A quick assessment of the world we live in today. The world is a dangerous place. It is an unpredictable place. We are very often not able to disagree with one another and then continue to maintain a conversation. We cannot read the newspaper or watch the news on television without encountering something awful, something that surprises us even past the point where we previously thought we were as shocked, disappointed and outraged as we could be with the way we humans are capable of treating each other.
This tone to the world did not begin yesterday and did not begin recently and most likely stretches back and back and back in time. But there is a day we can point to and say on this day this problem was painfully and violently brought unavoidably into focus. September 11, 2001.
I remember attending a high school football game in the town where I was serving at the time, Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Blackcat football is a wonderful communal experience in Prestonsburg. The game I am referencing was the first football game, the first real community gathering following 9/11. That night people were still tense and uncertain. We were glad to be out and doing something that felt like normal, but it surely did not truly feel like normal. As we sat in the bleachers nestled in between the mountains, a plane flew over. One by one, heads turned away from the game and to the plane, until it felt as though all of us were focused on that plane.
I think in that moment we wondered if this was how it was always going to be - we wondered a lot of things. Would we feel safe again? Would we laugh again? Would we be happy and maybe one day experience joy again? And where would God be in all of it?
In some ways it was a time when we reflexively turned to God. And held on. In other ways, God may have seemed distant and far away to some as the world spun out of control.
We turn to two New Testament scriptures this morning. New Testament passages, meaning some two thousand years old, more or less, which do what the Scripture does time after time - speak to our moment in time like they were thinking of us when they were writing down the words.
The first passage, Luke 15:1-10, is Jesus telling a couple of stories speaking about the vital importance of finding what is lost. A sheep and a coin. Both lost. One sheep of ninety-nine. One coin of ten. The owners of the sheep and of the coin will not rest.until what is lost is found. We are told, then, that God is like this. Continuing to seek us out, to be in relationships with us, until all of us are connected with God and with one another in relationship. Until we all found by God and in turn find one another.
And when a new one is found, when a new relationship with God is formed - discovered - in that moment we are told there is a celebration in heaven. Not because ninety-nine are already in the group, but because one more adds their unique self to the mix.
In 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Paul is explaining how he, rather like the sheep and the coin, had needed to be found. It had happened. God had found him. Paul tells us that he needed finding because he had been very diligently becoming lost. He says he was an accomplished sinner, the world’s foremost sinner - a champion at getting lost. God through Christ shows God’s infinite patience and does amazing work in Paul. Paul becomes more than found. Paul becomes an example. An example of the transformation that God can work in a person’s life. An example of a life lived in fidelity to God’s call and of the fulfilling nature of such a life. Fulfilling in that it is a life of hope and a life of joy.
There are moments in our present moment world - back to where we started - where things like joy and hope seem like quaint ideas. Circumstances make it so easy to find opportunities to embrace despair. There is no challenge to believing that the world is broken. It is a short step from that belief to imagining that no one will ever be able to put things right. In our darkest moments it may feel like God is far off and perhaps has lost interest in our failures as well.
This is why what we do this morning is so important.
The Church, the body of Christ, has always existed in this world. Never too far from the one we live in - the one with challenges and difficulties and things that oppose hope and joy. The Church has never given up. It did not give up in it’s earliest days in the face of Roman persecution. It did not give up hope in the face of injustices like the reality of slavery. It did not give up hope in the past century as the world traversed two World Wars and the Holocaust. All manner of moments of massive darkness throughout history - the church did not give up.
And after September 11, 2001, the church did not give up. We continue doing what we are doing here this very day. We worship. We baptize. We confirm. We are a resistance movement that says that however great the power of darkness that is thrown at us, we renounce it’s power over us because we really, truly, honestly believe that the body of Christ is built on so solid a rock that the gates of hell cannot and will not prevail against it. This is who we are and this is what we do.
Just as Paul was an example to Timothy and to so many other individuals and communities, faithful Christians across history have inspired us. They have showed us how the unlikely forces of a cross, an empty tomb, forgiveness, love and hope are stronger than any opposition. And they remind us of our call to be examples that point to a better way and a greater reality.
Our family attended a soccer game this past Saturday evening in downtown Louisville. In the midst of the game there in the twilight, a plane flew over. Do you know what I thought when I looked up. I thought the sky looked pretty. Somewhere in the past fifteen years a plane returned to being a plane in my mind, and could not make itself so big that it blotted out a beautiful sky.
The world has not gotten easier to navigate or more peaceful or even less threatening in the past fifteen years. But we have not closed the doors, ceased gathering here and decided it was all beyond us and there was nothing we could do save throwing in the towel. We do not give up. Specifically, the church does not give up.
In the face of adversity, challenge and potential despair, we worship, we baptize and we confirm. Today is our no to hopelessness.
And we don’t simply survive. We celebrate.
When one sheep is found, when one coin is discovered, when one person is baptized, when one person is confirmed, when one person says yes to God’s hope, forgiveness and love, says yes to the truth that God is Lord and that God is creator…when that happens, scripture is clear. Heaven rejoices.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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