5th Sunday after the Resurrection of the Lord 2025

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God's family, now and forever.

And together we say, Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

We may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, who truly to know is everlasting life.

Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ, to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.

Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Please be seated for the lessons.

And they went to their bed where they were all weary and the drinking that was going on for so long.

Judith was alone in the tent, and the whole affair had flapped upon her bed because of the pouring out of so much wine.

And Judith had told her slave girl to stand outside the bedchamber and to wait for her to come out as she did other days.

She spoke to the boys in the same word.

So everyone went out beyond the side.

And no one was left in the bedchamber, either great or small.

And then Judith, standing beside his bed, said in her heart, Holy God, what hour.

Now is the time to help your heritage and to carry out my intention to destroy the enemies who have risen up against us.

And she came to the bed and lifted hold of her head and took down her sword from there.

And then she came toward his bed and caught the hair in his head and said, Give me strength today and the holy God of Israel.

And she struck his neck twice with all her might and cut off his head.

And then she rolled his body off the bed and snatched the can from the post.

And a little later she went out and gave a hole of Harry's head to her slavery and placed it in her food back.

And then the two women went out together according to their custom at the time for prayer.

And they passed through the encampment and circled the valley and went up the mountain of Aphilian and came to its gate.

And then from a distance, Judah called out to the guards at the gate, Open, open the gate.

God, our God is with us, working deeds of power in Israel and might against our enemies, as God has done today.

And it happened when the men of her town heard her voice, they rushed to come down to the gate of the city and summoned the elders of the city.

And they all ran together from small to great, for it was extraordinary, extraordinary to them that she had returned.

And they opened the gate and welcomed the women, and they lit a fire to provide light and gathered around the women.

Then Judah said to them with a loud voice, Hallelujah, hallelujah, praise God who did not withdraw mercy from this house of Israel, but was broken our enemies by my hands.

And the most high struck him down with a feminine hand.

And as the eternal man said the canopy on my way, in which I went.

God regards the power of the destitute.

Let this be engraved for a generation to come.

To hear the groaning of the prisoner, so that the name of the holy God may be recounted in Zion.

In the time before time you laid the foundation of the earth.

Yet you were the one, and your ears will not.

And you will be the one.

Then Jesus spoke to them, telling this parable, saying, Which mother's child among 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 you can find it.

And finding it, lay it on your shoulders and rejoice.

And when you come back to your home, you call together your friends and neighbors, saying to them, Rejoice with me, because I found my lost sheep.

I say to you all, in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous somebodies who have no need for repentance.

For what woman having ten silver drachma coins worth ten days' wages, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search until she finds it.

Then finding it she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, Rejoice with me, because for I have found the coin that I lost.

The same way I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

And thanks for joining me with that greeting because a reminder, a few people ask Sean, why do you still have that white fabric on the cross?

Well, because it's still Easter tide.

We're celebrating Easter not for one week, but for 50 days.

And just like Lent, which is 47 days, you saw the cross, veiled grew purple, Easter invites us to see it through the pure light of the resurrected cross.

So we're going to keep it until it's not Easter anymore.

And the reason uh the greeting is important is because we're hearing this story from Luke that Jesus told long before his death.

And of course, the invitation is to hear it through the reality of the resurrected Christ, not the historical one.

I just want to name this.

There's a historical Jesus, and maybe you've read about it, the Jesus of history.

Boy, I really want to know about him, but I don't follow him.

The historical Jesus is dead.

We follow the resurrected Jesus.

So if you're ever in doubt, what would Jesus do, follow the living Jesus, not the dead one.

And I'm not joking when I say that.

I don't know what a Palestinian Jew who lived in Galilee would have done, but I know what the resurrected Christ compels me to do.

So let's be clear where life is and where death is.

And so we come to this story through the eyes of the resurrection.

And by the way, there's three stories in a row, and we didn't tell the third one.

Does anybody know which one comes next?

The sheep, the coin.

The sons.

Not the prodigal son.

There's not the prodigal sheep or the prodigal coin.

There's the lost sheep.

There's the lost coin.

And there's two sons that are lost.

And we like to treat them separate.

So look, let me just talk about the coin first before I tell you about sheep.

Do coins lose themselves?

Who lost the coin?

She lost it.

There's no doubt.

She lost it.

It's her fault.

When she finds it, she doesn't give it a spanking.

She does not say, doggone it, you coin.

I'll teach you never to lose yourself again.

Maybe she elbowed it off the arm wall.

Who knows?

She's overjoyed.

She's found it because it meant something to her.

Oh, but Mike, it was worth 10 days' wages.

You don't live and die off 10 days' wages.

If you do, you got bigger problems.

