those were, we always found it easier to move on. You can blame the weather, but it won't do any good. Innocent people were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the forces of nature intersected them.

What has stabbed brutally into our souls is that the root of this disaster is not abnormal weather patterns or shifting tectonic plates, but abnormal human hatred. Human hatred unnerves us like no other force.

Yet, are you and I not human? Can you or I honestly say that we have never hated? I cannot, and I can name names. Hatred is an incarnation of evil and we all participate in it. Hatred strips meaningfulness, goodness, and purpose to life from us. We are losing it.

Jesus liked to eat and party. He was eating and drinking with a bunch of tax-collectors and other assorted sinners. Let's make no justifications here: these were not "nice" sinners. The tax-collectors were greasy, rob their own mothers blind types. The other sinners may well have been prostitutes, but they were no longer innocent young girls. Jesus, however, was not being heroic, eating with them while he held his spiritual nose. He liked them and liked to party with them. The scribes and Pharisees did not approve and most likely were far more crude in their complaint than the rather plain "this man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

Parable time. The common perspective on parables that they are stories out of everyday life is bogus. Most parables are outrageous, ridiculous in their situation and resolution. A shepherd leaves 99 sheep unguarded as he heads off looking for a lone lost lamb. That's a normal course for a shepherd, isn't it? No, the shepherd, by anyone's standards, is an idiot and should be thrown out of the shepherding guild. The woman loses a precious coin and looks desperately and painstakingly for it, as we have done on some occasion. We assume that she must not be wealthy, that this one coin really matters to her income. She finds it and then in her joy throws a party that is probably worth more than one drachma. This woman needs serious financial management training.

These parables are not about people like you and me who have lost something precious. They are really not about you and me at all; they are about God, a ridiculous God.

OK, stories about God are acceptable in most company, but Jesus here says that God is like a shepherd and a woman. I don't need to explain why a woman should not represent God to most generations. A shepherd was no longer an honoured profession in first-century society. They were sort of like bikers who would roar into town and party up the place. They did not pray particularly well, if at all, and certainly did not worship at the right times or places as a good Jew should.

This shepherdly and womanly God rejoices greatly and parties hearty because this God - the only God we have - has found us and now we are no longer lost. God finds the unexpected people as well; and when God finds you, God does so at the times you don't expect it. God seldom finds you when you are praying. When you are lost, when you are dead to this world, then God raises you up, resurrects you to new life.

"The world will never be the same" is a tired refrain heard often this week. The world should never be the same. Dazed and confused, people around the world are struggling to make sense of what has happened, to find out what it all means. I have not heard anyone find any meaning in Tuesday's events. That is because Tuesday has no meaning in and of itself. It is an example, a demonstration of the existence of evil and human hatred, but ultimate meaning, No.

For us in the Christian Church, as for Augustine, there is meaning to life. The meaning is the resurrection of Christ through which God finds us even in the midst of the cruelest, darkest deaths. We mourn, not as Americans, not as Canadians, but as human beings with the families of those so cruelly lost in the terror. We dare not say that hatred has made these deaths and lives meaningless, for God has yet to act finally. Resurrection is never finished.

You may think that the fall of Rome wasn't that big a deal, but for the ancient world, it was probably more disconcerting than Tuesday. The fact we no longer give it much consideration is because God found a way to resurrect not Rome, but the greatness of the human spirit which had once been Rome's. The Black Death killed millions of people and whole cities became ghost towns, yet God raised us up again to bring new life to civilization.

After the Holocaust, we could not live in the same way. We had to examine our hatred, not those of the crushed Nazis. No time now for our vengeful versions of a Christian fatwa. If we do, they have won, for we become barbarians too. Only when we admit that we are lost and wandering will we be found.

We have been shattered, we have been shaken, we mourn our common loss, but we have not lost the meaning of life. Martin Luther wrote in his great hymn: "Let goods and kindred go; This mortal life also; The body they may kill; God's truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever."

We shall overcome, for God finds us even now in the midst of the rubble.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan