After Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday, the Philadelphia Inquirer featured an article on the queen’s 1976 visit to Philadelphia. It was, of course, the nation’s bicentennial. While visiting the Independence National Historical Park Visitor Center, the queen presented a birthday gift to the city in the form of a ten-ton replica of the Liberty Bell cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in London, where the original bell was cast.
The queen made a provocative proposition during this presentation. Maybe Independence Day should be celebrated as much in Britain as in the United States. As she put it, “[n]ot in rejoicing at the separation of the American colonies from the British Crown, but in sincere gratitude to the founding fathers of the great republic for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.”[1]
It seems to me that these words are very timely indeed, because I can hardly imagine a monarch or world leader saying such a thing today. At times—most of the time, perhaps—it feels as if we are losing all cohesion in civilization. Nations wage war and will fight until the end because they are convinced that they are right. Political parties sabotage their opponents, even their own members, because they have made up their minds on any number of issues or because they just want to be stubborn. Christians argue over issues unrelated to the gospel and prefer schism to living with difference.
That’s why I’m struck at a deep level by the late queen’s words delivered nearly fifty years ago. It’s difficult for me to imagine any modern, powerful nation agreeing to change its mind once it has set its course. To consider yielding what is impossible to keep is usually characterized as weakness rather than commendable humility.
It’s no secret that human pride is the root of much evil. Spiritual pride is a failure to acknowledge one’s own frailty and sinfulness. It’s also an eagerness to point out the sins of others; indeed, it even delights in them. Whether it’s Jesus’s critics mentioned in today’s Gospel or self-righteous modern Christians who think they have all the answers, spiritual pride is a dangerous thing.
Unsurprisingly, when confronted with opposition, Jesus usually resorts to parables. He clearly knows that trying to argue with people who have already made up their minds is a futile endeavor. But telling a parable is different. A parable draws on real, concrete human experience. It’s vague enough to entice the listener’s imagination, at least for a time, until the parable sharpens its convicting point.
This is the context for today’s parables. Jesus’s critics judge him because he hangs out with notorious sinners. And because they seem to have made up their minds about Jesus and about the sinners with whom he associates, they grumble.
To respond to this grumbling, perhaps hoping that minds and hearts could be changed, Jesus tells three related parables in sequence. We get two of them today. The third, which we don’t hear, is the parable of the prodigal son. There’s so much good news in these parables. The quest for one lost sheep among a hundred is like God’s passionate quest for finding us when we are lost. The woman who goes to great lengths to find one of ten silver coins, resembles our heavenly Father who will do anything to find us and bring us home. And in the parable of the prodigal son, how can we not find a similarity between God the Father and the earthly father who is waiting with open arms when his wayward son returns to him?
This is all good news. But I want to focus on another aspect of these parables. In every single one of these stories, the one who finds what is lost rejoices. And finding the lost is not an individual achievement. Finding the lost affects the entire village or community. When the lost are found, it’s a cause for great celebration and rejoicing.
Yes, Jesus tells these parables to illustrate God’s boundless love, mercy, and compassion. But he also tells these parables because he clearly hopes that his critics will change their minds, whether they are those of his day or of our own day or even us. The outward and visible sign of an inward change of heart and a change of mind seems to be an ability to rejoice that others have been found by God. In Christian theology, we call this change of mind and of heart metanoia. It is repentance.
And this brings us back to the words of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Isn’t learning how to rejoice with others a valuable life lesson? Isn’t it really about knowing “the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep”? Because the truth is that, while it may be easy to rejoice in our own individual successes and accomplishments, it’s far more difficult to rejoice in the successes of others. And it seems nearly impossible to readily rejoice in the successes of our enemies or those whom we dislike.
Which of us rejoices when the death row inmate guilty of a heinous crime finds Jesus in prison and experiences God’s forgiveness? Which of us can imagine frauds, convicted felons, corrupt hedge fund managers, cruel politicians, and destructive leaders entering the pearly gates? Can we muster any joy at the conversion of those we perceive as lost? Do we secretly wish they stayed lost?
Dare we contemplate the prospect of God actively seeking out such people? Would God really leave us, the righteous, out in the wilderness while he searches eagerly for the sinners or the irresponsible? And how unfair is that! Would God scour the planet to find those who have angered, hurt, and destroyed the lives of others? Are three parables of Jesus enough to change our minds so that we could begin to imagine a God of such boundless mercy and compassion?
Such a God is scandalous. We are usually taught that changing one’s mind and summoning compassion for the vile and offensive are signs of weakness. To have mercy is to deny justice. But the truth is a bit more difficult to hear. The truth may be that we are not good at changing our minds. And an unchanged mind is an unchanged heart and is also a soul unwilling to turn back to God’s open arms. Lest we criticize Jesus’s critics, at times, I suspect we are there, too, with the scribes, Pharisees, and the elder brother of the prodigal son. It’s much easier to grumble at the company God keeps and at his gratuitous mercy and compassion. It’s much harder to change our own minds.
Our Lord offers us a difficult truth today. As Christians, we are called always to find the right time to yield what is impossible to keep. What is impossible to keep while remaining a Christian is our anger, resentment, and lack of forgiveness. Those are the precious things we want to keep because they are so satisfying. Vindictiveness masquerades as justice and spiritual pride as righteousness.
I’m always struck by a question posed in our prayer book’s Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent. The priest asks the penitent, “Do you, then, forgive those who have sinned against you?”[2] This is exactly like Jesus’s questions in the parable. The answer he assumes is yes, of course! Yes, we would go after the one lost sheep of the one hundred. How couldn’t we? Yes, we would turn the house upside down to the find the one lost coin. What else could we do? But we know that truly rejoicing with those who were lost but have been found is not easy at all. And Jesus seems to suggest that the outward and visible sign of forgiveness is not saying “I forgive” but rather our ability to rejoice in the salvation of our enemies.
The most authentic mark of our Christian discipleship is not our self-righteousness or our churchmanship or our emotional zeal for Christ. Those things can be deceiving. The truest mark of our commitment to Christ is our ability to rejoice with those who, no matter what they have done, have experienced the joy of God’s scandalous mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. This commitment is marked by an open willingness to understand that by following Jesus we must yield all the poison in our veins that keeps us from rejoicing with those who have been found by God. And above all—and here’s the most difficult part—we must let God help us to learn that it is always the right time to yield what is impossible to keep. And maybe God can change our minds, too.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 11, 2022
[1] “Queen Elizabeth II was the first sitting British monarch to visit Philly. Here’s what happened when she did,” by Nick Vadala, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 2022 (https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/queen-elizabeth-philadelphia-visit-1976-20220908.html)
[2] Book of Common Prayer, p. 451.