24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
September 15, 2019
9:30 and 11:15am
Saint Mary Parish, Pylesville 4pm and 8am
Seeking What Is Lost
Several years ago, I lost a credit card.
I was at a gas station. When I opened my wallet to get a credit card to pay for the gas, I immediately saw that I had only one card there.
The other one – I have two credit cards – was missing. Well, I pumped the gas and then immediately started looking for the missing credit card.
I took everything out of my wallet and it wasn’t there. I looked in the glove compartment and under the seats of the car and it was nowhere in sight.
I went back to the rectory at Saint Margaret’s. I looked all through my study and my bedroom – no credit card!
And then, I tried to get a grip on my anxiety. I asked myself: when did I last use the credit card?
Almost right away I realized I had used it the night in buying Chinese carry-out food. So, I immediately called that restaurant and sure enough, I had left the card on the counter after signing the bill and they had it.
Seeking Who Is Lost
Well, my intense focus on finding my credit card helps us to appreciate today’s gospel.
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. With these two images of the shepherd and the woman, Jesus is showing us how intense God is in looking for us when we are lost.
God is even more intense than me looking for my credit card! And then, with the images of the lost sheep and lost coin, Jesus shows us that we can be lost in two different 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. So, we can get lost when we stop coming to Mass or stop praying personally outside of Mass and lose our centeredness in God.
We can get lost when we drift into being unfaithful to our major life commitment or vocation – to your marriage or for me to the priesthood. Getting lost in ways like these is what we call sin.
But even though we get lost in these ways, Jesus is saying that God is still there, still loving us and looking for us. God is like the shepherd looking for that one lost sheep.
In fact, when we are like that one lost sheep, hopefully our conscience will bother us and we will feel guilty. These guilt feelings are really God intensely looking for us and trying to bring us back.
And, by all means, notice in Jesus’ image that the shepherd does not scold or punish the lost sheep. Instead, he joyfully carries it back to the flock – what a good example this is for how we as a Church are to relate to a lost sheep!
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 ways like these, God is still there, loving us and wanting to be close to us, even though we may not feel it.
God is like the woman looking for the one lost coin. Some of our great spiritual teachers have called these experiences dark nights of the soul.
In these times, we may need to push ourselves to come to Mass or to pray. We may need to push ourselves to do the commitments and things of everyday life.
And we may need to push ourselves to respond to the companionship of family and friends. But, if we hang in there and 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, searching for us when we are lost, and 2) about ourselves, the ways we can be lost and how we might respond when that happens!
