Saints and Sinners, Lost and Found

9-15-19 Kick Off Sunday

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

A few months ago, I went to 5 Below North Wales to find some glowsticks for our campfire, when two women approached me, asked if I “believed in the female images of God.” I bet you could imagine how that went. After about 5 minutes I could tell they were tired hearing me go on and on, so I gave them my card … and big surprise, I haven’t heard from them yet!

We know in our hearts that God is neither male or female (or black or white), but let’s admit it – our language still tends to skew to the male pronoun when we talk about God, and out of habit, even I slip up sometimes. We speak and we imagine from the perspective we are familiar with. While the Bible was inspired by God and written by men of faith (mostly because women weren’t educated at the time), they were still bound by their own experiences. Even Jesus was sometimes! … as you may have noticed last week, when the stories he told were from the perspective of kings, armies, business owners, and construction workers.

But every once in a while, language describing God from female perspectives peaks through, to remind us that if we have been created in God’s image – male AND female – God has attributes of both. God is a nurturing mother who gives birth (Deut. 32:18) and nurses us, her children (Isaiah 49:15), God is a seamstress (Gen. 3:21) also a knitter (Psalm 139) and a baker (Matthew). During this year of Luke, we hear that God looks for us like a woman looking for a lost coin (15:8-10) as we heard today, and Jesus describes himself as a hen who wants to gather us like chicks (13:34).

The Gospel of Luke is also full of these descriptions, and is also populated with bold women who are faithful follows of Jesus – Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, the women at the empty tomb, just to name a few. We are blessed to be part of a denomination where the gifts of women are recognized, where they can serve at the highest levels, including our presiding bishop. But as I said at the banquet at the ELCA churchwide assembly, the night we celebrated the ordination of women no matter what race or who they love, we have not “arrived” yet. We still have a long way to go.

If we had truly arrived, these 50 years after the first white heterosexual woman was ordained in one of the predecessors to the ELCA, then THIS book would never have needed to be written.  I read this book earlier this year when it was fresh from the publisher. It comes from the perspective of someone called to ministry who is from one of the “lost” groups,” and by its title “One CoinFound” you can probably tell that it draws heavily from the “lost” stories we hear today.

Author and pastor Emmy Kegler grew up Episcopalian, is now a Lutheran pastor. This book is her story about how she as a queer woman pastor grew to fall in love with the very same scriptures that many Christians have used against her throughout her life. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kegler was always deeply drawn to the story of all the “Losts” in Luke, - lost sheep, coin, culminating in the Lost/ Prodigal son.

She reflects on the nature of sheep and of coins, saying that sheep tend to wander, but usually for good reason … hunger, thirst, exhaustion, fear (of predators). But what is the coin’s excuse? Kegler writes, “the funny thing about coins is that they can’t get lost by themselves” … “Coins get lost because their owners aren’t careful….” And when coins get lost, they tend to their shine (and their perceived value), which makes them even more difficult to locate.

But is God the one who loses us? With every story Jesus tells, and with every image we use to talk about the kingdom of God, there is a “yes” and there is a “no.” God is LIKE a knitter, but God does not actually take up knitting needles to make a scarf. Our limited human language can only tell so much of infinite truth of who God is, and we often reach out to more tangible things to anchor us, for better or worse. Emmy reminds us that “We experience God through our experience of others…” but is also careful to clearly say, “God has never been careless with us, but those who claim to speak for God have.” Church leaders, not God, cause some of the most vulnerable sheet to be lost - to be disregarded and left to get dusty like the coin or starved for love like the sheep.

Pastor Kegler experienced this so painfully in her own life, as growing up she struggled to reconcile the revelation that she both gay and a Christian, and how the people of deep faith around her, who she though loved her, could reject her because of it.

In the fall of Pastor Kegler’s senior year of high school, 2 years after starting to attend “Watermark” (a non-denominational youth centric church in Minneapolis), a preacher in training came from a nearby seminary to rail against same sex relationships. Traumatized and triggered by his hateful words, she left the sanctuary to collect herself. Her “friends” followed her, pressuring her to “repent” of the way God had created her. That night, the people Kegler though were her friends turned on her, and she saw their true colors. She never went back to that church or those people.

Years later, on a Sunday morning during worship in the chapel of a Lutheran college, Pastor Kegler was unwillingly pressed into service to help distribute communion. When someone handed her a plate with the bread, she panicked. She tried to hand it back to one of the campus pastors, telling him, “I can’t serve, I’m not trained.” He asked her if she knew what to say, she responded without thinking, “the body of Christ, given for you.” He handed the plate back to her and said, “there you go, you’ve been trained.” In that moment, and in every moment of love shown to her since, Kegler was truly found. Now, she is happily married, a pastor in the heart of Lutheran country – St. Paul MN, a published author, and sough-after speaker and preacher.

I think we can all see why, when Kegler describes God hitching up her skirts to get down and dirty on the floor to search for lost coins like her. “God has taken up a broom and cleared each corner, untucked and re-tucked each sheet and quilt, turned over pitcher after pitcher to see where we have landed.”

Our own found stories probably look a little bit different form Emmy Kegler’s, and may not seem worthy of publishing as a memoir, or at least not as “interesting.” But I think all of us have experience what it means to be hungry for something – for empathy, for acceptance, for someone to see our worth, for someone to love us for all of our flaws and brokenness, and the disappointment we feel when our deepest needs are not met by the people we thought cared about us. Most of us, I believe, HAVE  felt the sting of rejection when those who seem to have everything – power, influence, comfort, privilege – sneer at you and judge you when you leave the “correct path” they have laid out for you, using some misguided  interpretation of God’s words.

Listen closely here to the words of Jesus, then. How then can we stand in the way of Jesus, when he very clearly stands in for the shepherd who abandoned the ninety-nine sheep to find the lost one, and the woman who stayed up late into the night to find her coin that had gone missing? The body of Christ is not complete until all of us are found in God and loved with dignity by those of us who call ourselves Christian. And yes, that might not just include feeding them…. But eating WITH them, at the same table, side by side, elbow to elbow, with Jesus.

Perhaps we don’t have a lot of tax-collectors floating around anymore, but we all encounter people that we grumble at we deem “undeserving,” and want to begrudge a seat at the table. The good news is that Jesus eats with sinners…. And its good news BECAUSE WE are sinners. The repercussions of some sins might be more obvious than others.  But all are given a spot next to Jesus. All of us are, in the words of the commendation at the end of our funeral service, we are “sheep if [God's] own fold, [lambs] of [God's] own flock, [sinners] of [God's] own redeeming.”

One of the last things that Rachel Held Evans wrote before she died this spring, was write the introduction to this book, One Coin Found. Evans words ring achingly true in light of her sudden death, when exhorts us readers to remember that “you …  are immeasurably beloved by God, …with the help of the great communion of saints, …. you… will always and ever be found.”

Nothing can separate us form the love of God. In life, and in death, we are loved, and we are known, and we are found. Because God will stop at nothing to gather those who are lost. Now it’s our turn, to tuck up our own skirts, find the broom, and join in the search with that great communion of saints… and sinners. Thanks be to God. Amen.