Friday, September 9, 2016

9/11/2016 - 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Cycle C - Luke 15:1-10

      Say we have a change purse of coins and we lose one of those coins - it could be a penny or a nickel, a dime or a quarter.  First of all, we probably wouldn’t even notice that the coin would be missing. And if we did notice, we probably would not spend all day looking for it. We wouldn’t lose any sleep over that one lost coin. But, look at our parable today of the woman with the lost coin. We might not understand the entire story. The coin in question in our Gospel parable today was a silver drachma.  In ancient Israel, the houses were very dark.  The floors were hardened dirt covered with dried reeds and fibers. It would be nearly impossible to find a small coin that was lost under those circumstances, but the woman in the parable never gave up, since that coin was worth much more than a dime or a quarter - it was worth more than a day’s wages for a worker in Ancient Israel.  The parable says that the lost coin was one of a set of 10 coins - for a married woman in Israel, there were ten silver coins attached by a silver chain to her head garment - those ten coins would be equivalent to a wedding ring today. Thus, the woman would be filled with so much joy at finding that coin.  God is like the woman in the parable - he is filled with joy when the lost are found again, when the sinner repents, when someone returns to the faith.  The woman never gives up on finding the lost coin in the Gospel parable today.  Likewise, God never gives up on us. We believe in the love and mercy of God that is beyond all of our human understanding of things.  We believe in the love and mercy of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, who came to seek the lost and to bring us salvation. 
     These blue wristbands that we have been wearing here at St James Catholic Church during the Year of Mercy have imprinted on them one of the slogans of this Jubilee Year declared by Pope Francis: Merciful like the Father.  I look at the wristband often, pondering the meaning of the Father’s mercy.  I think all of us Christians aspire to be merciful like God the Father.  But, implementing mercy into the messy reality of our lives is never easy.  All of us in the Diocese of Jackson have been touched by the two Catholic sisters, Sister Margaret and Sister Paula, who were killed in their home in Holmes county last month. Marie Sanders, the wife of Rodney Earl Sanders, the man who confessed to killing the two sisters, was touched by the way that the relatives and members of the sisters’ religious orders embraced her and reached out to her in love, mercy and forgiveness, comforting her and reassuring her. While many here in Mississippi advocate for the death penalty for perpetrators of capital murder, the families of Sister Paula and Sister Margaret, their two religious orders, and our Diocese of Jackson have all advocated against the death penalty for Mr Sanders.  Bishop Kopacz writes that for Rodney Sanders and others who are accused of such devastating crimes, “justice (indeed) must be enacted, society must be protected, but the violence must not be perpetuated by demanding the death sentence for…capital crimes.”  
     A lot of people find it hard to let go of wrongs that have been done against them. Sometimes the wrongs done against us are deliberate, sometimes they are unintentional.  So many in our world today go through life harboring grudges, making themselves miserable because they cannot let go, holding on to things for years and years. Many imagine that God is like this too - that God wants to take revenge on us for the wrongs we have done, that he does not search us out when we’ve turned away from him, that he lets us get what we deserve.  But this isn’t the God who is presented in Jesus’ parables in the Gospel today. According to Jesus, God does not want to judge us out of harshness and anger, but rather God wants to be close to us and he wants us to be close to him.  The true God - the God of our Catholic faith -  is like the loving parent who has lost a child, the parent who cannot rest until the child is safely back.  It is true that we see a lot of acts of hatred, anger, and revenge in action in our world today.   We see nations amassing weapons of mass destruction, ready to annihilate their enemies.  We see acts of terrorism where many innocent lives are taken away.  We see politicians willing to lash out against their people.  But that is not the way of God.  And that is not the way believers are called to live out their faith. 
      God loves the just.  But God does not ignore the sinner.  He does not turn his back on the lost.  He does not give up on those who have missed the mark.  All of us can have a place in God’s kingdom.  The Church is not an exclusive club.  Church is not a reward for those who are perfect. The Pharisees resented God’s mercy.  The parable of the lost sheep does not deny the goodness and virtues of the majority, but reminds that there’s a special place for the sinner who repents.  Just like the parable of the lost coin, all of us have value and worth in God’s eyes, especially when we are lost and then are found. 

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