September 14, 2025

Sermon Transcript

Jesus said, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:7)

What is heaven like? One day this summer I was browsing through a used book store and came across a volume entitled, “Called out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.” Upon further inspection, the book turned out to be a memoir by the well-known novelist, Anne Rice, author of the Vampire Chronicles. Having read a few of her works, I was intrigued and made the purchase – as if I really needed yet another book. This one was worth it.

In the memoir, Rice portrays herself as a wandering sheep who was lost and found. She began life safely in the fold of a pre-Vatican II, Roman Catholic household. She loved her church and she loved her family. When she came of age the losses began to mount. She lost her mother at a young age. She lost her beloved 5-year old daughter to leukemia. She lost her faith. She lost the person she used to be and wandered deeply into atheism. All the while she was writing. The vampires in her novels represented lost souls, most especially herself. In retrospect she came to see the Chronicles as spiritual autobiography. She didn’t believe in God, but she missed God. Meanwhile, God was always working to call her out of darkness.

Rice describes how one of the Chronicles, entitled Memnoch the Devil, represented her longing for God more than any of her other works. In the book, the main character is a vampire named Lestat. Lestat is granted a guided tour of heaven. What is heaven like? Have you ever wondered? Lestat’s guide warns, Be prepared that the laughter you hear is not laughter. It is joy. It will come through to you as laughter because that is the only way such ecstatic sound can be received or perceived. Then Lestat continues:

The sound swelled and enveloped us, and indeed, it was like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it was canorous, as though all those who laughed also sang canticles in full voice at the same time. What I saw, however, overwhelmed me as much as the sound … I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and in every direction saw these multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters and groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out. Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was the mystery. This was not chaos. This was not confusion. This was not a din. It seemed the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by final I mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding shared by all who participated in it.

What is heaven like? Heaven is joy and laughter. Heaven is reunion and reconciliation. Heaven is the hilarity of a great and final gathering. Jesus said, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. The Pharisees, whom we meet in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke (15:1-10), would disagree. For them, heaven was a reward for the righteous, nothing more. The Pharisees were a clerical order among the Jews who practiced for themselves, and did their best to enforce on others, a strict keeping of the Mosaic Law. They didn’t have just Ten Commandments, they discerned over 600 laws in the Torah. To clarify the following of them all they had added layer upon layer of new commandments. They were consumed with following all these laws to the letter, thinking that doing so would keep them righteous before God. Their goal was to stay clean, so they had commandments about whom they could touch and whom they couldn’t, and on what day of the week they could or couldn’t touch this or that possibly unclean person.

When Jesus came along he did everything wrong from the Pharisee’s point of view. If Jesus really wanted to be a respected teacher of Israel – to say nothing about being the Messiah, as people suspected he might be – the Pharisees believed that Jesus should have stayed clean as they were clean. But instead, Jesus was spending his time with all the wrong people. The lepers, the widows, the poor, even his obtuse disciples were unclean. What is more, Jesus was known to dine with those who were unclean through their own fault: tax collectors, prostitutes, adulterers, and swindlers – people who couldn’t possibly fulfill the Law and inhabit heaven. To these sinners the Pharisees would have little to offer in the way of redemption other than a stern glare of displeasure. Finding life difficult, are you? Can’t manage to keep those Commandments? Let us scowl disapprovingly at you until you conform to the ways of the rest of us. Gone was the joy and the laughter that was supposed to ring out on earth as it does in heaven.

Granted, the Pharisees get a bad rap. If they were trying too hard to follow God’s commandments, well, at least they were trying. On many occasions Jesus sat down with the Pharisees and tried to redirect their zeal. In doing so, he would challenge them to consider that possibly they were missing the point. The point is not a petty and petulant God who is always on the verge of punishing the people. Instead, the point is God’s joy. God, who is the source of being, wants to share his joy with all creation. So in parable after parable Jesus would challenge the Pharisees to rethink their conception of God’s nature. Indeed, the better view into God’s heart is not through the windows of law and logic and limits, but rather through the windows of love, and grace, and joy. What gives God joy? Apparently, God’s joy abounds when someone being called out of darkness responds. Heaven rejoices when the lost are found.

Jesus put it to the Pharisees like this: Imagine that you are a shepherd and you have a hundred sheep. Which one of you, upon losing one, will not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go and search for the one that is lost until you find it? And when you have found it, don’t you lay it on your shoulders and come home rejoicing? The parable we heard today illustrates how God feels every time someone outside of his fold is brought inside. God rejoices because the flock is whole again. But did the Pharisees rejoice? Do we rejoice? I’m afraid the parable catches us too often not rejoicing with God, but grumbling with the Pharisees. After the obligatory Oh isn’t it nice that the shepherd found the sheep, the ninety-nine voice their outrage about this ministry to the one. Shouldn’t the shepherd have stayed with the ninety-nine sheep he left behind? What kind of shepherd is this, putting the good sheep at risk for the sake of the one? What about us?

