Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 12, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Here I go again.
I hear those trumpets blow again.
All aglow again.
Taking a chance on love.

I don’t know what it is, but sometimes Bible passages just remind me of the lyrics of popular songs. Maybe it’s because so much of the Bible is about love, and so many popular songs are about love. A different kind of love perhaps, but still love. This time it was Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep that reminded me of the great Vernon Duke song “Taking a Chance on Love.” Now, I recognize that the connection between the standard love song “Taking a Chance on Love” and an ancient parable about sheep may not be obvious to anyone but me, so let me try to explain what may seem to you to be a strange association.

Jesus parable of the lost sheep says: “Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Now, I know full well that some of you know a lot more about sound agricultural practices than I do. It’s not hard to know more about agriculture than I do, despite the fact that I’m named after my grandfather who was a graduate of North Dakota State Agricultural College, now NDSU, and who worked as a county extension agent. Be that as it may, this parable has always struck me as odd. Luke’s Jesus apparently intends his question to be rhetorical. The way he puts it makes it sound like he’s expecting the answer to be “Of course! Of course we’d leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and chase off after the one that’s missing!” And it sounds like that answer is supposed to be obvious.

Really? Is that what a competent shepherd would really do? I mean, Jesus doesn’t say leave the ninety-nine in a fenced field watched over by border collies—or llamas. I understand that people use llamas to guard sheep from coyotes. Much less does he say leave them in an enclosed, secure barn. He says leave them “in the wilderness.” In the Bible wilderness usually means the desert, and it is often seen as a place of hardship and danger. There are thieves in the wilderness. And wild animals. Lions, and bears, and such. Leaving the ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness isn’t leaving them safe and secure. Rather, it is exposing them to great risk. It is taking the very real chance that when you come back, having found the lost sheep or not, the ninety-nine will be gone, or at least some of them will be. They may be stolen, or have died of dehydration, or have made a nice meal for a pack of wolves. Leaving the ninety-nine in the wilderness is taking a great risk for the sake of the one that is lost.

Now, we are of course dealing with a parable here, not with a book on how to keep sheep. So we need to look for a lesson in the parable that is about something other than sheep. Perhaps you see other lessons, but the lesson that I see in this parable of the lost sheep this morning that is about something other than sheep is about love. It is about the true nature of love, and what it says about the true nature of love is this: Love, true love, love the way God does love, involves risk. Love isn’t safe. Love creates—true love always creates—the risk of loss. Love involves the risk of pain. When we love, truly love, love the way God loves, we risk being hurt. Perhaps badly hurt. Indeed, we risk losing everything. The shepherd of the parable could fail to find his lost sheep and also come back to find the other ninety-nine gone as well. That’s how it is with love.

Certainly those of us who have experienced human love know that that’s how it is with love. We probably learned that lesson the hard way. Maybe a love we felt for someone wasn’t returned, and we suffered the pain of rejection. Maybe that love was returned for a time, but then things went wrong and we suffered the pain of losing a love we once had. Maybe, and I know this is true for many of us in this room, myself included, we lost a loved one to death, perhaps the most painful of all of love’s losses, but one that is so often part of what it is to be human.

These are the losses of emotional, romantic love, or the love of family and close friends. Human love can involve other losses as well. Acts of charity are acts of love, and they involve at least a little bit of loss, the giving of some money or some of our time. We can invest ourselves emotionally in trying to help another person but our efforts fail and we lose the person to whatever demons she is struggling with in her life. Human love can indeed involve many different kinds of risk, many different kinds of loss.

Divine love, God’s love for creation, involves a risk of loss too. We don’t often think of God suffering loss or feeling pain, but I am convinced that God does. God seeks the lost sheep, every lost sheep, pining to give every person wholeness of life; but so often we humans choose instead ways that are harmful to ourselves and others, and when we do God feels loss, God feels pain. That shouldn’t be hard for Christians to understand. We confess that God sent Jesus into the world to bring us the Good News of God’s grace and God’s love. When God did that, God took a great risk. God risked the death of God’s own Son, and then God suffered the death, of God’s own Son when human beings did what God must have feared they would do. Yet God did not withhold God’s Son because of the risk. God acted in love, accepting the risk that came with the act of love. God calls us to do the same. Love involves risk, and love is the call of the Christian, risk and all.

Which may not sound like very good news. After all, who wants to take risks, especially for someone else? Well, perhaps the truth that love necessarily involves risk isn’t real good news; but there is something else about love that really is good news. Why does the shepherd in Jesus’ parable risk the ninety-nine to save the one? Out of love, yes; but what is it about love that would cause him to do it? What is it about love that causes all of us to take the risk of love, to take a chance on love as the song says? The answer, I think, is that at some deep level we know that love is its own reward. God has so created us humans that we crave love. We long to receive love, but we also long to give it. It’s part of who we are. And we know, some of us at least, that with the risk of love comes the satisfaction of love. Love is risk, but love lived well brings us a satisfaction deep in our souls. The satisfaction of knowing that we have done a good thing. The highest satisfaction of the human soul comes not from excessive self-concern but from giving of the self to and for others in love. All the great religious traditions know that truth, Christianity not least of all.

And here’s another thing about love that makes it worth the risk. When we love we never take the risk of love alone. Every time we love, God takes the risk of love with us. God is there supporting us in the risk and comforting us when we suffer loss and pain. God is there suffering the loss and the pain with us. God is there blessing us for having taken the risk, for having dared to love. And that is the best news of all. That is the blessing in the risk. In taking the risk of love we know God’s grace, we find God’s favor, we feel God’s love. We feel God’s love making us whole, making us fully human, making us the people God intends us to be.

So even the risk of love, pain and all, has a happy ending. Just like Vernon Duke’s great song:

Things are mending now.
I see a rainbow bending now.
We’ll have a happy ending now.
Taking a chance on love.

Amen.