Proper 19, Year C: Getting Lost, Least, Last, and Left Behind

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Year C, Proper 20

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

The other day, I was asking our youngest to put her clothes in the laundry hamper in the daily madness we call getting ready for school at our house. Rinsing out massacred bowls of frosted miniwheats, I recited the mantra I’ve said a thousand times before between gulps of my black coffee, “Clare, it’s time for school. Do your hair. Brush your teeth. Feed the guinea pigs, and put your undies in the dirty laundry.” Usually, the response is a cheerful little chirp, “Ok, Dad!” But this morning was different. This morning I got a scowl, a foot stomp, and then to my surprise a phrase I’d never heard before, “Get lost, Dad!” Her sisters burst into a fit of conspiratorial tittering.

Now we had a little discussion about whether that was the best way to respond, but on the drive in to school I was musing about that phrase, “Get lost.” I started to wonder if there wasn’t a profound wisdom buried beneath this five-year old’s garden variety Monday morning defiance. I started to wonder, actually, whether getting lost might not just be at the core of the life of Christian discipleship.

I started to think of all the folks in the Gospel stories who find health, healing, wholeness, salvation, and reintegration into the life of the community. Who are they? They’re people who are dead in their tracks like the son of the widow of Nain who’s being carried around on a funeral bier. They are people who are lost in a far country eating pig pods like the Prodigal Son. They are people like the lost coin and the lost sheep in last week’s parables.

In short, they’re all least, last, lost, and left behind. Being lost is the engine of being found. I was remembering how in our prayers of the people we heard that line—“We pray for those we are sure they are not lost.” Deacon Libby and I even shared a chuckle when we heard that line. It sounds like thinking we’re not lost is what prevents us from accepting the deluge of grace that is our peace, our freedom, and our salvation.

But human beings don’t like getting lost. We like winning. We like having our ducks in a row. We like having things under control. We like order and predictability. We like having ourselves and our valiant, heroic efforts at the center of the picture. In the Gospels, this universal human tendency is personified by the Pharisees. They are the ones who are convinced that by their own efforts, by their own careful management of rules and regulations, by their perspicacious accounting of who’s in and who’s out,  they will take heaven by storm and enjoy divine favor. To paraphrase the old advertisement from Smith Barney—“They make salvation the old-fashioned way… they earn it.”  It’s a universe almost totally devoid of grace, of God’s presence and action in our lives. It’s a universe where everything is on us. No wonder Jesus talks about his yoke being easy and his burden light. The alternative is Atlas with the world on his shoulders!

Again and again in the Gospels, it is the lost who find themselves sudden found, unexpected insiders in the effervenscent, grace-filled, effortless ease of the life of God. That’s why Jesus tells us that the seed has to fall to the earth and die. That’s why in baptism we are buried with Christ and rise in Him. We die to that whole picture that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and earn our salvation by our own efforts. We die to everything that’s not God grace working in us—the pursuit of power, prestige, possessions—and rest in Him, the one who makes a way out of no way, the who says that when we are at the end of our efforts God is not at the end of His, the one who brings life from stinking death. As Robert Farrar Capon writes, “…[A]ll we have to do is let go—let go of everything that is not the slim thread of our lastness and lostness, and let go of every effort to walk the easy road of winning—and upon that letting go, he will draw us home

When we get to today’s Gospel we see this same dynamic at work—especially if we are willing to consider the Unjust Steward is actually Christ. We get our first hint of this when Luke links the manager’s behavior to that of the Prodigal Son. Just as the Prodigal Son squandered himself in riotous living, so the Manager squanders his Master’s wealth. Jesus is the one who squanders himself on us. Jesus is the one who squanders himself for us. Jesus is the one though he enjoyed equality with God, emptied himself taking on the form of a slave and became obedient even to death on the cross. Our God is a Prodigal God who squanders Himself on us, that we might wake up and realize that the peace we seek has already been gifted to us if we would just stop trying to earn and accept it as the unmerited, unearned, undeserved, squanderous grace it is.

There’s another way that the Unjust Steward is a Christ figure in this parable—he dies and rises just like Jesus and gives new life to those he encounters. When the Unjust Steward is caught out by the boss for tinkering with the books and fudging the numbers he dead. The game is up. His life is over. But by the end of the parable his is laughing with his Master, celebrating with the Master who thought he’d never see a blessed penny from his deadbeat debtors. Death and resurrection.

But the Unjust Steward also raises others. First of all, he raises the Master. Surely, we say, the Master doesn’t need raising! After all, he’s the wronged party. He’s the one who’s been bilked. Not so fast. The Master is the Keeper of Accounts. He’s the guy with the ledger. He’s the one who’s keeping score. And all the while, he’s remained incredibly unsuccessful in getting his debtors to pay back a single cent. As Capon writes, “the lord of the steward starts out unwilling to drop dead to any of his bookkeeping: he will not die to the stewards peculations, and he will not die to the accounts past die that he has never succeeded in collecting” (307). The Unjust Steward becomes sin, in order to free the Master from his sin of ledger-keeping, and in the process the Master enjoys an abundance that he could never predict.

Of course, the Unjust Steward also raises the Master’s debtors as well. Through his slashing of what is owed, the Unjust Steward restores the debtors. He frees them from their debt and sends them on their merry way. Sounds an awful lot like nailing our debts to the cross to me. Jesus becomes an unsavory swindler in order to save all the other laggards who haven’t paid their bills.

What, we might ask, does any of this have to do with getting lost, where we began this whole mess? What gets lost, what drops dead in this parable. Capon writes, “The unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus is its insistence that grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, and winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing—which is the only kind of grace there is.

There was nothing, after all, very respectable about Jesus in the eyes of polite society. He sought out sinners and tax collectors to eat with. He healed on the sabbath. He touched the unclean and made himself ritually impure in the process. Most obviously, he died as a criminal hanging two thieves. “Now at last, in this of this parable, “Capon writes, “we see why he refused to be respectable: he did it to catch a world that respectability could only terrify and condemn. He became sin for us sinners, weak for us weaklings, lost for us losers, and dead for us dead.”

Respectability, is the world of the Pharisees. The world of thinking that our puny human calculus is the measure of God. It’s in dropping dead to that whole game, of stopping the act of being perfect little peaches, of admitting our lastness, lostness, leastness, and littleness, of admitting our need for a Savior, that the Kingdom of Heaven that strived for, worked for, made ourselves respectable for, us given to us ruffians, just as we are, right here and right now. Let’s drop dead together. Let’s get lost together. Let’s drop the act of precious respectability and join the come as your party that is life in the Squanderous Christ that’s been in full swing since the foundation of the world.