Foothill Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Volunteer Sunday

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 September 16, 2007

WE ARE ALL MINISTERS OF THE CHURCH

1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

One of my favorite quotes, purportedly, comes from a wise old rabbi during a wedding ceremony. He said: “You can either be right or you can be in relationship.” If you don’t get that quote at the time of your wedding, you will seven years down the road. No marriage relationship can last long, or well, if one or more of the parties has to be right. More wars have been fought – interpersonal or international - over the “rightness of the cause.”

Relationships, the real stuff of living, are messy and irregular, and require certain skills and tools of reconciliation like forgiveness, gentleness, listening, and saying “I’m sorry.” The defense of right leads to conflict, even violence, but the building of relationships is the path to peace and prosperity.

Saul thought he was right. He was trained as a Pharisee. He knew Torah, and he knew the right thing to do. This sect in the temple, known as “The Way,” who declared the disgraced Jesus as messiah – “Christos” in Greek - had it wrong. They needed to be punished and persecuted into extinction.

He was right, but he was not in relationship with God. And as the story tells us in Acts 9, he was knocked to his knees in a blinding light, and a voice said: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” I want you to notice that the voice did not say, “You are wrong, Saul.” Rather, the voice engaged him in a dialogue, which is what the voice of the Divine often does - as it did with Moses on the mountain, or Elijah in the cave, or Jacob at night. God seeks to be in relationship, dialogue with us.

And so, Saul became Paul, and as 1 Timothy tells it, Paul says: 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. … The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am foremost. For that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making of me an example to those who would come to trust in him for eternal life.

In our gospel lesson the Pharisees were right to criticize Jesus. He was eating with tax-collectors and sinners, people who were considered, either, traitors to the Jewish cause, or too poor to matter. If Jesus had lived in the 1950’s America he would have been brought up before the House committee on un-American activities. There is no question about that. He was in the wrong.

Even his little stories were not quite right. The stories of the good shepherd and the woman who lost a coin which precede the story of the prodigal son are so familiar to us that we miss their “bite,” says Richard Swanson. He writes in his commentary on Luke (Provoking the Gospel of Luke, 195) “My uncle hates it when preachers talk about sheep.

“…Usually they talk about sweet, innocent little lambs who respond lovingly to their tender shepherds. That makes him shake his head. Almost always they talk about what a good shepherd the person in Jesus’ parable is, willing to exert such effort for one lost sheep. That makes him wish that fewer preachers were town kids.

“You see my uncle raised sheep. He knows them up close. They are not sweet… they are rude, insistent, and deeply stupid animals. They would rather try to walk through a fence than go around it. They will destroy their pasture if not driven off it, because (unlike cattle) they do not move on when they have eaten all the grass where they are standing. They will devour the grass, down to and including the roots, and make a wasteland of what had been a flourishing pasture. ….They would rather bloat themselves on green alfalfa than do anything else in the world, though the bloating will kill them. They just go on devouring it even as they begin to swell up.

“The worst thing for my uncle is when town-kid-preachers talk about how the shepherd is like God. My uncle sees that as an insult to God, and a rather sharp insult at that.”

Here is the problem according to Swanson’s uncle. If you leave 99 stupid sheep in the wilderness to look for the one who wandered off, how many sheep do you think you will have when you get back? And what about the woman who spends all day sweeping her house looking for a lost coin at the expense of doing the one thing she needs to do for her family – find and make enough Food for them to eat. Even if she is searching for something precious, she has disrupted an entire world in her searching. It is not right. And if we think about the Prodigal son, why does he deserve such attention to the deficit of the elder, responsible child? It is not fair.

No, it’s not right or fair, but that’s what happens when you love someone, fairness and rightness become less important than saving the relationship.

Many of the people served by the agencies represented here today on this Volunteer Sunday may not feel like they are “right” with the community. They are poor, poorly educated, immigrant, pregnant, homeless, abused, imprisoned. Some of these people have made bad choices. Many of them find themselves in situations that are not of their own making. Life is not fair. These are the people who get lost in the wilderness of modern life. They are the ones who slip through the cracks of our educational system, or who are only educated through the penal system, or get lost in the crazy environment of success here in Silicon Valley.

What are we to do? Just let them go and fend for themselves? Some think that is the right thing to do, and we could do that, or we could give money to let someone else do it. We are good at giving money.

But, we are here at this training seminar for community shepherds (that is what a worship is, after all) because we follow this somewhat crazy shepherd, Jesus, who asks us to seek out all those folks who are on the margins of our community.

We are called ministers – ministere – those who serve. In this church we are all ministers. That’s our covenant when we become members of this church. The congregation shares in the work of compassion. Today we have invited some of the agencies and programs we partner with in this community to be here and to share their stories with us to offer opportunities for any of you to volunteer. We do not do this alone. We need to work together.

In fact, I would suggest to you that even the Good Shepherd was not working alone. He may have had some boys with him, maybe a couple of dogs, who could keep the 99 in control, while he used his special skills to bring in the one who had wandered off.

The training manual we are using is old and something outdated. It is made up of stories and illustrations that don’t always make sense. There is something “not right” about them. Which is why we study these texts asking - “What does this mean?” – until we realize we have been asking the wrong question. (Remember the quote: You can be right or you can be in relationship.) The question is not “how to get it right,” but “how to be in relationship.” Thus the question is transformed into “What kind of people do we need to be for this to make sense?” And that is the question Jesus puts to his disciples, and to us, who have been judged faithful and appointed to his service. Amen.