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S. Pentecost 14.25 Ezekiel 34:11-24, Luke 15:1-10

‘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…’

And here we see something really important about Christ’s Kingdom—his Body the Church—and who his sheep really are! We think, modern people that we are, that since God is really Big, his Church must be really big. Since God is Mighty and Powerful and Impressive, his church must be really mighty, powerful, and impressive…

And this is what has Modern Christendom (really Medieval Christendom too 🙁 “hankering for bigness” as Hermann Sasse well put it, striving for an institution that is mighty, powerful, and impressive to worldly eyes. This is what drives the “missional” theology that permeates Modern Christendom, every denomination, including our own little LCMS. The biggest, the best, the mightiest, the most impressive must be the True Church of Jesus Christ!

But when Almighty God, Christ Jesus, came in the flesh did he appear mighty, powerful, and impressive, or as some homeless beatnik—beat-up, crucified, and outcast by his peeps?

OK! In our OT and Gospel readings today, Jesus spells out with great clarity his preference for the FEW who like and are like him—beat, lost sheep. The strong sheep who butt and shove, and muddy-up the pasture like they own it, he puts up with outwardly. But, at The Last, as he long ago told Ezekiel to tell us, he will judge between sheep and goats, and even between sheep and sheep! And the weak sheep, the beat-up, beat-down, will be JUSTIFIED! while the strong and fat ones the Shepherd will feed in judgment!

And the judgment will not be favorable. The judgment, quite simply, will be: “not mine! I never knew you! Depart from me, workers of iniquity!” as we’ve heard several times in our Gospel readings the last few weeks.

Or to quote the great Taylor Swift’s wonderful ballad ‘August’ on ‘Folklore’, for many of the sheep hanging out in Christ’s fold it’s just a summer fling—the thing they’d had going with Jesus, but like that sultry August, it sipped away like a bottle of wine, so that, at the End, he will say, not quite as wistfully or melodically as Taylor:

‘So much for summer love and saying, “Us”/ ‘Cause you weren’t mine to lose/ You weren’t mine to lose, no…’ [See, my musical tastes are broader than you thought! Do you think the engagement to the future Mr. Taylor Swift is real? Never mind, we’ll discuss later…]

Doesn’t it strike you as strange, hearing our Gospel, that a Good Shepherd would leave the ninety-nine sheep defenseless in the wilderness and go chasing the one lost one until he finds it, and when he finds it, brings it home rejoicing such that all heaven rejoices with great joy(!) over the one sinner who repents, and doesn’t give a rip for the ninety-nine ‘righteous’ who need no repentance?!?!

The holy scriptures are littered with promises from Jesus that he will never leave nor forsake his sheep; the Good Shepherd knows his sheep and they know him and he never abandons but always guards and defends them simply because they are his.

Just like Jesus never changes his mind that his Apostles have no business preaching or teaching outside the synagogues of Israel—the Church, the flock that are truly his—and that when we see lands and people without God’s word, without any true love or adoration of Jesus, we do 2 things that our Lutheran Confessions rightly distill from holy scriptures…

Thing 1: we see it as God’s well deserved judgment on them for despising his Word (that has gone out to every creature under heaven!) And Thing 2: we see we do the same damn thing all the time, and make ourselves unworthy of salvation by hanging out with the haters of the LORD, so quit it! Only love Jesus! And maybe muster some of that hate for those who hate him, as David advises… 😉

In the same way it seems perfectly clear the reason Jesus leaves the ninety-nine abandoned in the wilderness is simply because THEY WERE NEVER HIS!

What?! You mean Jesus’ actual flock is just 1% of the sheep that had a thing with him that one sultry August, back in high school? You’re suggesting that even out of the couple billion members of various Christian denominations today that only like about 1% are really his sheep?

Well, no. Actually, the LORD told Elijah I Kings 19, that out of at least a million Israelites who claimed his name, only 7,000 were actually believers, were actually his sheep! But since you can’t have .7% of a sheep, Jesus happily rounds up to the 1% figure.

Why would Jesus let his sheep get pushed around, beat-up and beat-down like that? Well; because the first word in beatific is beat as Jack Kerouac well knew when he chose that word for his generation. St. Paul said that trials and travails show who’s genuine—who loves Jesus just because, and who is just a gold digger?

“Why was I not told?”! Well; I’ve been telling you this for a while, now! The Lutheran Confessions tell you too. “No injustice is done those who despise the Word!” Hell isn’t a place Jesus sends people against their will. It’s his mercy to let those who find his light a consuming fire be shielded from it forever. He won’t drag anyone kicking and screaming into heaven by their hair. Jesus is an acquired taste few acquire…

The early church got IT—the rite crowd and no crowding—probably not more than 100,000 out of 100 million until Constantine became Emperor in the 4th century AD and made the Church a department of the Roman State to use (quoting W.H. Auden) “like spiritual benzedrine to rev up a flagging empire.”

This is why the Roman Church has so many members. Because it had its beginning not with St. Peter (who was never a bishop of Rome!) but with Constantine and his successors like Gregory the Great in the 6th century who took the Roman Imperial Title “Pontifex Maximus” for himself and served as a substitute for the defunct West Roman Imperial State.

The hankering for bigness leads to all sort of misconceptions about Christianity. The worst being the way big institutions (all modern denominations!) are Big Business demanding the members serve the institution’s big-shots, the holy-rollers who need no repentance…

By contrast, 180* around, Jesus’ sheep are Beatniks dealing mostly unsuccessfully with lives sin has made totally unmanageable. Their worry’s not: ‘how can I make Jesus give me what I want’? but rather: ‘how can Jesus make me what he wants?(!)

If he wants to take us on a wild ride through death and hell to his Undiscovered Country, his sheep are like: “Wherever you go, no matter how dark and difficult the road, just take me with you, make me be thine forever.”

We won’t discover we’re his by searching our feelings, but searching his! In Holy Baptism, Holy Word, Holy Supper, Jesus bares his heart, makes us lost sheep his, bestowing on us the Peace, surpassing all understanding, that guards your heart and mind in Christ Jesus. Amen.