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24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C
St. Margaret Church 10:00 and 12:00 am
September 11, 2016
Lost and
Found
(Rev.
Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
Mother Teresa
Last Sunday, Mother
Teresa was canonized – declared a saint by Pope Francis.
We now speak of her
as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. She led her
Sisters – the Missionaries of Charity – in caring for the least, the lost, and
the last in society.
Mother Teresa and
her Sisters did this in Calcutta. They
would house and personally care for those who were destitute and literally
dying on the streets.
In some cities in
our own country, including Baltimore, the Missionaries of Charity care for
persons with AIDS.
In Baltimore, they
can accommodate about twelve persons at a time who are in the advanced stages
of this illness and literally have no one to care for them, no place to go,
even no place to die.
One of Mother
Teresa’s Sisters put it this way. “We
want our guests to know that there is a God and that God loves them.”
Seeking Out the Lost
What the
Missionaries of Charity do illustrates the lesson of today’s Gospel.
Some of the
religious leaders are upset because Jesus is having dinner with “sinners.” We are not told what sins these people committed,
just that they are labeled as “sinners.”
These religious
leaders – who frankly 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 a single lost
sheep and the other about a woman looking for a single lost coin.
So, right at the
start, Jesus is challenging the religious leaders. I say this because the society of that day
looked down on shepherds as low-life people and they looked down on women as
second-class persons.
In the stories,
then, Jesus first wants us to identify with the shepherd and the woman and is
even saying that this shepherd and this woman are images of God.
He’s jolting his
listeners to start thinking differently.
What a challenge that is to these people!
And then, in his two
stories, he gets to his main point – that we can all be lost in two ways.
Lost Through Our Fault
First, we can be
lost as 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 or stop praying.
The result is that
we lose our grounding in God and may well drift into harmful behavior, like divisive
and demonizing comments about others, even in the name of God or of what we
think is right. We can fall into misuse of the Internet.
When we are lost in
these ways, Jesus is saying that God is still there, still loving us and
looking for us, just like the shepherd looking for that one lost sheep.
In fact, when we are
like that one lost sheep, our conscience may come into play and we will have
some tuggings of guilt feelings.
I suggest that these
tugs of conscience and guilt are really God trying to find us and bring us back.
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 great example this is for how we,
as a Church, are to relate to a lost sheep!
Lost Through No Fault
And then we can be
lost like the lost coin. Through this story Jesus is telling us that we may
become 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 desperately
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.
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, like a shepherd
or a woman, searching for us when we are lost,
(2) About ourselves – about the
ways we can be lost and how we might respond when that happens!
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