Sermon: "God Values Everyone"

The rearing of sheep today is a big business. They roam the hills in their thousands. Tractors and land rangers are used to supervise them and round them up when there is a need. We have come a long way from the small time shepherd Jesus was referring to in his parable of the Lost Sheep. This man had just a hundred, an average flock, and looking after that hundred was a full time job. Each night he counted them, which must have taken hours as the sheep kept moving about, and one night, after checking several times, he found that he had only 99. One had wandered off. 

Those listening to Jesus would have said, What do you expect? Shepherds were proverbial for their doziness and lack of organization. There was a law forbidding shepherds to give evidence in court because their minds tended to be as woolly as the backs of their sheep. He had only 100 sheep and yet he has managed to lose one. But here the shepherd begins to act out of character. Instead of forgetting about the lost sheep he sets about recovering it. He leaves the 99 in the care of a hired hand (the kind of character referred to in St .John's Gospel in the chapter on the Good Shepherd) and sets off to find the sheep which was lost. 

What was so special about the sheep that had been lost ? In the Gospel of Thomas, a later reworking of the biblical Gospel tradition, it is stated that this sheep was the largest of them all. But there is no suggestion of this in the original tradition. Nor is there any indication that the missing sheep was particularly lovable, or that its wool was of a superior quality, or anything of the kind. The only quality it had which motivated the shepherd to put himself out and go over the hillsides to find it was its vulnerability. It had got itself lost. 

That very characteristic which would have caused many people to conclude that the sheep was not worth saving was the one which encouraged the shepherd to risk himself, and the rest of his flock, (because hired hands were not always reliable), to get it back. And when he did get it back he put it on his shoulder and carried it back to the rest of the flock with real and genuine joy. 

From all this we can draw two conclusions. The first is that this story, like many which Jesus told, shows how God regards us. We may be like the sheep. We lose our way in life. We do not live up to our good intentions. We think that we are poor specimens whom God is rather ashamed of and would rather not bother about. Nothing could be further from the truth. However weak we are, however much we fail, God does not give up on us ; indeed, the weaker we are the more God is determined to do something with us, and the more joy God feels when it comes right with us. 

St. Paul knew this when he wrote to the Corinthian Christians who certainly had their fair share of weaknesses and problems : Consider your own call, brothers and sisters : not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise ; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong ; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God (I Corinthians 1.26-29). 

That is how the lost sheep would have seemed to many people : foolish, weak, low, despised, nothing. If we seem like that too, we can take comfort from the verse : 

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,

But yet in love he sought me,

And on his shoulder gently laid,

And home rejoicing brought me. 

God's values are quite different to the values which often exist in the world. Anne Robinson may say, You are the weakest link, Goodbye. Jesus Christ will say, You are the weakest link, and you are infinitely valuable. Without you the chain is incomplete. Come to me and be made strong. 

The second conclusion we may draw from the joy of God over one sinner who repents, is that we can find that same joy if we put ourselves out as the shepherd did to seek out the lost and bring them back to the fold. Whether they are physically weak or socially disadvantaged or spiritually deprived, they are our concern. It is not for us to despise or disregard those who are weaker than us in any of these respects. Nor is it for us to try to drive them in a direction where they are unable to go. But we can lift them onto our shoulders and take them where they want to go but, for various reasons, cannot. 

This is how we show that we are more than sheep. We are not simply passive consumers of God's grace and strength, however much we need it and however welcome it is. We are called to go out in that strength, being shepherds ourselves after the pattern of Jesus the Good Shepherd.