A woman sweeps a room, finds the coin she lost, equal to the wages of a days labor. She invites all her friends over to celebrate.
An image of God: a woman sweeping the floor who throws a party.
How often do we picture God like that?
Lighting the lamp, sweeping every nook and cranny, looking and looking for what was lost, and celebrating extravagantly upon finding it.
There is Joy in the presence of the angels of God, not for the righteous, but for those who repent.
The question, the big question is will the righteous join in on the celebration? Why don’t the righteous rejoice? If they don’t rejoice are they righteous? Are they the ones in need of repenting?
There are two things going on in the gospel lesson today.
We see something essential about God: looking with unflagging persistence for the lost, and rejoicing when they are found.
And we see something important about us: we are told to rejoice with God, not to murmur, or be resentful of God’s grace to others, but to rather rejoice with God.
In fact, the true sign of repentance is that of rejoicing with God in the life of other people.
That is righteousness, the ability to be thankful for what others have received.
The Gospel lesson today leaves us with a biting question: why don’t the righteous rejoice? Why do the righteous murmur and begrudge? Are the righteous really righteous? Who are the righteous?
We begrudge the mercy of God.
We have fallen prey to the American myth of being “good people” and that other people are the ones who need to repent.
The Christian world view, the real world, is that we all fall so short of the glory that God created us for that it is silly to try to compare who is more fallen than the other.
It is an act of hypocrisy.
It is to turn righteousness into a joyless mockery, a joyless mockery that can’t even imagine or consider that the mercy of God has a claim on us as well.
The woman keeps sweeping, looking for that joy that her children have lost.
To be righteous is not to have our lives all together. To be righteous is to be capable of joining in the joy of the angels of God when mercy has been embraced and clung to.
The Good News is that Jesus is that searching out of God looking for the lost.
The Good News is that Jesus is the rejoicing God for finding what was lost.
Notice that God is all about searching and rejoicing, not judging and resenting. (Repeat)
I find hope that joy is found in mercy.
I find hope that God is looking for us, lighting up the darkness, sweeping, reaching, searching, looking.
I find hope in the reminder that I stand in constant and desperate need of being found by that mercy over and over again.
I find hope that the true measure of righteousness is our ability to rejoice with God, not to begrudge others, not to hold ourselves above others, but rather to rejoice with God when mercy is embraced, when mercy becomes the way of living.
See God: sweeping, searching, looking. See God: rejoicing.
I conclude with a quote from Jesus, from the eleventh chapter of Luke, the Peterson translation.
“If you live wide eyed in wonder and belief, your body fills with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar.”