This week we’ve explored two of Jesus’ short parables about things lost and found, each one with the message, “So there is rejoicing over one sinner who repents.” In the reading from the New Testament appointed for Sunday, we hear from one of those sinners, Paul, writing to his colleague Timothy about his experience of having been found:
"I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost."
Paul, as we know from the Book of Acts, was Jewish, a Pharisee – and so outraged by the blasphemy of Christian claims that Jesus was divine and rose from the dead that he became the foremost persecutor of this Jesus movement, trying to stamp it out, violently if necessary. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christ-followers when he had an experience of Jesus speaking to him that changed the course of his life – and of human history. Though viewed with suspicion by those he had persecuted, he was baptized into Christian faith and gradually accepted, going on to evangelize Greek and Roman-held lands and articulate in his letters the theology that has shaped Christian understanding, especially the truth that we are saved by Jesus' works of love, not by our own “goodness.”
No one would have called Paul (then Saul) a “lost sheep.” As a Pharisee he was known for his holiness and fidelity to the Law. But he, who called others blasphemous, came to see that he was the blasphemer, having ignored all the signs that Jesus was who he said he was, the risen Son of God, redeemer of the world. He came to believe he was foremost among sinners and had gone far astray – and that he’d been found and rescued by the Great Shepherd himself, for a purpose: "But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life."
Lest we ever think it a waste of time to seek those who have strayed far from God’s will, or even those who just have no interest, we have the example of Paul who went from legalistic, self-righteous religious leader to foremost articulator of the grace of God that Jesus describes in his lost and found stories. Not even Paul, who was persecuting Jesus’ beloved community, was too lost for the shepherd to seek out – he reached from beyond the grave to get Paul. No one is beyond the reach of God's love, no one.
Who might we seek, who could end up having a huge impact for good? Who is hovering on the edges of our lives, our churches, our communities, who needs to be welcomed in?
What parts of ourselves are yet unclaimed by the grace of God, that still operate out of a code of condemnation?
We have received mercy, we found sheep and found coins. To whom will we extend it?
We have received mercy, we found sheep and found coins. To whom will we extend it?
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