Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity 2025

‘There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.’

The worship of the Eastern Church is made up of many patterns and rhythms. Orthodox liturgy is animated by processions, litanies and the chanting of cycles of psalmody and hymnody. If you go to an Orthodox liturgy, probably the most common simple phrase you will hear repeated time after time, is straightforwardly ‘Lord, have mercy.’ This petition forms a kind of pulse throughout  the worship. It is a creaturely expression of humanity’s longing for healing and reconciliation. The cry for mercy is not a self-hating diminishment of human dignity, rather it is the natural response to the call of God’s love.

The Christian religion is one of responsibility. We are not created as robots or automatons, but as people with free choice and intrinsic, inherent dignity. Right at the heart of our faith is the incarnation of the Son of God, in which Jesus not only showed us the extent of God’s love, but laid down for us a pattern which we could share from the crib to the empty tomb. All of that is offered to us as radical free gift, a potential pattern and rhythm for our lives, which we can learn through worship and fellowship together.

There are multiple points in life from which anyone can begin or refresh the journey of Christian discipleship. But we are unlikely to deepen our relationship of faith in any profound way unless we know our need of God. Human beings come face to face with this reality through encountering their own limitations, especially at times of sorrow, pain, loss or confusion. Sometimes it is when we come face to face with a situation of grief or disorientation that we begin to recognise that need most clearly. In his novel Brighton Rock, Graham Greene made popular a line from a sixteenth century poem by William Camden, ‘Betwixt the stirrup and the ground/ Mercy I sought, mercy I found.’ It is between that space of falling off the metaphorical horse and hitting the ground that we pray ‘Mercy!’ most intensely. People sometimes speak begrudgingly about ‘death bed conversions’, or disparagingly about the surprising emergence of a faith in the face of tragedy: these are not occasions to be dismissed or mocked, but often are rather moments of intense realisation of the need for turning, and for God.

So many images for salvation in the Gospel are corporate. The proclamation of Christ’s Kingdom is a very public matter, a message given for the sanctification of humanity and the transformation of the whole created order. And yet, it is also clear that the call of Christ does come to individuals. For each person, there is a decision to be made, a path to be followed, truth to be discerned. Sin – separation from God – surely can be corporate. One does not have to look at the world, its violence, greed and lust for power for very long to realise that. But sin is also personal, and we fall prey to lethal forces if we fail to recognise that in ourselves before we point it out in others. So, our prayer for the Lord’s mercy is a cry on behalf of a fragile and compromised humanity; but it is also a deeply personal cry for each one of us, in response to the overwhelming love we see in Jesus.

The two parables we heard in today’s Gospel should give us confidence in praying that prayer. In response to the pharisees and scribes complaining that Jesus welcomes sinners, Jesus offers two stories which go even further than that that welcome. The shepherd searches for the one lost sheep out of ninety-nine. The woman loses one coin out of ten, and does not stop sweeping until she finds it. The Lord doesn’t just welcome, the Lord searches: as ever, God is the first mover, not us. In both of the images Jesus uses in this scene, the pattern of the parables is the same: the losing, the search, the finding, the calling together of other friends and neighbours, and finally the rejoicing. In Luke’s account, he sets up a dichotomy that we should notice: the scribes and pharisees grumble about the welcome, whilst there is joy in heaven over the successful search. Christ’s mission of love, made intimately personal for each of us through our baptism, is one which culminates in a symphonic communal celebration. Both the shepherd and the woman discover that which they have lost, but the story does not end until they have encouraged, indeed, enabled, celebration amongst friends and neighbours. These images, of course, are parabolic. The real joy is God’s joy in heaven, as the angels delight over the repentance even of one person.

One person. Each person. St Luke’s recounting of these stories is that the search is a tactile one. The shepherd not only finds the lost sheep, but picks it up, places it on his shoulders to carry it home. The woman lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches meticulously for the coin. These parables show careful attention to the materiality of that which is lost, an attention which is then celebrated amongst others. Not the resentful grumbling of the scribes and pharisees, but the full-throated belly-laughs of ever expanding circles of friends and neighbours. We can probably each imagine, recognise, even remember the joy of our being lost but then found and celebrated. But to what extent are we willing to enable that for others? To what extent are our churches communities which celebrate real reconciliation? Not just for ourselves, but for others, for outsiders, even those whom we might consider to be beyond the pail.

CS Lewis famously told a story about children playing at burglers downstairs in a large house, when suddenly they hear a mighty crash on the floor above them. Whilst they’re in the middle of their game, the house is actually being burgled. We may say that we search for God, but the underpinning reality is that God first searches for us, and that any response we make is a response to God’s searching, God’s loving longing for us. The cry for mercy is the truest response to the call of love.

In the history of Christian art, the imagery of Christ as the Good Shepherd predates any devotional images of the crucifixion by a couple of centuries. It is especially prevalent in funerary art of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. A strong sense that Christ comes to search out the lost and bring them home, is fundamental to some of the earliest theologies of salvation. These scenes of rejoicing take us into some of the earliest living memories of the Church: that the Christ who has come to earth as one of us, will search for us, find us, call us together, and break bread with us. If that isn’t Good News, I don’t know what is.