Luke 15:1-10
The stories we tell our children shape them, and us, and pour the foundation upon which a life is built. Those stories include stories out of picture books and Bibles, movies and television, family history and the day’s news. Growing up as the daughter of an educator, I had the great privilege of a childhood steeped in stories, and I still have one of my favorite storybooks in my office to this day. It is a little board book, titled “Stories Jesus Told” by Nick Butterworth.1 This is an illustrated retelling of a handful of Jesus’s most well-known parables, and a few that are less familiar. Both of today’s parables of Jesus are included in my well-worn book with the broken spine, and each time I revisit these stories I hear them as a child all over again. I’m still just as fascinated, just as moved, just as full of questions as I was when I begged my momma over and over to read these same eight parables to me. Jesus preached in stories for a lot of reasons, but I believe one of his reasons was that he understood his children, he understood how our ears tune differently to a story than an essay, how our hearts beat more like poetry than prose. I think he told us stories because he wanted us to listen, and he believed it was the best way for us to hear the words and the loving challenges behind them. We revisit these stories over and over, and we tell them to our children, because stories shape us, and we want ourselves and the people we love to live a Jesus-shaped life.
The story my daddy told me on September 11th 2001, after I had come home from a very confusing day of school, has directed the course of my life to this very day. The day planes rained from the sky, I was in second grade. My teachers took turns watching the live coverage in the teacher’s lounge while covering one another’s classrooms and calling loved ones. I saw the footage of the smoke by peaking around the edge of the couch in our living room that night when I was supposed to be playing with my Barbies. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I’m still not sure I can fathom it all these years later. Once my parents had talked and cried together, my daddy took my sister and I into the backyard to talk to us. My sister Samantha was not even 5 yet, and I don’t know how much she heard. He told us that day that a terrible thing had happened, and a lot of people had been hurt, and a lot of people had died. He told us, and I’ll never forget this as long as I live, that some people had done a very bad thing because they thought it was the right thing, and a lot of people were suffering because of that choice. He did not tell us that bad men did bad things. He did not tell us a story of good and evil people, of heroes and villains. When I was still learning to read, I was shaped by the story that the impacts of our choices matter more than our intentions. I was shaped by the story that causing another to suffer, no matter how righteous you believe your cause, is wrong. Somehow, on a day when the sky was falling, my parents were able to prevent a seed of hatred and cynicism from being planted in my young heart even as theirs broke. I can only pray that the people who listen to the stories I tell in my lifetime hear the Gospel in them even on my hardest days.
I was shaped by the story my father told, not the story the newscasters and politicians and preachers told. That story, along with the stories Jesus told, has made me the person I am today. And still I come to these stories with wonder as each reading opens up a previously unseen gift. The story of the shepherd and the lost sheep is possibly one of the most often told and depicted parables of Jesus. “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” We’ve all heard this in children’s Bibles and seen it in stained glass and sung it in hymns and prayed for it in our hearts. Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, cares so deeply for every one of us that not a single one will be left behind. Moreover, when the gentle shepherd returns with the tattered and tired lost lamb, he will rejoice in their reunion with friends and family and neighbors, for what was lost has been found. I have found this story comforting when I find myself wandering like a lost lamb, either for boredom or for hunger or for want of company. I have told it to parishioners who fear for their children who seem far afield of the Christianity of their parents. I remember it vividly in my little storybook, and I wonder if my momma was comforted when she introduced her babies to the Jesus who would always come and find us when we got out of sight. But today I hear this story differently, and I wonder how this new version will shape me, and I wonder how it might shape you.
You see, the tax collectors and the sinners were coming to Jesus by the dozen, sitting at his feet and approaching him in the street and even hosting him in their own homes. Some members of the religious establishment, educated people with social influence and power, were displeased to see this young rabbi affiliating himself with such people and they told him so. So Jesus tells them a parable, and you know how it goes- a shepherd with 100 sheep seeks the one who goes missing, and upon his return from seeking the lost he throws a party for the whole neighborhood in celebration. Up until now, I guess I always assumed Jesus was pointing out that the religious leaders were objecting to the return of the lost sheep, and maybe that’s the most commonly received interpretation. But when I sat with this text this week, I wondered where the Church is meant to see ourselves in this story. Sure, the Pharisees and scribes and the faithful people of the covenant might be the 99 sheep who stayed within the bounds of safety, which I think we can safely say is what shepherds hope their sheep will do. But it would be a bit out of character for Jesus, a prophet, to placate the powers that be. I wonder if, perhaps, Jesus’s flock of 99 was always made up of tax collectors and sinners, scribes and Pharisees, Gentile and Jew, enslaved and free. Perhaps he offered this story to those who challenged him as a promise that he had not forgotten them, that he was there to find them too. Perhaps the lost sheep aren’t who we think they are. Perhaps the lost sheep are sometimes the people in the pews, in the pulpit, in the halls of power and privilege. Perhaps those of us who are most assured of ourselves are the ones most in need of our shepherd, always nudging us back onto the right path. I wonder if we as Church have more in common with the lamb slung across the shepherd’s shoulders than the sheep found safely in the fold.
This is one of our stories, a story of the God who will turn the world upside down in order to show us how to live rightside up. Wherever we see ourselves in the story of the shepherd and the sheep, this story shapes us and makes us who we are on our best days and on our worst ones too. How we respond to the Pharisee and the tax collector, how we tell the stories of people and their choices and the impacts of their lives, these shape us too. I hope that your life, and mine, and the life of this Church are shaped by the stories Jesus told.
Mother A Writes 