Message: Count as God does
Luke 15:1-10
We’ve all had that moment – I’ve lost something. Keys, wallet, phone - regardless of the price of what we lost, the feelings are pretty much the same: anxiety, worry, regret, frustration. We usually find our lost things… Well, some of them. Sometimes, my partner and I have a conversation about the definition of ‘lost’. If I can’t find things right at the moment I am searching, I often declare, “I didn’t lose it; I just don’t know where it is right now.” My partner, always replies that’s what he means by, ‘I lost it’. But most of the times I end up being right – I find my temporarily missing items. Most times. And for all of us, regardless of the price of the lost items, we “rejoice” when we find them.
Jesus doesn’t tell the two parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep to just talk about lost items. When Jesus tells a story, it is about people. The story of finding people. Lost people, found people. The story is about ourselves, as individuals, the people we love, the community we care for, and the world where we find our home.
Traditionally, the church understood the two parables allegorically, which means, it considered that each story had one meaning - - regardless of the context where and when these stories are told and shared. For example, the shepherd who has a hundred sheep and loses one and the woman who lights a lamp and sweeps her house to carefully search for one drachma represent Jesus. The lost coin and the lost sheep are us, the sinners. The church teaches that in these stories, Jesus was telling the church about himself, the Christ, who redeems and saves sinners, paying a high price in the process. The church says this story is about the grace and the love of God who restores a relationship with us who have sinned and gone astray; God offers forgiveness. This is a beautiful image when we imagine a shepherd who seeks and gently restores the lost sheep, famously portrayed as a lamb being put lovingly on the shoulders of Jesus himself. The problem with this interpretation, through, lies in the fact that it defines our relationship with God only in the light of sin and forgiveness. It narrows down a complex thing and constricts it to that single language of sin and grace.
Now, I care for my garden. If any of my plants becomes weak or show signs of disease or infestation, I give my best care and love and try all the solutions I can find, showing the same concern that the shepherd would give for the lost sheep. It is not because any of my flowers or plants have sinned. Jesus finds the humanity in us deeper and richer than just having sinned or not sinned. Jesus leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness to find us, the “one sheep”, not because we sinned but because of the love Jesus has for humanity, a love that longs for restoration, relationship and reconciliation.
Amy Jill-Levine is a Jewish scholar who studies and teaches the Christian Gospels at Vanderbilt Theological School, and she says, “Luke misleads us by turning the parables into allegories. It is unlikely a first-century Jewish listener would hear the first two parables and conclude that they have something do with sheep repenting or coins confessing. Sheep eat, sleep, poop, produce wool, and give milk — but an awareness of sin 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. 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.”
Please imagine with me. The parables might not tell us obviously in the text, but the first activity the shepherd and the woman must have done in the story is counting. The shepherd counts, and finds one is missing out of one hundred. If he doesn’t count, how would he know? Counting must be one of the most important things to do in the Shepherd’s job description. If you are in charge of the finances of your household, the same principle applies. The woman counts, and finds one coin is missing out of ten. (One drachma was worth about one day’s wages). Perhaps the two parables of today are really stories about the God who counts - stories for us to count as God does. Count to know who is missing? Who is not here? Who is lost? If one or more is missing, our task is to seek, search, and find those who are not included in our counting. It is the work of searching and committing to be a community of inclusion and justice in all aspects possible. The community of “no margins” as the ideal. As Jill-Levine noted, the blame is on the shepherd, not the sheep, “if any blame is to be assigned.” The task of searching is assigned to the love, the aching heart, of the Holy One, the community of faith, and the ordinary people of faith who search for the lost, because we count. Because we care. What if our congregations were places of joy where we heard regularly that God is using ordinary people like us to find others in order to create even more joy?
Continuing from last Sunday’s reflection, we have just begun to realize what is the one big missing thing among us: the earth, the planet, the Mother. We humans are not above it or under it in hierarchy. In the indigenous worldview, we two-legged beings are not higher or central; we equally share the land and the earth with all of everything else: the four-legged, the winged, the living-moving things. When I read about the Corn Mother - the Christ figure - from A Native Indian Theology recently, I was deeply touched. This, the Corn Mother, the Christ, is exactly the One whom we have lost in our counting for a long time while we assume that we have God’s sanction to make progress, the industrial revolution, the factory waste and the astonishing record of carbon emission and carbon footprints that come after us. If Jesus were here with us in this critical time for climate action, Jesus would start searching the Christ-self, the body of Christ - the earth that sustains humanity along with everything else, the four-legged, the winged, the sea beings, the living-moving things - with the aching heart of a shepherd with a vulnerable missing sheep.