Let me give you some interpreter’s tips for the parable. First of all, most of us assume that we are among the righteous ninety-nine sheep who need no rescuing. Some of us may want to reconsider our presumed insider status with God. Secondly, notice at the end of the parable that the shepherd comes home with the lost sheep around his shoulders. He doesn’t go back to the field to find whatever might remain of the ninety-nine sheep, because when he left on his rescue mission, we can assume that he put another shepherd in charge of his flock. The other shepherd would stay with the flock and bring them home. The ninety-nine would never be at risk, so don’t worry about them. To worry about them is to read more into the parable than Jesus ever intended, and it is to miss the point. The point is the shepherd’s concern for the one sheep that is lost, and his joy when the flock is made whole again. Look at it this way: no parent with three children rejoices at the end of the day when only two are safely home. You can be sure that the one who is missing consumes the parent’s thoughts. No one rejoices until everyone is home and the family is whole.

It’s the same story in the matching parable of the woman who lost a coin and turned her house upside down until she found it. Why would she hunt high and low for the one when she had nine others? The reason is this: the ten coins weren’t pocket change to be earned today and spent tomorrow. Most likely, Jesus was referring to the traditional wedding head-dress of a woman of the time. Sewn into the wedding head-dress were ten coins. It was a married woman’s most precious possession, a symbol of her very identity. To lose a part of it would be akin to losing a part of herself. Thus, the lost cost can represent a lost part of yourself, taken away by anything that dismembers, disintegrates, or diminishes your life: the death of a loved one, childhood abuse, reckless decisions of youth that have had lasting consequences. In the parable it’s not the face value of the coin that matters, but the joy of being made whole again. The woman rejoices upon finding the lost part of herself.

The same proved to be true for Anne Rice. God called her out of darkness through his goodness and love made known to us in creation, in the calling of Israel to be his people, in the Word spoken through the prophets, and above all in the Word made flesh, Jesus. She died in 2021 at the age of 80, believing in God and trusting in Jesus. Likewise, in today’s reading from I Timothy (1:12-17), St. Paul makes a spiritual confession of his own. He writes briefly about how he was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. He was lost in sin, and had completely missed the point of his faith, which was to share in God’s joy. But God called him out of darkness. God had mercy and patience, and Paul would spend the rest of his life in gratitude, trying to invite others into the joy of the Lord. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, he would write. Indeed, the mission of the church is to search for the lost, and invite them to share in God’s joy. The reason we are here, the reason why we restore this building, the reason why we do everything we do is to give people a foretaste of heaven. It is no small task.

Sometimes I think of the church’s mission in terms of a family cat that we had when I was growing up. She was already fully grown when we adopted her. We brought her home from the vet, gave her the imaginative name of “Tabby,” and made her part of the family. Tabby was to be an inside cat. My mother did not want fleas, tics, and dead rodents brought into the house. But Tabby had other ideas. The great outdoors called to her, and she was prone to wander. In fact, we had to be careful anytime we opened any door. The odds were, she was crouched around a corner looking for her chance to bolt. When she saw her opening, she would wiggle her backside, then dash to the open air. On these occasions of Tabby’s great escapes we’d all have to drop what we were doing and join the search. “Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! She’s done it again.” In fact, one time my older brother took the horn from my bike, plucked off the rubber bulb, and blew the horn with a long, steady wail. All these years later, I submit that his actions were not helpful to the cause. The neighbors must have thought it was an air raid, or the Apocalypse was upon us.

Tabby’s fur was mostly white. She was usually easy to spot. But she was strong and fast so catching her was always an ordeal. Every time she got outside I remember being terrified. I feared she was going to be hit by a car or simply wander so far away she’d be lost forever. Once she climbed out an upstairs window and perched herself atop the pitched roof of our three-story house. A fall from up there would have exhausted all of her nine lives. Somehow we always managed to rescue Tabby from her many excursions. To be sure, carrying her inside was not a matter of laying her on your shoulders. It was more about holding her at arms-length to avoid being raked by her twenty sharp claws. But we loved her and breathed a sigh a relief every time we retrieved her. We rejoiced.

What is heaven like? Looking back, I think it was the first time I caught a glimpse of the way God looks on the world, and all the inhabitants thereof. God rejoices when the lost are found. God wants us all to share in the joy of the great and final gathering, which is heaven. These days in particular, I wonder how the divisions that ail us would heal if we looked at one another not through our own eyes, but through the eyes of the Good Shepherd, who came into the world to save sinners.

So which one of 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 find it?