Sermon — September 11, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
I once heard an interview with a baseball umpire who’d been recruited to test out a new ”electronic umpire” system in the early days of its development. It used lasers and cameras and computers to detect exactly where the baseball crossed the plate, then communicated wirelessly with a headset in the umpire’s ear, which played a little noise after each pitch. Right down the middle? Ding! Way outside? BAAAAH. The company was just testing things out, and this guy was an umpire for one of those leagues that’s so minor it’s not even technically “minor league.” They called him up with a proposition. “Hey, you have a double header on Thursday, right? How about this? The first game, you call, the way you’d call it, but with the headset in your ear. The second game, for every pitch, just call exactly what the computer says.”
And by about the third inning of that second game, he was convinced: This machine was going to ruin baseball.
His reasoning was simple. While the strike zone is, in theory, a geometric concept, in practice it’s a human one. Negotiating the exact boundaries of the strike zone is part of the game, as the batter tries to shrink it down and the pitcher and catcher try to make it wider. The umpire’s job isn’t to apply an algorithm to determine whether any given pitch is a ball or a strike. It’s to preside over a healthy game. If the pitcher hit the last batter, the umpire might call a few balls on the inside to discourage the pitcher. If the batter keeps mouthing off about bad calls, the umpire’s going to stand his ground, and then some. And let’s face it, baseball is a spectator sport: there are certain pitches that can be called as strikes in the top of the second inning but really need to be balls in the bottom of the ninth, if the batter’s team is down by two, because this is a game, and not a computer simulation.
You may not agree with this umpire. But you can at least understand his point. There are times when the best way forward is not the precise and strict application of the rules, but a certain kind of flexibility. There are times when we think fairness is the most important thing, but in fact it’s forgiveness. There are times when what we want is justice, but what we need is mercy.
If you think there’s nothing more important than calling balls and strikes as precisely as possible in life, then today’s parables might be disappointing. The lost sheep and the lost coin tells us something about what God values, after all. And if this is the way that God behaves over “one sinner who repents,” (Luke 15:7, 10) then our God is an unfair, unjust, unreasonable god. And everybody knows it.
Consider the lost sheep. “Who among you,” Jesus asks, “if you had one hundred sheep and lost one, wouldn’t leave behind the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one who had been lost?” (Luke 15:3-4) And every shepherd in the crowd is looking around, like… Should I raise my hand?
This is a very bad idea! No reasonable person would do this. For the sake of saving one in a hundred, no one would leave the other ninety-nine out alone in the wilderness, vulnerable to wolves or thieves or simply to wandering off themselves, which sheep, it turns out, are rather apt to do.
And what he does next is worse! He takes the sheep, and puts it on his shoulders, and where does he go? Back to the rest of the flock, to make sure they’re still okay? No! He carries it home! Into his house! And he calls his friends and neighbors and he says to them, “Rejoice with me!” And they show up and they’re like, “Man… Where are your sheep?” And he’s like, “I don’t know! Out there! I hope! Isn’t this awesome!?”
The woman with the lost coin behaves in a slightly more methodical way. She only has ten coins, and she’s lost one of them, but there’s no risk to the other nine. So she lights the lamp and she sweeps the floor. She scours her apartment looking for that coin and when she finds it, she is filled with joy. And she calls to her friends and her neighbors, and she says to them, “Rejoice with me! I’ve found my coin!”
But the more you think about this story, the stranger it seems, too. She invites her friends over to celebrate, and how do you celebrate but by throwing a big party—by eating together, like Jesus eats with the tax collectors and sinners? But how many friends and neighbors can you feed for one drachma? It seems to me that the woman may have spent a huge amount of energy searching for this one lost coin and then spent it right away, by throwing a party to celebrate having found it.
And so it is, Jesus says, with God.
We so desperately want things to be fair. We want balls to be balls, and strikes to be strikes. We want people to be held accountable for their actions, punished for their wrongdoing. We want them to apologize so that we can feel justified in forgiving them. We want the ninety-nine sheep to be rewarded for their good behavior, and the one lost sheep to have to deal with the consequences of its actions.
But God is unfair. God’s like the woman who’s lost the coin: she’ll light a lamp to drive away the darkness so she can look for you the instant she realizes you’re lost, even if you’re not ready to be found. God’s like the shepherd who’s found the sheep: he’ll throw you over his shoulders and carry you back home, bleating furiously, without a thought for the rest of the flock. When you have wandered far away, God is so delighted at the prospect of your return that he doesn’t even wait for you to realize you’re lost; he just goes, without a thought of fairness in his mind.
God doesn’t call balls and strikes according to an algorithm. God practices mercy, more than justice; forgiveness, more than fairness. And Jesus invites us, in these parables, to consider whether we might do the same.
There are, no doubt, many situations in which clear boundaries need to be set. There are relationships in which the appropriate response to being wronged is not “It’s okay. I forgive you,” but, “That was wrong. It’s not okay. You need to stay away from me.” Absolutely.
But we spend most of our lives on the edges of the strike zone. And we see the world like typical baseball fans. We think that we are pitching strikes, and they are throwing balls. We think that we are being wronged, when we’ve done nothing wrong. We think that if only life were more fair, if only someone were out there really calling balls and strikes, then—Well, then what? God would smite our neighbors or our spouses or our friends for their thousand tiny wrongs?
Because that’s the thing. We crave justice, but sometimes justice doesn’t do very much for us. What we really need is mercy. We stick to our ideas of fairness, but knowing that we’re right doesn’t do much for us. If we can let go, and forgive—if we can sweep the floors of all our resentments and search what we’ve lost—we might have a chance at feeling a tiny fraction of God’s joy.
God in her mercy has given us the power to forgive, to be as irresponsible and unreasonable as God is, with one another, to display, as Christ did, “the utmost patience” with one another. (1 Tim. 1:16) Not because it’s easy to forgive. Not because the other person isn’t wrong. But because God has displayed the utmost patience with us. Because God has swept the floor and searched diligently for us. Because God has sought us out when we have gone astray and carried us home on his shoulders, rejoicing.
So “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (1 Tim. 1:17)