I’m going to begin this morning by reading another version of the Parable of the Lost Sheep—this one from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Now, if you don’t remember the Gospel of Thomas from your days in Sunday School, it will soon become obvious why. Thomas is a book of sayings discovered in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt. It is very old—perhaps as old as the Gospel of John—but it was obviously not included in the Biblical canon—again, for reasons you will soon understand.
Without further ado—the Parable of the Lost Sheep according to the Gospel of Thomas:
The Gospel of Thomas, verse 107:
Jesus said, "The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine sheep and looked for that one until he found it. When he had gone to such trouble, he said to the sheep, 'I care for you more than the ninety-nine.'"
That is how you change the whole vibe of a passage with two words—one qualifier, “the largest”. Two words stir up a rather important question: Does God seek us out because we are lost creatures that he loves, or is God only going to pursue us if we are the best, the biggest, or the most beautiful?
This brings up a whole other category of questions, like: Where does my worth come from? Am I valuable in and of myself, or only for what I produce, or only for what I consume? Then, a step further removed: What is God’s economy?
I believe Christians have done a terrible job of talking about worthiness, because too often we have slipped into this dialectic where faith is about spiritual things and life is about material things and never shall the two meet, presumably because God does not like material things. Now, I can say that almost without objection in the Christian church in spite of how ridiculous it is when we have a God was the one who made those material things and called them good.
God loves trees and rocks, but God also loves the works of our hands. I suspect God loves marvels of architecture just as God loves water and sun, livestock and companion animals, and every other thing that God created and called “good.” It is not sinful to marvel at created things—after all, you are one of them! If God cares for you, as a lost sheep, then I have to believe God also cares for quilts and bowls and all sorts of things we create.
I am not saying anything particularly new or radical here. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote that “God loves material things; he invented them.” Of course, we are skeptical of this, because generations of preachers have warned you about the dangers of living “in the world today” as if any of us are living anywhere but “in the world today”. Regardless, there is a danger with material things and it has to do with their purpose. Are we using them to steward and grow what God has given us? Or are we hoarding them and trading them for power. In his essay, The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry teases out what it looks like to love material things for the wrong reasons. He writes, “The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their qualities.”
Loving wealth is a problem, because wealth is an abstraction. Loving weapons for the feeling of power it gives you is a problem because those qualities are an abstraction.
The question is the same question we are always asking as good Christians: Are these things instruments of power for me or instruments in service of others?
I feel this need to defend material things in part because Ewalu is full of these things that make this place special: trees and rivers, buildings and quilts. All of these are reflections of love and devotion and care, because they reflect our love for one another. God loves material things, because God loves good work. The Devil’s work, as Berry points out, is in valuing a building or a quilt only for the money or status that it brings, not for the heart put into it—not for the person it warms nor the feelings of wonder it inspires.
In spite of what the Thomases of the world say, God does not seek after the sheep because of its economic value. In fact, he risks leaving the 99 to attend to the weakest link. It is risk management nightmare! God seeks the lost precisely because they are lost, and God does this because God loves that stinking sheep. God loves sinners. And the good news is that we are all most certainly that.
As Christians, we are called to love things that reflect God’s good creation. In fact, I’m going to take this a step further and say this: Good spirituality requires good love of creation. You cannot separate the two, and those who try end up doing terrible damage under the guise of living a spiritual life. There is no spiritual life apart from one spent caring for others by the work of your hands.
Not surprisingly, C.S. Lewis’ buddy, Tolkien, fleshed out what this looks like in The Two Towers when he wrote, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
And what do they defend but created beings loved and called good? Which reminds me to remind you what today is about: Quilts, yes, but only secondarily. They’re beautiful. They are. Still more beautiful are the hands that sewed them, the feet that moved them, the hearts that gave them away. And most beautiful of all are the campers who benefit from them—the kids who never realize they are at Ewalu in no small part because of the work of people they will never meet, producing quilts they will never see.
These campers are kids like Cody (not his real name). This is what Cody’s mom said after he spent a week at camp this summer:
“Camp is a wonderful experience for Cody. He has learned how to use nature and God to help him along his journey. Cody has a learning disability and was physically abused as a baby. He came into our lives when he was 2 years old. It has been a struggle for our family and Cody to understand why he reacts and goes on fight or flight mode. This will always be a struggle for him but with your camp he has been able to understand and learn to have God and nature be there for him.”That, my friends, is not an abstraction. That is as real as it gets. When we talk about God meeting campers, we mean Cody. There were 875 different Codys last summer.
I don’t know if God smiles down on buildings, but I have to believe that God loves what our beloved safe spaces have meant for all those Codys, what this chapel has meant, what Cedar has meant. And I don’t know if God enjoys quilts for their quilt-y-ness. But I have to believe that God smiles for the heart and passion that goes into them, the love that flows out of them, and the joy that that brings—for the warmth they provide and the care of those who are wrapped in them. Not abstract things—true, real joy lived out in the most valuable material thing of all: People, like you and like Cody, and like everyone else who shows up at Ewalu.
You are what this ministry is about.
And you are actual, lovely human beings—not abstract, not statistics, but lovely creatures—and still (and always) lost sheep.
So, God delights in finding you. Just as some of you delight in finding that really wonderful quilt. There is absolutely no shame in loving beautiful things. After all, their beauty is a reflection of creation—created and called “good”—and where good work meets a good world in a place apart drenched in God’s word. Now, THAT is something really special.
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