Sermon delivered by David Burrow September 11, 2022 - First Congregational Church, Algona, Iowa
Click here for an audio version of this sermon. (30 MB - .mp3)
This is normally the time for the children’s sermon in our church, what Pastor Chris Burtnett calls the “time for children and the young at heart”. While he usually sits down on the steps with the kids, I don’t have the luxury of his headset microphone. So, with apologies to the children, today will mostly be addressed to “the young at heart”. It’s really the first of two short messages I’ll be sharing today.
Over Labor Day weekend I went down to southern Iowa. My brother Steve and I went to our old hometown, Mt. Pleasant—clear down near the border of Illinois and Missouri.
It had been years since we’d been back to Mt. Pleasant, since we don’t have family there anymore and most of our friends have left. We spent quite a while just walking around town and reminiscing about how things had changed since we moved away.
Mt. Pleasant is one of the oldest towns in Iowa. A lot of downtown is more than a century old, with many of the stately brick buildings going back 150 years or more. Even the part of town that was “new” when I was a kid would be described as “mid-century modern” today. All those buildings are still there, and they all looked familiar. What was different, though, was that every single one of the stores inside them had changed.
Mt. Pleasant is more fortunate than a lot of places, because there’s almost no empty space downtown. The businesses that fill the spaces are completely different than they used to be, though. What used to be a pharmacy is now a cell phone store. The old men’s clothing store is now a Mexican restaurant, what was once J.C. Penney now sells party goods, the doctor’s office has been transformed into a real estate agency, and an old grocery store is now the local police station. Even the banks have all changed their names countless times since I was a kid.
Seeing all these changes made me feel old, of course, but it was also fun to see how the town had kept re-inventing itself. It’s a different place than it was when I lived there years ago, but it’s still a nice town.
We all can take a cue from how those businesses have changed. We need to re-invent ourselves too—throw out the old and stale and replace it with new and fresh. Let’s ask for God’s help to renovate our lives. After all, it was God who said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
Tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to Jesus, but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
So to them Jesus addressed this parable. “What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’
I tell you, in just the same waythere will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.
“Or what woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it? And when she does find it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found the coin that I lost.’
In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing
among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
God created the universe, the world we live in,and every living thing on this earth.
We believe the Creation shows us the power and presence of
God,
and makes us want to praise and give thanks to God,
and take good care of the earth God has made.
We are full of joy that across the world
different peoples have their own culture and language,
and that in God we are all united together as one.
We say God is Spirit, breath of life,
who is always working to bring people to life in God.
We believe the Spirit has been alive and active
in every race and culture,
getting hearts and minds ready for the good news
of God’s love and grace that Jesus Christ revealed.
We are full of joy that from the beginning
the Spirit was alive and active,
revealing God through the law, custom, and ceremony.
We say Jesus is Savior and Lord,
that he began the church,
and prayed that the church might be together as one.
We believe that in the risen Jesus
we are all part of the one great family of God,
and that God calls us to live in faith, hope, and love
for the sake of the Kingdom of God here on earth.
We are full of joy that we can learn,
grow, and serve together? as a pilgrim people
in the name of Christ.
AMEN.
Then Jesus said, “A man had two sons, and the younger son said to his father, ‘Father give me the share of your estate that should come to me.’ So the father divided the property between them.
After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a reckless life.
When he had freely spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he found himself in dire need. So he hired himself out to one of the local citizens who sent him to his farm to tend the swine. And he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed, but nobody gave him any.
Coming to his senses he thought, ‘How many of my father’s hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger. I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.”’
So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.
His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.’
But his father ordered his servants, ‘Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.’
Then the celebration began.
Now the older son had been out in the field and, on his way back, as he neared the house, he heard the sound of music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean.
The servant said to him, ‘Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
The older son became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father came out and pleaded with him.
He said to his father in reply, ‘Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns, who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.’
The father said to him, ‘My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’”
I mentioned earlier that last weekend I drove down to southeast Iowa. As I often do, I listened to some music as I drove. Everything I listened to was old. Over the past few years I’ve been converting music I had on old cassette tapes to a digital format. Many of those tapes had themselves been recorded from old vinyl records. So the music I was listening to went back a long way. It had been literally decades since I listened to most of that music; in keeping with today’s gospel, you could say that the songs had been lost, and now I’d found them again.
Most of the songs I listened to were things I remembered from when I was a teenager at the tail end of the baby boom—songs from Queen, Styx, Elton John, Joan Jett, and the recently deceased Olivia Newton—John. I’m not ashamed to have grown up in the ’70s, and I still think many of those songs are among the best that have been recorded.
Eventually, though, I put on a re-recording of a crackly old record that I remember my parents listening to. That record was a collection of gospel songs by George Beverly Shea, a Canadian-born crooner who joined Billy Graham’s ministry in the 1940s and spent almost seventy years traveling around the world with Graham’s crusades.
My parents were married just days after my dad got back from fighting in the Pacific theatre during World War II. Shea’s music, which made old hymns sound like showtunes, was very popular after the war, and my parents had a huge collection of his records.
Some of the songs George Beverly Shea sang were standard old hymns like the ones we’re singing here today. Much of it, though, was designed to fit in with Billy Graham’s revivalist ministry. They were calls for people to repent of their sins, which is also part of the message in the parables we find in today’s lectionary readings. Three different times we’re told that God loves a repentant sinner, and of course the message is that we should make God happy by repenting our sins.
We often think of this as something you’d hear in other churches, the sort of thing you might expect at an old-fashioned revival meeting. We don’t usually think of repentance as something a modern, mainline denomination like ours would spend much time with.
BUT … The fact is that all of us have sinned. Chances are we’ve already sinned just today, and there’s no doubt at all that every one of us has done something wrong since the last time we were together. Different churches have different interpretations of the consequences of sin and how it should be confessed, but we all know the difference between right and wrong, and we know that we need God’s forgiveness. Without detailing the particulars, all of the parables in today’s gospel urge us to confess our sins and get things right with God.
There are two versions of the lectionary gospel today. The short version is the first two parables—likening God’s joy over a repentant sinner to a shepherd finding a lost sheep and a woman finding a lost coin. The longer version (which I broke into two readings today) includes the parable of the prodigal son, and that goes beyond just telling us that we need to repent.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the prodigal son to be a rather troubling story. My bet is that most of us are a bit troubled when we think deeply about the parable. We like to think of ourselves as the good son who has worked hard and done what we’re supposed to do. We feel kind of cheated that God would celebrate people that we view as worse than ourselves.
If we look back to the beginning of these parables, though, we’re reminded that Jesus was telling this parable to the pharisees, and the real point is that we shouldn’t be like them. It’s not our business to judge others by our own standard, and we certainly shouldn’t think that we’re superior and only WE are deserving of God’s blessing.
All three of these parables—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son—fit together with a common theme. Not only do they remind us that we need to be aware of our own sins, but they tell us that God rejoices when anyone who was lost is found, and we need to join that celebration. We need to be happy when a sinner repents or when someone who’s been away from the church comes back.
Jesus reminds us to love God and to love our neighbors. We need to remember that commandment, and we need to remember that EVERYONE is our neighbor. God’s love is for everyone. We need to welcome everyone, share God’s love for them, and join in the great celebration when more and more people follow in the way.
To send us off, I’d like to use some words from St. Patrick:
May the strength of God pilot us;
May the wisdom of God instruct us;
May the hand of God protect us;
May the word of God direct us.
May these things be ours, this day and evermore.
Amen.
(C) 2022 davidmburrow@yahoo.com