14th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19C

14th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19C September 5, 2019 This past week, my book club met to discuss the book we had chosen to read this month: Congratulations, Who Are You Again? by Harrison Scott Key. It’s a memoir by a local author who is from a small town in rural Mississippi and who now lives here in Savannah and works at SCAD, and this memoir that we discussed is actually his second book that is all about the process of having a dream of writing his first book, which was also a memoir. Did I mention that I usually hate memoirs? So reading a memoir about a person’s writing of their first memoir was not something I was particularly excited about. In an effort to help me, one of our members sent me the link to Key’s TED talk which he gave here at Savannah TEDx. In his TED talk, which is titled The American Dream Value Menu, Key debunks some of the common statements that motivational speakers say to young people about following their dreams such as “you can do anything you put your mind to;” “you can have it all;” and finally, “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”i In response to these lies, Key has created what he calls “The Great American Dream Value Menu” which consists of the following 6 areas: 1. Family 2. Friends (which includes church) 3. Fun (which is what we do for our hobbies) 4. Fitness 5. Financing (your day job) and 6. The Dream. And Key says of these, “According to my experience, at any one time in your life, you get to pick 3. That’s it.” What Key is talking about is that in life, we may have many things that we value. All 6 of these areas are important and very valuable to us as human beings. But Key says that we are only able to focus on three at a time, and when we put too much focus on one over others, then we begin to lose the others. This is primarily what he writes about—his struggle to find harmony among his competing values. Because when we put too much time and attention into one thing we value, our attention becomes spread too thin, and it is easy to lose other things that we value in the process. Our gospel reading for today gives us two out of three parables in Luke chapter 15. Luke writes that Jesus tells these parables in response to the Pharisees and Scribes who are grumbling because the tax collectors and sinners are coming near to hear Jesus’s teachings. And it’s easy for us to look down on the Pharisees and Scribes because of how the story of Jesus has been told throughout the years, but y’all, they are us. They are the faithful religious people who care about the community and who try to do what is right-trying to be in relationship with God as scripture teaches. The tax collectors are people who have sold out their own people to make money off of them in conjunction with Rome, the foreign power who has come in and taken over their land; and the sinners would be our equivalent of arms dealers, drug dealers, mercenary people who do not give one whit about the community around them and are ruthless in looking after their own interests even to the detriment of the community .ii So Jesus tells this series of three parables, and they are all about people losing things and then seeking after them until they find them. And Jesus begins by asking the Scribes and the Pharisees, “Which one of you wouldn’t do these things…” First, we have the parable of the lost sheep, where a man realizes he has lost one sheep out of 100, and he leaves the other 99 sheep to go off frantically searching for the one lost sheep. When he finds it, he brings it home and throws a party for his neighbors to celebrate its return. Then we have the parable of the lost coin, where a woman realizes that she has lost one coin out of 10, so she frantically cleans her house until she finds the missing coin. Then she throws a party and invites all her friends to celebrate her recovery of the missing coin. The third parable, which we didn’t get to hear today (we actually heard it back in Lent), is what is known as the parable of the prodigal son. There is a man who has two sons. The younger son asks for his share of the inheritance and then goes off and squanders it in dissolute living. When he comes to himself, he realizes he should go home and apologize to his father and beg him to take him back. So he does this, and the father runs out to meet him, decks him out in splendor, orders that a huge party be thrown and begins to celebrate the return of this son who he thought he had lost. Meanwhile, the older son is left out working in the fields. The party is going on, and the father doesn’t even think to send someone to tell him the good news and invite him to join the party. When the older son finds out what is going on, he refuses to come in, so the father finally goes out to him, reassures him of his love and his place of belonging and encourages him to come to the party. And that’s where the parable ends. We don’t know if the older son ever comes in to the party or not. We don’t know if he is ever reconciled with his father after he has become lost in his father’s attention and in his joy in the return of the younger son. The third parable shows us the stark reality of what is only hinted at in the first two parables. What on earth actually happens to the 99 idiot sheep who are left completely alone, left to their own devices when the man leaves all of them behind to go seek out the one lost sheep? And how much money of her 10 coins does the woman spend in throwing a party for the recovery of the 1? When we place a higher value and attention on one thing of value, other things of value get lost. So what is the invitation of the good news in these parables to us, the earnestly -trying-to-be-faithful-people-of-God this week? I think, first, it is the call to pay attention to what we value, to pay attention to where our focus is, and to help us to remember the valuable things that are lost when our attention wavers from them or when we place too much attention on one area of value over the others. Second, it is to remember that nothing and no one is ever lost from the heart of God. Even when God is maddest and most disappointed (like in our Jeremiah reading for today), God does not forsake anyone. All are present in the heart of God, even when we don’t know it ourselves. This means that as the people of God, it is our call to look for ways we can seek out, come alongside those who have been lost from us, members of our family who may be estranged or maybe who we haven’t talked to as much as we should; (are there people from our church we have lost? Then this applies to them, too). And it is also our call to be aware of how certain people have been lost from the priorities of society—the poor, the lonely, even those who put their own self-interested above and beyond the good of those around them (maybe especially them). What would it look like if people of faith encouraged people in power to consider ways to try lessen the damage that our existing societal structures do to the already lost—immigrants, people who are in prison, people who are homeless, people who are on welfare…?. When we place too much attention on one value to the exclusion of others, the other values get lost. When we place too much attention on certain people, to the exclusion of others, people get lost. May God help us be brave enough to be like the father who had two sons, who realizes when he has forgotten one son, and who goes after him and tries to make things right. i. http://www.tedxsavannah.com/talks/the-american-dream-value-menu/ ii. I got this interpretation from Amy—Jill Levine in her book Short Stories by Jesus.