The coin meant a great deal to her beyond its economic value.

And we know that because when she finds that she does something that would, I mean, if your neighbor did this, you would think you would call the police.

Imagine your neighbor coming and saying, Hey, McGill, my box decor in the family.

What happened to a big burger over in my house now?

Uh yeah, my wife's calling.

Lock, lock, lock, right?

I mean, that's how you know this is wild.

So now let's go back to the sheep.

Because I took a whole college class on the difference between domesticated animals and wild ones, and I'm going to give it to you in about four minutes.

What's the difference between a wild animal and a domesticated animal?

Their DNA.

Because wild animals were selectively bred and trained by humans, and now we live in a mutual relationship.

Are tigers domesticated?

No.

Which is why any zookeeper worth their salt knows you don't play with the tiger.

As friendly as it seems, it is wild.

We have a zookeeper here.

Comes at 8 o'clock.

One day she wasn't careful in the gorilla enclosure, and she thanks God every day she got away before the gorilla got to her.

So I know you've seen videos with people hugging gorillas at your own risk.

The domesticated dog was made by human beings.

We made them.

We made them.

God made wolves.

We made dogs.

Dogs will keep eye contact with you.

Dogs will only eat you after you've been dead three days in the house.

They won't kill you in your sleep.

We get these differences, right?

Wolves and dogs can breed, but they have different DNA.

And what many of us don't know is that there are two kinds of sheep in the world.

There are domesticated sheep and there are wild sheep.

By the way, cats are not domesticated.

They're tame.

I'm serious.

The research says this.

Cats can live without humans.

Dogs can't.

Dogs can go feral because there's humans in the world.

But dogs need us.

Cats don't need you at all.

Which is why they're tame.

Does that make sense?

You can tame a lion sort of, but you just have to be aware it's wild.

Cats are wild.

But they can live in your house.

Okay, two kinds of sheep in the world, domesticated and wild.

When a wild sheep smells a predator, do you know what it does?

It runs for high ground using sure footing, right?

Because a wild sheep can stand on an outcropping the thickness of a dime.

It's kind of incredible, isn't it?

The other thing a wild sheep does is it is quiet.

Why would it help the predator find it?

Wild sheep are migratory.

They move not only for safety, but so they move, they have this instinct that if they stay in one place, they'll overload the carrying capacity of the land.

They will eat themselves to death.

Domestic sheep were made by us.

We made them.

When a domesticated sheep smells a wolf, it cries because we taught it to.

It's loud.

It helps the wolf find it.

It's really trying to help the shepherd find it.

Domesticated sheep, they're not dumb.

We made them reliant on us so that if the shepherd doesn't move them, they will sit in one place and eat not only the blade of grass, they'll eat the root so that the grass cannot grow again.

It's not because they're dumb, it's because we domesticated them.

When a domesticated sheep wanders away, it's not because they're evil, it's because we train them to need us to bring them back.

Whose fault is it that the woman lost her coin?

Hers.

I'm sure she didn't plan.

How will I lose my coin?

Accidents happen.

Whose fault is it that the sheep wandered away?

It is the shepherd's responsibility, if not fault.

And why?

Because we made them.

Oh man, if you've ever had children, that's a tough line, isn't it?

We made them.

We did.

We made them.

And sometimes they wandered.

And we made them.

So Jesus in this story is not saying that the sheep should get blamed or that they should get punished.

Jesus is saying that we were made by God to trust in God and live into God's domestication.

That is domicile home.

And when the sheep wander away, it's not because they're evil or rebellious, it's because they get lost.

There are not good sheep and bad sheep.

There are lost sheep.

And there are sheep who are in proximity to the shepherd.

They're not actually found, they're just in proximity to the shepherd.

Anybody in the room ever been lost?

And I don't mean in the grocery store, because in the grocery there were other humans.

I mean, have you ever been lost in the desert when you were carrying all your stuff on your back for the next three weeks and you were by yourself and you had no idea where you were?

Different levels of lostness, aren't there?

Because the grocery store is a freak out moment.

If you've seen your kids get lost in the grocery, you can see the panic and terror.

Having been lost in the desert, the panic and terror actually goes to new levels.

It goes to the levels that maybe you've heard Elizabeth Kubler Ross write about.

The first thing you do see is called denial.

I'm not lost.

I know right where I am.

I'm really close to the trail.

Then comes anger.

Oh my god, this compass doesn't work.

What kind of training did they give me?

Then comes the bargaining.

Okay, I'm just gonna take a minute, I'm gonna take 15 steps, it's all gonna be fine.

Then you know what's after that bargaining?

Despair.

Oh my god, I'm lost.

