Two stories from Who Counts?: 100 Sheep, 10 Coins and 2 Sons, by Amy-Jill Levine, were shared with the children and the congregation before Sermon. For more information about the children's book: Click here.
One Hundred Sheep
One hundred sheep! If just a single one were lost, who would notice?
Who counted sheep anyway?
The man did.
The man had a lot of sheep, one hundred of them.
He counted them every day.
1, 2, 3, 4, … 10
He kept counting:
10, 20, 30, 40, … 100.
It took time to count, a long time.
One day the man counted:
10, 20, 30, 40, … 91, 92, 93, 94, …
96, 97, 98, 99.
Then he stopped.
There were only ninety-nine!
He must have made a mistake; he had one hundred sheep, not ninety-nine.
He counted again.
Still there were only ninety-nine.
One of his sheep was missing!
He was responsible for ALL the sheep, all one hundred of them.
Immediately the man went to look for the lost sheep. He walked and walked, but he saw nothing. He kept walking. He looked to the left. Nothing.
He looked to the right. Nothing. He walked and he listened. Still nothing. Then he heard it: a bleating sound.
- BAA
He ran toward the sound. And there she was – the lost sheep!
He had found her.
She was too tired to follow him home, so he lifted her on his shoulders and carried her.
He was so happy to have all his sheep together that he invited everyone to celebrate.
Some people said, “What’s so wonderful? It was only one sheep, You had ninety-nine others.”
The man smiled. “One sheep makes a difference. Without her, something is missing. Now my flock is complete.”
The next story:
Ten Coins
Ten drachmas, ten silver coins. Every day the woman would count them.
Then one day she counted: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
She stopped. She couldn’t have made a mistake, but she counted again anyway.
Still she counted only nine. One drachma was missing. She had lost one of her coins.
The woman lit a lamp to see more clearly. She looked under chairs and in corners. No coin!
She looked in cabinets and in wastebaskets. Still no drachma! She took a broom and swept the floor. There were crumbs and dust, but no coin! It was her fault.
She had lost the coin, and now she must find it. She searched again with the light and the broom.
Finally, she saw something shining and heard a ping. PING!
She looked down, and there it was – the missing coin!
She held the coin in her hand for a few moments, and then she carefully placed it with the other drachmas.
She was so happy to have all the coins that she invited the women in the town to celebrate. Some people said, “What is so important? It was only one coin.” The woman smiled. “Just one coin matters. Without it, something is missing. Now my coin collection is complete.”
Scripture: Mark 1:14-20
Sermon: Fish for People
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” It’s a beautiful calling story of Jesus, easy to visualize. The sea of Galilee, the nets, the boats, the hired servants, the action of casting, mending, then following. We could almost participate in this story with our sense of sight, smell, sound, through imagination.
When Jesus calls his first four disciples, he makes clear that the work they are going to do will not be fishing for fish, but fishing for people – building and nurturing a revolutionary community where fishing for people means feasting: feasting on the stories and feasting at the table as God’s family.
I hope that the two stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin (we shared with our children as we began our worship) can help us to understand this calling story to be relevant to our time and our Immanuel community.
Traditionally, evangelism has been understood as Christians going out into the world and finding sinners and delivering them to salvation through the grace of God and the cross of Jesus. Today’s Gospel story begins with Jesus’ message which echoes the warnings of his former teacher, John the Baptist: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.” Given this urgency, new forms of living are required: we need to determine what is necessary and what is not. We need to find the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, on earth. It is truly a new message.
However, an even more authentic calling from Jesus comes after this important proclamation – “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” (Here, we don’t hear Jesus mention sin, repent, believe.)
What’s interesting to note is fish, sheep, coins do not sin. They are not about sinning and repenting. Do sheep sin? Do coins confess? They are not sinners.
Amy-Jill Levine, the ingenious contemporary biblical scholar, renowned for bringing the Jewishness of Jesus into Christian interpretation and dialogue tells us: “Sheep eat, sleep, poop, produce wool, and give milk- but an awareness of sin or salvation is not part of ovine nature… Neither sheep nor coins have the capability to repent”. If any blame is to be assigned in the first two parables, then the shepherd and the woman are at fault, for they “lost”, respectively, the sheep and the coin.
