“Rejoice with Me Because I Have Found My Lost Sheep” by Rev. Paul Berghout (@FatherPB)

“Rejoice with Me Because I Have Found My Lost Sheep” by Rev. Paul Berghout (@FatherPB)

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Piety

But Moses implored the LORD, his God, saying, “Why, O LORD, should your wrath blaze up against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with such great power and with so strong a hand?  …[Y]ou swore to them by your own self, saying, ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; and all this land that I promised, I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.’”  So, the LORD relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people. (Ezekiel 32:11, 13-14)

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Of these, I am the foremost. But for that reason, I was mercifully treated, so that in me, as the foremost, Christ Jesus might display all his patience as an example for those who would come to believe in him for everlasting life. (1 Timothy 1:14-15)

‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance. (Luke 15:7)

Study

There is a story of a man who was driving along the highway. Along the way, he hits a big bump and hears a clang, but he ignores it and keeps on pushing. When he gets home, he discovers that one of his hubcaps is missing. So, the next day he goes back to the spot where he hit the big bump, and sure enough, there is his hubcap which was deliberately propped up on the side of the road. When the man walks over to get it, he notices a note which some stranger has attached to the hubcap. It reads like this, “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you to find me!”

How is the coin lost? Through no fault of its own. It could have happened through careless guardianship.

How are the sheep lost? To illustrate:

A sheep found a hole in the fence and crept through it.

He wandered far and lost his way back. Then he realized a wolf was following him. He ran and ran, but the wolf kept chasing him until the shepherd came and rescued him and carried him lovingly back to the fold. In spite of everyone’s urging to the contrary, the shepherd refused to nail up the hole in the fence.

We have free will, but daily, we need to pray that we use it correctly. Recall these words from the Mass: “Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of Your whole family; order our days in Your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those You have chosen.”

As the words from Mass indicate, both the lost coin and lost sheep tell us that we are unable to move on our own. We are spiritually compromised. We may not even be aware that our poor conscience formation led us astray. We need God’s help. We all need prayer for ourselves.

Passive sheep and inanimate coins are appropriate symbols of things lost when one wishes to emphasize the divine initiative in finding what is lost.

Action

Life becomes this process of shouldering one another, of walking each other home. Sometimes we’re the carrier, and sometimes we’re being carried. Always, movement is toward holiness and wholeness, toward being included again with others though the Real Connection with God.

How did the Prodigal Son get found? Our text says, “He came to his senses.”

So did Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, and was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert. She advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. Pope Benedict XVI used her conversion story as an example of how to “journey towards faith... in a secularized environment.” 

Pope Francis mentioned her in his address before the United States Congress. The Church has opened the cause for Day’s possible canonization. She had lost herself in the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, a place full of “Bohemians, serious artists, workers, theorists, parasites,” communists, socialists, and assorted rebels. During this time, she also experienced failed relationships, an abortion (which later she greatly regretted), and a common-law marriage. She had thought herself sterile following her abortion, was elated to find she was pregnant in mid-1925, though a man named Forster Batterham, who dreaded fatherhood. He found her increasing devotion, attendance at Mass, and religious reading incomprehensible. Carrying their child, she came to faith in Christ. As a result, Day left the man she loved. They remained just friends since he could not reconcile himself to her faith in God. She went on to guide the Catholic Worker movement. 

Dorothy Day - A Prodigal for Our Time?

In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day tells us: “When I wrote the story of my conversion, I left out all my sins but told of all the things which had brought me to God, all the beautiful things, the remembrances of God that had haunted me, pursued me over the years so that when my daughter was born, in grateful joy I turned to God and became a Catholic. I could worship, adore, praise, and thank (God) in the company of others. I found faith. I became a member of the Mystical Body of Christ.”

One prodigal came to his senses in the pigsty, another with the first pangs of morning sickness. In the strangest places, we realize we have been found. (source: Bill J. Leonard).

Here is the formula of how to be a Prodigal Son or Daughter so that we can avoid it:

The prodigal’s arbitrary squandering of the property shows that the ego has no goals or commitments and that in turn reveals that energy has moved from consciousness to the unconscious.

The ego in isolation is unreachable; the light simply does not penetrate. We need to make the breakthrough of self-disclosure—What the AA Big Book calls “a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.”

He can only attain the enjoyment of personal freedom by fleeing from the father’s house with all that it stood for in terms of tradition, authority, objective values, and moral responsibilities to his father and his brother.

The far country that promised so much in the beginning and beckoned so seductively at the outset of the journey turns out to be a land of faded dreams and spiritual hunger. Times change and the land of plenty becomes the land of want. Famine strikes, wealth plummets, jobs became scarce. Days of abundant living and socializing turn into nights of loneliness and personal bankruptcy.

The only employment the younger son could find was looking after pigs, unclean animals in Jewish dietary and social law. He hungered for the food that the pigs were eating.

In the context of the parable, the hunger of the younger son’s body is a symbol of his inner hunger of spirit for something to sustain his being and to rescue his life from its downward spiral into destruction and eternal damnation.

When he came to his senses, he is quite willing now to incriminate himself with the self-indicting words, “I have sinned.”

The prodigal in verse 17 “comes to himself.” He confesses his sins before God and humanity (w 18 and 21). This realization and confession is true repentance, as the underlying Semitic expression shows.

The changes that took place in his mindset (metanoia) — “coming to himself,” engaging in internal dialogues, and persuading himself through his internal rhetoric — are dimensions of cognitive-emotive and enactive processes considered from a top-down perspective by God’s grace above.

However, “just because the monkey’s off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town,” as a comedian said.

We must understand that wanting reconciliation with his father is an act of purification or purgation, and not as a punishment. One scholar, who describes himself as “a Protestant who believes in purgatory,” has argued for a return to the original understanding of purgatory as a process of purification.

Amen.