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24th
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C
Terranuova Hermitage
September 15, 2013
Lost and Found
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
Mother Teresa
Back in the 1990s, I
was working in the education office for the Archdiocese.
One of the projects
that the central office was involved in had to do directly with Mother Teresa
of Calcutta. Mother Teresa came to
Baltimore to open a new mission for her Sisters, the Missionaries of Charity.
We – the Archdiocese
– had provided a large, old convent building near Hopkins Hospital. We renovated it to accommodate how the
Missionaries of Charity wanted to use it.
The Sisters lived on
the first floor, in very simple and even meager conditions, just as their rule
stipulates. The second and third floors
house about twelve persons with AIDS.
This is one of the
core ministries of Mother Teresa’s Order – caring for persons with AIDS. The Sisters specifically care for persons
who are in the advanced stages of the illness and literally have no one to care
for them, no place to go, even no place to die.
One of the Sisters
explained it very well to me. “We want them to know that there is a God
and that God loves them” – that clear, that simple, that powerful!
Seeking Out the Lost
What the
Missionaries of Charity do really illustrates the lesson of today’s gospel.
The context is that
some of the religious leaders of the day are upset because Jesus is having
dinner with “sinners.” We are not told what sins these “sinners” committed, but they are
labeled as “sinners.”
These religious
leaders – who seem pretty full of themselves – believe that associating with
these sinners makes you unclean. In
response to them, Jesus tells two stories: the one about a shepherd looking for
one lost sheep and the other about a woman looking for one lost coin.
So, right at the
start, Jesus is challenging these religious leaders. I say this because the society of that day
looked down on shepherds as kind of low-life people and it looked down on women
as second-class, persons who don’t really count.
In these stories,
Jesus wants us first to identify with the shepherd and the woman – a real
challenge for those religious leaders.
And he is even saying that this shepherd and this woman are images of
God.
So, Jesus is jolting
his listeners to start thinking differently.
And then, in his two stories, he shows that we can all be lost in two
ways.
Lost: Our Fault
First, we can be
lost like the one sheep.
We can wander off
and our being lost is our own fault. For
example, we can choose to stop coming to Mass regularly and lose our grounding
in God.
We can drift into
harmful and immoral behavior, like Internet porn or things like that. When we are lost in these ways, Jesus is
saying that God is still there.
God is still loving
us, looking for us, and not giving up on us, just like the shepherd looking for
that one lost sheep. In fact, the tug of
our conscience and even our feelings of guilt are God trying to find us.
Isn’t that a great
way to understand our tugs of conscience and guilt feelings? And finally, notice in Jesus’ image that the
shepherd does not scold or punish the lost sheep, but simply carries it back to
the flock – what a good lesson for us as a Church!
Lost: No Fault
And then we can be
lost like the lost coin.
This means that we
are lost through no fault of our own.
For example, we can feel lost when we are grieving the death of a
husband or wife.
Or we can feel lost
when we are dealing with depression.
When we are lost in these ways, even though we may not feel it, God is
like the woman looking for the one coin.
God is still there,
loving us and wanting to be close to us.
Maybe it will take time for us to feel this.
We may need to push
ourselves to pray and come to Eucharist or push ourselves to respond to the
companionship of family and friends. But
if we give God a chance in these ways, we can be found and we can find
ourselves once again.
Conclusion
So, a powerful lesson today (1) about God – God searching
for us when we are lost, and (2) about ourselves – about the ways we can be
lost and what we might do when that happens!
