A Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
by Linda M. Maloney
Exodus 32:1,7-14
Psalm 51:1-11
Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10
Today's gospel reading is so familiar we could all probably recite it in our sleep--especially the first part, about the shepherd with the lost sheep. The church is very fond of the image of Jesus the good shepherd -- so much so that four times a year we get a "good shepherd" Sunday, with one or the other of the gospel readings that touch on that theme.
So today, rather than belabor the familiar image of the shepherd, I am going to focus on the part of the gospel reading that usually gets the least attention: the story of the woman who has lost a silver coin, a drachma. Ordinarily she is just the peanut butter in the sandwich between the all-too-familiar story of the lost sheep and the long, interesting story of the lost son. (That story comes next in Luke's gospel, but because we always read it during Lent it gets skipped in the Pentecost cycle.) Between the man and his sheep and the man and his son, the woman and her coin gets -- if you'll pardon the expression -- swept under the rug. We say politely: isn't that nice, Luke likes to pair stories of men and women, and here is another of those pairs, and now let's talk about something interesting, like why the owner of the sheep would risk losing 99 to go looking for just one -- and so on. But today I am going to go sweeping and searching and looking for a paradigm of Christian living in what you may consider an unlikely place: in a story about a poor woman.
I used to have a problem with this second parable because it seemed so trivial. The man has a hundred sheep; the woman only has ten little coins. In one of the translations that was published in the sixties someone had gussied up the story in modern dress so that she had "ten dimes." Now, I ask you: who is going to sweep the whole house looking for a lost dime? And that was before the 1970s inflation! It seemed to be one more example of how women's lives are trivialized and demeaned in comparison to those of men. (The Living Bible has reversed field and made these "ten valuable silver coins," but in fact a drachma was about equal to a day's wages for a laborer.)
In 1985 women theologians of liberation from the whole South American continent and the Caribbean met in Buenos Aires at the "Latin American Conference on Liberation Theology from Women's Perspective," and they took this parable as the theme of their conference! They interpreted that conference as the coin that was lost and found. They said: "The coin symbolizes our coming together and the discovery of our selves in light of our experience of God and our daily theological work, which now are transformed into a festival. [In this celebration] we will share our different ways of seeking our coin, of doing our theology."
As these women knew, the parable reveals a number of things about the ways we do theology nowadays: our work is contextual and concrete; it sees the ordinary and the everyday as the place where God is revealed: It takes place "in the house." It is hard work; it is a struggle to find what we are seeking in the darkness that has covered it for so many centuries. But it is also characterized by joy and celebration, and by hope: a hope that assures us that God is with us. God has her skirts tucked up and is busy sweeping and searching, too.
Let me read the story again in this context:
What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, "Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost."This woman has ten silver coins or drachmas, and apparently that is all she has, because she is very distressed about losing even one of them. A drachma, as I said before, is about the same as a denarius: one day's wage for a laborer. We know, then that the woman is poor. We also know she is poor because she lives in a mean, dark house, with a low door that doesn't let in much light. In an age when houses were sometimes taxed according to the number of windows they had you could count your neighbors' wealth by how light and airy their houses were. This woman's house is dark. She has to light a lamp, which could cause her further anxiety because of the cost of lamp oil. Even then she can only find her coin by sweeping and listening for the rattle of the metal against the hard dirt floor. She is so happy to find that coin! In her joy she calls all her women friends and neighbors to share in her happiness, just as the owner of the sheep gets his buddies together to celebrate the recovery of that one sheep.
Both stories are the same: both use the same language. Both have the same sequence: having, losing, searching, finding, rejoicing. But more than that: both of these stories, and the one that comes after, the one about the lost son -- all of them end the same way: with a party! The rejoicing of the one who has found the thing lost is not complete unless it is shared, unless it results in the creation of a community of rejoicing. The having, losing, searching, and finding are all for only one purpose: so that, in the end, there can be a community gathered together. It appears that the sheep-owner has sheep for only one reason: so that there can be banquets. And the woman knows what money is for: it exists so that you can invite your friends to a celebration. It seems to me that by the time the feasting is over more than one sheep and more than one drachma's worth of goodies will have been consumed. But that is what they are for.
That is what we are learning about doing theology in the churches today: that its purpose is to create community, and to re-create it again and again. (When I talk about "doing theology" I am not just talking about what scholars and professors do; I mean what all of us do when we read the Bible together, when we gather in EFM classes or study groups to ask questions about God and seek for answers together, and when we gather in worship and break the bread of the word and the bread of the Eucharist together.) When we go searching for the lost coin of memory we re-discover and form new bonds with the lost fore-sisters who have gone before us (and that includes the fore-brothers, too). We forge new connections with our lost saints, and in doing so we find ourselves. We sweep, and listen, and sweep again, and listen again -- until there is a tiny sound that gives us the energy to go on searching until at last we have something; something so minuscule, so insignificant compared to the hundred sheep our neighbor has (just compare, for example, the number of pages in the Bible that are spent talking about men with the ones that tell us about women, or the number of pages in the Bible or in any history book that tell us about kings and queens and generals compared to those that tell us about ordinary people). But that tiny drachma is just what we were looking for; it is just what we need to make it possible for us to call our friends and neighbors, our fivlai and geivtonai, together and say: "rejoice with me, because I have found the drachma I had lost." (Incidentally, this little story is so nicely constructed that the woman, her friends, her neighbors, and the drachma she seeks and finds are all feminine in Greek!)
There are some stories in the Bible that tell us how we should be like God: in the way we love each other, in the way we forgive each other, in the way we care for God's creation. Then there are other stories, like these, that tell us how God is like us (only more so): how if we care for what is ours, and search carefully and exhaustingly until we find what we have lost, we can know that God cares and searches and rejoices even more when God has lost something -- or someone. And I think we can justly say, too, that God cares -- cares more than we do, if the parable is true -- when the stories of some of us are lost, when the memory of half the world dies. We are used to the idea of Jesus the good shepherd, and some of the earliest Christian art has that theme. But we are not so used to the idea of God the anxious woman, the poor woman laboriously seeking in the dark for the tiny, precious thing she has lost. This story says that God is like that woman, just as God is like that shepherd. And if God is the one searching, then we are like the sheep, either the lost one or the ones at home, and we are like the coins, either the errant one or the ones in the purse. Like them, we exist for only one reason: so that there can be an us, a community gathered together. When we are alone, we are lost; we are out of place.
In the end every story is about the communion of saints -- the community that rejoices together, with God and all the angels, because God refuses to have any gaps at the banquet table. If any of us is missing, we can't celebrate. If anyone is lost and cold and miserable and frightened, the rest of us are, too. Because our God can't rejoice without us. We have to be together, all of us, with our men friends and our women friends, with the saints and the angels: one people of God celebrating, because none of us can stay lost forever. "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." Nobody is superfluous, and nobody is left out.
"There will be joy in heaven," says the first story. "There is joy in the presence of the angels," says the second story. Our sisters and brothers, the saints who have gone before us, are already rejoicing -- not just because they are gathered together with God and the angels -- but because we are gathered here with them, and we are pledged never to forget them, as they will not forget us. Amen.
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