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!