And if you can make it through despair, you get to acceptance.

Acceptance.

This did not turn out like I thought.

There's no lying or changing that.

So how is it I'm going to find my way home, back, to life, whatever it is.

If you've known an alcoholic, I guarantee you you've known at least a few of those stages.

If you've been lost, really, for a long time, you probably know that.

But Jesus isn't just talking about analogies, he's talking about parables.

And that's what the beginning says.

He tells a parable.

See, because shepherding doesn't work as an analogy.

Most shepherds don't own their flock.

They're sort of like tenant farmers.

And it's a dangerous job because wolves will kill humans just like they'll kill sheep, particularly when they're hungry.

Particularly when the human is trying to keep them away from the sheep.

So when Jesus says, which one of you who has a hundred wouldn't leave 99 for the other one, the answer is nobody would do that.

You would cut your losses at one, after all.

I mean, look, would you really search day and night for a penny?

You'd be like, I got a dollar.

That seems really good.

Right?

Jesus actually is like a bad shepherd.

He's a bad shepherd.

Because when you leave 99, well, the chances they're gonna wander.

And if a predator comes, I don't know how much National Geographic you've seen, but like, I mean, wolves are sweet and all until they get into a feeding frenzy, and then they're like sharks, and they just kill as many as they can.

And I better tell you, I identify with the 99 sheep because as lost as I ever really got was like an A-and-I did have two drinks in high school, two, like two.

That was lost for me.

Yeah.

And so the fact that Jesus didn't like put a blue ribbon around my neck as the shepherd and put me on a pedestal is deeply disappointing.

And why would he leave me for the F student who couldn't even turn their work in?

Like, I don't want the that shepherd, I want the county fair ribbon.

And what do you know?

Jesus is talking to people just like me who bifurcates the world to good people and bad people, and he tells the story to say there's not good and bad.

There's people who are close to the shepherd, and there's people who are lost.

And if you've ever been lost, you'd never wish it on anybody else because it's terrifying.

And I trust most of you in the room have known somebody in your life who was lost.

Man, I actually trust most of you in the room have had a period, maybe it was only even a couple of seconds, where you felt lost.

It's not like you actively planned how can I hate God.

It's that somehow you thought, where the heck am I?

What am I gonna do?

No, maybe I'm the only one.

So we get to hear this story about Christ, the bad shepherd.

And I want to make sure you hear, because I don't think that God looks at us as good or bad.

I don't even think God looks at us as found or lost, as if there's only two categories.

I mean, I think the truth is all of us have a hundred sheep in us.

All of us have a hundred sheep in us.

So which ones have wandered away from home?

I know how to cut my losses.

I know how to cut parts of my own flock off so I can focus on the ones that do what I want them to for now.

Of course, the problem is when I do that, I've cut parts of myself off.

So here we hear the story about a God who made us and values us more than our economic value, so much so that God can't bear for any of us to be lost.

Because God knows we as humans belong together, but God also knows that me and all my hundred sheep also belong together.

And I'll tell you a strange truth, because I've had family members lost and I've chased them, and I've gone looking for them, and I've lost parts of myself looking for lost people.

Boy, when you start thinking, how am I going to cut my losses now?

I pray you're never there.

But I do think that's part of the human love experience, is that we often find ourselves saying, I've lost myself looking for the lost.

Oh my God, what do I do?

Do I cut my losses?

Do I cut myself?

Or do I live in this tension?

When do I stop looking?

When do I go home and when do I come back?

That's why I think we continue to read this story, because it's not simple.

And if we read the next story about the sons, we have the hardest time with people because we impute motive to them.

The queen has no motive, it's an object.

Just so you know, the sheep has no motive either.

We took it away from them.

The sons don't have motives.

Their dad made them.

And they get lost.

They both get lost.

Read the story.

It is not the lost son.

They're both lost.

And there are probably two or three or seven sons in you that are lost.

What does the gospel ask us to do?

I think it asks us to consider which parts we cut off and how we go looking.

And I think the other readings actually beg us to ask, what does it mean to be domesticated?

Now, you're gonna think I'm stretching this.

So I just want you to hear this.

You're gonna think I'm stretching this.

By the way, these are pants.

If these are distracting you, I'm wearing pants.

My spouse made them for me, and I'm grateful.

There.

You might have thought, I just can't get past him wearing a skirt.

That's because you were domesticated to believe that men wear pants and women wear skirts.

And I want you to accept this as an object because it's true.

Men don't inherently wear anything.

If you live in Dubai, you don't wear these.

The seam down the middle would be a disaster for any man.

Why?

Because they have a different house they live in.

So let's talk about the house of Judith for one second.

