Episcopal Church of the Messiah

Worship Service Sermons

Proper 19C,  September 19, 2007

 The Reverend Canon Brad Karelius

Lost and Found

It was a very different Episcopal Church, August 1970, when I began fulltime ministry at St. Mary’s Parish, Laguna Beach. The BCP was 1928. No women clergy, everyone involved in visible leadership on Sunday was male, except for the Altar Guild and Sunday School teachers. St. Mary’s was a resort country club congregation, many living in Emerald Bay, where I also happened to live with the Amsden family.

I was fortunate to work for a cutting edge rector, Father Bob Cornelison. He hit the ground running when he arrived in 1968, doing something that clergy did not do, especially in Laguna. He reached out to drug addicted youth (remember Timothy Leary was going strong at this time in Laguna Canyon} and also to vagabond hippy youth and other homeless. As our country was going through a cultural revolution about authority and traditional structures, Father Bob spent most of his time out of the office connecting with people in need in the community. About this time the parish helped to start the Laguna Beach Free Clinic.

Two months after I arrived, a parish-wide meeting was called in October 1970 by dissident parishioners who wanted Father Bob out of there. The church was packed and it felt like a lynch mob had gathered. You could cut the tension with a knife. It was frightening. The presider, who represented the Bishop of Los Angeles, was Father Gary Adams, who was to become rector of the Church of the Messiah two years later. Venerable parishioners spoke angrily about how the rector was ministering to drug addicted youth and the homeless and that was an outrage. He should be attending to his own flock. But moving testimonies from community leaders and youth, whose lives had been saved, turned the tide at that tumultuous meeting, and the die was cast for a congregation that would make its mark in the Laguna Community as a church that reaches out to the lost and abandoned and forgotten.

As we listen to the scriptures for today, I think many sermons in Episcopal churches today will focus on the two parables Jesus tells the crowd: the search for the lost sheep; the woman who turns her house upside down as she searches for a lost coin.

But I think we can go much deeper in exploration of what Jesus is saying to us today. Do these parables about a relentless search for the lost give us a vision for a reunion of the missing to the rest, a quest for wholeness and completeness?

This vision may seem romantic to you, and not realistic. Sometimes things are lost. The wilderness claims sheep that are foolish enough to stray and coins lay forever unclaimed in dark corners of a house. Mature consciousness does not fantasize perfection in an imperfect world. There are necessary losses.

This kind of thinking allows us to permit inevitable loss. Life is transient. Bad things happen, even to good people. We may shrug off losses, rather than search and try to reclaim them. We accept loss as the way things are sometimes in a broken world.

But Jesus is relentless with God’s insistent dream of reconciliation, restoration and reunion.

I am thinking about where we live the experience of loss and separation every day: in our relationships.

If we substitute people for the lost coin or the lost sheep, the meaning becomes more personal. We can look back on our life and remember relationships where one of us became lost, disconnected, separated from the other. As you try to remember, perhaps it was a family member, a friend, or a loved one. Something happened. Maybe it was where you were in your life at that time, or something that they did or said. But they became cut off from you in some way. As we look back, perhaps the memory still hurts. But that was life. Sometimes a memory about this loss and separation visits you when you are driving to work or walking the dog or washing dishes: it can seem like just yesterday. Certainly you have your regrets. But life is transient. Things happen. You need to move on.

Can you remember a time when you went out on a limb and tried to repair or reconnect or restore a relationship? What did you do? How long did you hang in there with the hope of reconciliation?
I remember an experience in the mid 1980s. I was on the Board of Directors for St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, where our daughter Katie was a student. The Board was dominated by wealthy physicians and businessmen. There was a lot of macho banter and power swaggering in those early years of Board meetings. I found that my role was to be a voice advocating for scholarships, especially for gifted middleclass students and persons of color, who could not afford to attend. I did not believe that Messiah Parish and other congregations in the Diocese of Los Angeles had invested millions of dollars to build a school for rich pagans. But it seemed to be what was happening. My confrontations focused on the physician Board president and we fought openly at every meeting. Finally, one Lent, after conversation with my spiritual director, I decided to try to mend this relationship. I remember waiting at his office with other patients, and his surprise at seeing me and then at what I was trying to do, which was somehow to try to work together and find some common ground. There was a reconnection between us, and I walked out of the office with hope.

You know when we have people like this in our life, aggravating people can dominate our daydreams and thoughts. They become part of a cast of persons in our mind, with whom we carry on arguments or against whom we plan counteractions. These persons who aggravate us can consume a lot of our energy.

But despite my hopes, the macho swaggering and hard-handed direction at the board meetings by the President did not change. I again brought this to my spiritual director. She invited me to bring this person into my evening prayers and to ask the Lord every night: "Lord, what are your hopes and dreams for Dr.X?" It was hard for me to imagine that God had hopes and dreams for this guy, but I practiced the discipline, and after a week or so I noticed a shift in my anger and resentment and my reactive nature to his behavior.

Life hammers us and it can make us skeptical about hoping for wholeness and reconciliation. Our efforts may not end up with a happy ending, but I think Jesus is saying to us: what matters is the direction you take in response to this experience of separation or alienation. Do you walk away from the person, turn your back on them? Do you in some manner walk toward them?

We can walk away, shake off the dust from our sandals and sigh, "Well, I tried, but they weren’t open to it." We walk away from them and the person becomes a distant object. We can build up a wall of hurt feelings and continue to brood in our heart. The Other has been cast out and is lost.

Readers of the Gospels marvel at Jesus’ ability to move with ease among sinners and outcasts. I think that Jesus spent so much time with these folks because they were honest about themselves and had no pretense.

One group that reminds me of the people that Jesus hung out with is AA. We have three AA groups here and I have gone to AA meetings to deal with some issues that have come up for one who has grown up as an adult child of an alcoholic. AA runs on two principles: radical honesty and radical dependency. This honesty and dependency is also expressed in the Lord’s Prayer, which we recite after every AA meeting.

The radical dependency is openly expressed in asking God for forgiveness and strength and on their friends at the meeting who support them. The AA program requires a radical honesty. Two of the 12 steps involve a detailed confession of the past, perhaps with a priest, and making amends where it can be done.

We who gather upstairs here in church on Sundays may think we have it together, while we are just barely hanging on. The people downstairs, at the AA meetings, in their radical dependency on God and each other, and radical honesty, could be our spiritual teachers. These outcasts, who hit bottom, at the end of their rope, who turned to God and AA, have joyful resurrection testimonies they could share with us about reconciliation and reunion.

So…the invitation is given to you today. Amidst that host of real people in your mind right now, are one or two aggravating people. Instead of giving up on them, or planning further warfare strategy, bring them into your evening prayers over the next seven days: ask the Lord: "Lord what are your hopes and dreams for X?"

The dominant consciousness of our culture suggests: "move on, get over it, they’ll never change." Jesus confronts us with an alternative consciousness: which breaks anew into the world in every risk at reconnection and every prayer for the Other. Amen.

Sources use:

What’s So Amazing About Grace, Phillip Yancey, pp.274-80.

The Relentless Widow, John Shea pp. 257-262