Proper 19C; September 15, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
1 Timothy 1:12-17 But I received mercy.
Luke 15:1-10 This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.
O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Our Gospel reading from Luke contains two well-known stories as a preamble to the granddaddy of all parables – the prodigal son. But we won’t hear the prodigal son story next week – it will get skipped because it got read in church this past Lent. I’d bet most of you know it, though. These stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin build up to the story of the lost son. For those of us who attended ChurchSchool as little children, they are among the first stories that we learned. I was thinking about this the other day and remembered how when I was a child, getting lost was a clear and present danger for me. So these stories were very reassuring.
One of my earliest memories is leaving my backyard at the age of two, to go toward a woman I thought was my mother, far off in the distance. But as I got closer to her, like a mirage, she turned out not to be my mother and so I kept looking, wandering further away, across a busy street, more and more confused and distraught. As I reflected on this, from my middle-aged vantage point, I realized that I was both the lost one and the seeker. But mostly now I am the self-righteous one who grumbles, what on earth was my mother doing that she left me unsupervised in the back yard in the first place? Continue reading