Sunday, September 15, 2013

24th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle C - September 15, 2013


24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
September 15, 2013    9:00 and 10:30am and 12 noon
Saint Margaret Parish, Bel Air

Mother Teresa

Back in the 1990s, I was working directly for the Archdiocese.

One of the projects that I was part of involved Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  Mother Teresa came to Baltimore to open a new mission for her Sisters, the Missionaries of Charity.

We – the Archdiocese – had provided a large, old convent building near Hopkins Hospital.  We renovated it to accommodate how the Missionaries of Charity wanted to use it.

The Sisters live on the first floor, in very simple, basic conditions.  The second and third floors house about twelve persons with AIDS.

This is one of the core ministries of Mother Teresa’s Order – caring for persons with AIDS.   The Sisters care for those who are in the advanced stages of the illness and literally have no one to care for them, no place to go, even no place to die.

One of the Sisters explained it very well to me.  “We want them to know that there is a God and that God loves them” – that clear, that simple, that powerful!

Seeking Out the Lost

What the Missionaries of Charity do illustrates the lesson of today’s gospel.

The context is that some of the religious leaders are upset because Jesus is having dinner with “sinners.”  We are not told what sins these people committed, but they are labeled as “sinners.”

These religious leaders – who seem pretty full of themselves – believe that associating with these sinners makes you unclean.  In response to them, Jesus tells two stories: the one about a shepherd looking for one lost sheep and the other about a woman looking for one lost coin. 

So, right at the start, Jesus is challenging these religious leaders.  I say this because the society of that day looked down on shepherds as kind of low-life people and it looked down on women as second-class persons.

In these stories, Jesus wants us first to identify with the shepherd and the woman – a real challenge for those religious leaders.  And he is even saying that this shepherd and this woman are images of God.

So, Jesus is jolting his listeners to start thinking differently.  And then, in his two stories, he shows that we can all be lost in two ways.          

 

Lost: Our Fault

First, we can be lost like the one sheep.

We can wander off and our being lost is our own fault.  For example, we can choose to stop coming to Mass regularly and lose our grounding in God.

We can drift into behavior that is harmful to us and to relationships, like Internet porn.  When we are lost in these ways, Jesus is saying that God is still there.

God is still loving us, looking for us, and not giving up on us, just like the shepherd looking for that one lost sheep.  In fact, the tug of our conscience and even our feelings of guilt are God trying to find us. 

Isn’t that a great way to understand our tugs of conscience and guilt feelings?  And finally, notice in Jesus’ image that the shepherd does not scold or punish the lost sheep, but simply carries it back to the flock – what a good example for us as a Church!

Lost: No Fault

And then we can be lost like the lost coin.

This means that we are lost through no fault of our own.  For example, we can feel lost when we are grieving the death of a husband or wife.

Or we can feel lost when we are dealing with depression.  When we are lost in these ways, even though we may not feel it, God is like the woman looking for the one coin.

God is still there, loving us and wanting to be close to us.  Maybe it will take time for us to feel this.

We may need to push ourselves to pray and come to Eucharist or push ourselves to respond to the companionship of family and friends.  But if we give God a chance in these ways, we can be found and we can find ourselves once again.    
   

Conclusion


So, a powerful lesson today 1) about God – God searching for us when we are lost, and 2) about ourselves – about the ways we can be lost and what we might do when that happens!