Levine adds, “Were the parables called ‘The Shepherd Who Lost his Sheep’ and ‘The Woman Who Lost Her Coin’, we might be closer to an earlier meaning.” Before the authors of the Gospels of Luke and Mark added their allegorical interpretations by dictating the meanings – “This parable means this, this parable means that,” the stories are open. If we take out the layers of interpretation given by Mark and Luke, in Jesus’ original story-telling, these stories may be about, literally, counting. Who counts? God counts. We count. The meaning we add - sin and forgiveness and reconciliation and deliverance is extra, is not part of the original parables.
We can also understand fishing for people in the same light. I wonder if, by “fishing for people”, Jesus means going out and catching people and saving them from sin or a wrong path or a wrong faith. Or is it a call to search and find all who will find such joy at gathering at the table because they hunger for the goodness of God and Jesus’ good news for the poor? If we let go of the familiar, restricting lens of sin and salvation we can look more deeply at who we are and where we are in these stories. For example, how are we like the man who lost his sheep and the woman who lost her coin? When we find ourselves in the stories, we are prompted to ask other questions as well: Have we lost or missed something, or someone, and not paid attention? Is there someone, or something, we take for granted?
What, or whom, have we forgotten to count? The blame of being lost does not fall on the sheep or coin. The story is about us, we who need to start searching, finding and rejoicing at the recovery of what and who is missing.
Then, think about the joy of the shepherd and the woman – you can imagine them as God, of course. Here we get the great image of God as the woman searching for her lost coin, sweeping with a broom through the dust on the floor and even crouching down, cheek on the floor, to look under the bed with a light to find one, single, drachma. You can also imagine the shepherd and the woman as us – engaging in an exaggerated search, and when we find the missing sheep, or missing coin, we engage in an equally exaggerated sense of rejoicing, first by ourselves, and then with our friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice together with me, because I have found my sheep, the lost one.’ ‘Rejoice with me, because I have found the drachma, the one I had lost.’ Really, the stories do sound more like how we become a community of the beloved, by counting, not by converting.
These stories remind me of the conversation our elders shared at the last Council meeting in January. We engaged with one question we found in the book Fishing Tips: “Who matters most in your community?” Our Immanuel United Church congregation is healthy, loving and deep.
I am so proud that we govern ourselves by the strong values of equity and sharing of power, operating with open conversations and in gratitude. If we do appreciate some key people, in the past or in the present, it is not because these people are matriarch or patriarch kind of people; we give them our respect and love because they are visionary.
My mind was blown when one of our elders shared “Everyone being part of the circle means community. We don’t exist in our congregation just for ourselves. We are part of our call to be in the world as our mission statement states: ‘Be in the community’. Being part of our call – to be in the world, in the community – has to do with energy and time, but it is very important to ask how we think of ourselves as part of the broader space: trees and forests. Trees are part of the larger eco system in which we are a part. Trees have root system and they interact with each other. Trees open my understanding of our place in the world.”
This reflection led me to ask, “How are we green, in our use of resources – paper, water, cups - ?” We say, ‘What matters most is people’, but it is also true that it is not just people. What people bring – talents - what people give – gifts - what people use. Are trees, earth and wind truly our siblings in our faith? Are they in our consciousness of faith? That’s another aspect of counting – once you start, you see how many things there are to be counted; our recognition of the importance of things like trees and water supply to God’s world, to everyone. One more clean river – rejoice! One more stand of trees growing toward the sky – rejoice!
How well do we do with welcoming newcomers? Name tags, announcements, greetings, tea, invitations, all matter. We need to draw our circle wide by welcoming curiosity. Who matters most in our community? How about children? We are an organization, and like any organism, we can survive and evolve only through passing essential genes to our offspring: our Christian teachings, visions, stories of faith. Embracing diversity in our neighbourhood and within us is also another way to ask who matters most. Who matters most in our community? Who are missing? What and who do we count or we don’t?
Today’s Gospel story of calling the disciples to fish for people is a question and exploration in which we look for something unexpected, unfamiliar, surprising, challenging, uncertain and new to be out of our comfort zone. The meaning of fishing for people becomes more inclusive and challenging when we think of it as counting. What today’s stories teach us is that we are the people who are called to count: count to search for what and who is missing, count to celebrate becoming a whole people, count to challenge, count to comfort, count to love, count to feast with joy, with all members of God, to be complete as Gods’ family, at the Jesus’ table.
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