The story only works because of the domestication of the culture that says, you're gonna think I'm believing, I'm making this up.

That's okay.

Look at the window.

It's pretty.

The culture says that widows are desperate for men because they've lost their soul with their husband, they're burning with physical passion.

They just need a man.

And women are helpless.

The story wouldn't work without that.

Because Judah's husband has died.

She's still in mourning, and yet she has this realization she can deliver Israel from the invading army of Assyria by killing its general.

How does she do it?

She dresses herself to the nines.

And he believes the domesticated script.

Ah, she needs me.

I'm powerful, I'm strong, I'm virile, whatever words you want to put in there.

And so she's come to me, the best of the best, so that I can satisfy her craving.

I mean, it's a cultural script.

So what does she do?

She gets him really junk and cuts his head off.

And then puts his head in the food sack.

And then when we're done with that reading, we say, thanks be to God.

Which is weird.

Because we've been domesticated to say thanks be to God after every reading, don't you know?

The reading only works because there's a domesticated script that we made up about what men are like and what women are like, and without that domesticated script, which are as made up as pants and skirts, she couldn't have been successful.

By the way, we've come up with a new script.

It's called the Femme Fatale.

The deadly woman that comes from stories like this.

And Susanna and JL.

Women who use their bodies and their image to trick men and kill them.

Fem Nikita, maybe that's a movie too.

We make it up.

It's not inherently true.

And this is gonna sound really weird.

The reading we got from uh Colossians, I just want you to know it's the way that we punish lectors.

We give them readings like that that have a bunch of Greek words in them, and there's always this stress like, am I gonna read it right?

There's good news, Renee.

We didn't punish you.

Will Gaffney did.

She's the one who put this together.

We didn't do it.

And uh the other thing is that actually uh it depends whether you're speaking Erasmian Greek, modern Greek, or demotic Greek, how you'd say it anyway.

So which one's right depends what kind of Greek you are.

Which pants are right depends where you live.

So good news.

How we pronounce the word Laodicea is a domestication, not an objective fact.

But I went to a church as a kid where if you called Laodosha, you were wrong because they said Laodicea.

You ever grown up in a place like that?

It's called a shibboleth.

There's a right way to do it, and it's the way we do it.

That's called domestication.

We make it up.

Now, I've talked about lost and found and the tension there, but I do really want you to think about what else are we domesticating?

Are we domesticating a script that says immigrants are mentally ill, rapists, and thieves?

I've heard that script on the news.

The question is, do we choose to believe it and hold it in our hearts and project it on people who don't look like us?

If we hold it, we've been domesticated.

And if we remain wild, then maybe we start to say emigrants are people created in God's image and likeness, and God would like to put the whole flock together.

Maybe you've been domesticated to think that the bishop is the shepherd and the clergy are the sheep dogs, and that's why we wear the collar.

Maybe you've even domesticated to think that Christ is the shepherd and you're the sheep.

The mystery of the incarnation is Christ is one of the sheep.

Bishop Andy Doyle is a sheep.

Clergy are sheep.

We're not any better than you, and we wander and we get lost.

And God would like us to stick around the shepherd who is Christ, but Christ is one of us.

I don't know what else you're domesticating right now.

I know there are a lot of attempts through different political parties, through different countries in the world to get you to buy a narrative that some people are less than others.

I know that.

But as my one of my mentors and teachers, Paul Farmer, said, you know, a lot of our concern with the third world is so misplaced because we don't live in three worlds, we live in one world.

And how jarring to think that people have to earn their health care by merit instead of claiming it as their universal right?

Do you know where health care is a universal right per their constitution?

Rwanda.

Do you normally associate Rwanda with like spiritual health and riches?

Or do you normally associate them with the Hutu and Tutsi genocide?

Yeah, see, they learn from genocide that health care should not be earned.

It should be a right of human beings.

What about food insecurity?

Have you been domesticated enough to think that welfare queens are eating food superior to yours?

You know somebody on welfare?

I do.

There is nothing regal about it, let me tell you.

There is parliaments that would like to domesticate you against your brother and sister who God made and loves and will leave us to pursue.

So our question is: do we look for the lost with God, or do we say, we're better out without them because they don't look like us, they don't dress like us, they don't shop like us, they don't do health care like us, they don't eat like us.

God, their pants look like skirts.

Now that's why we're going to come back to the story again in three years.

Because it's not a simple story about good and bad.

It's about the human condition and God, I've been lost, and I hope you never are.

I hope you are never lost because it's terrifying and it's humbling.

It breaks your heart and your mind and your spirit to be lost.

So why will we continue to not only lose parts of ourselves, but to live in a world where we say that you chose to be lost and not go looking for each other?