Let me share with you the story of the Corn Mother. In itself, it can be a parable of the earth, too, told in a variety of versions and languages among indigenous communities from the east cost of Canada down to Florida. It is the story of the willing self-sacrifice of the First Mother (Corn Mother) on behalf of her children. Initially the First Man was the hunter and alone provided for the sustenance of his family. But as the family grew, it became important to introduce new sources of food: vegetables and grains. In some of these stories, the Corn Mother provides food when the First Man cannot find game by privately scraping or shaking the corn (and sometimes beans) off of her own body. When two of her children sneakily discover where the food is coming from, they accuse her of tricking them into cannibalism; this become an excuse for killing her. There are other versions, but in all the tellings, the self-sacrifice of the woman is consistent and results in the enduring fecundity of the earth and production of food. In these stories, First Mother’s death is also the first human experience of death. Her burial is accompanied by ceremony and sometimes pronounced weeping. Later, the surviving family discovers that the clearing where she has been buried is miraculously filed with fully mature food plants, most prominently including corn. First Mother, buried in the earth, continues to nourish her children long after her death.
When we eat, especially when we remember food is sacred, eating becomes sacrament, because eating always involves the eating of the flesh of the First Mother. She, in her dying, becomes identified with the earth, with Grandmother, Mother God. In the indigenous creation stories, the character of the Creator is revealed: the grace, self-sacrifice, feeding. It is good news. Those things that are considered un-alive in the Eurocentric mindset, rocks, rivers, lakes, mountains, are sacred, alive, and inter-related in this worldview. It takes years and years, more than one lifetime – it takes generations (therefore, the traditions honour sacred knowledge keepers), for humans to finally understand the sacramental nature of eating. Corn and all food, and all that are provided by the Earth are all our relatives. So, the ceremonial and very real physical sacrifice of Corn Mother reminds us of Christ. Tink Tinker, the indigenous theologian would say to us Corn Mother is Christ, Christ is Corn Mother.
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| The Swedish teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg (centre), joins other young people for a school strike or demonstration outside the United Nations in New York on 30 August 2019. |
In this critical time of awakening to climate actions, we need to count. How do we count the Christ, the Corn Mother, Mother Earth, in our actions and plans and lives? If we cannot commit to one hundred action recommendations to keep the global average temperature under 2 degrees Celsius in our lives right away, we can still find and work on ten actions- or one. It is really all about counting the cost, and counting what and who are missing, and find and count the ways we can act. An all-out war on climate change might not be a reasonable option in our daily lives, (i.e. no taking flights) yet once we find what we can do, our actions will take on greater meaning. Remember, any movement toward a more just and more inclusive society can now be a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections, combatting extreme wealth inequality, instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, supporting a free and independent press — these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it. Therefore, rather than feeling guilty or overwhelmed and doing nothing, keep doing the right thing for the planet, but also try to save what you love specifically - save one, specifically, out of ten, or out of a hundred -, a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble. Taking heart in small successes would be following the Christ, the shepherd’s heart, and the woman’s practice of looking for one, unexpected miracle. Any good thing you do for the planet now is a hedge against the hotter future, and it’s a meaningful act right now. As long as you have something to care about, you have something to hope for. (Read: what-if-we-stopped-pretending)
When we lose something that is valuable to us, we all feel the same. Anxious, worried, regretful, frustrated. When we find them, we all feel the same, we rejoice - regardless of the price of what we’ve lost. The earth, the Corn Mother, the body of Christ is priceless. If we forget to count, if we overlook the missing, then we are not doing our jobs as disciples of Christ. So – we count, we seek the missing, we seek to make the very Earth whole again. If we rejoice when we find our lost keys, our lost phone, imagine the joy when we recover our missing ones, when we heal our wounded planet. It may take generations, but that makes the final summation – the wholeness of our communities, our planet, all the more worthy of rejoicing.
Ha Na Park
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