Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity
Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth
Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.
Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.
And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.
It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.
