Isaiah 40.1, 6-11. Luke 15.1-10
Comfort, O comfort my
people, says your God. In these last
few days, I have been very aware of how much we all need comfort at the moment
- to comfort ourselves, to comfort one another, to be gentle at this time. Of
course, it is the late Queen’s family whose grief is paramount and greatest,
just as it would be for any family who are bereaved, but this is a bereavement
which touches us all. I have been doing
a lot of listening since Thursday; listening to people’s stories about the
Queen, their memories of her reign and, in some cases of the reign of her
father and even grandfather too. But I have also been listening to stories of
people’s own bereavements and sorrows, triggered by this very public death.
Bereavement is always complicated.
Nearly thirty years of taking funerals has made that obvious to me. Every
situation is different, every person is different, and our feelings may change
from day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute. That’s just as true
for this national bereavement. Everyone is affected, but each of us feels this
death differently, and needs to grieve in our own way, at our own pace.
Over the last couple of days,
I have been thinking hard about what we might need to change for our worship
today – readings, prayers, music and so on. There are guidelines from the
Church of England nationally, but there aren’t any hard and fast rules. One of
the decisions I pondered was whether to include the National Anthem in today’s
service, the new one of course – God save our gracious King... But whichever
way I approached it, somehow, it felt too soon. I know that the moment the
Queen died, Charles became King. That is the fact, but facts are one thing, and
feelings are another, and it felt to me as if we needed a chance to say goodbye
before we say hello, whatever the constitutional position is, which is why I’ve
decided to leave that for another week, to allow this Sunday to be a moment to
acknowledge what, and who, we’ve lost, before we look to the future and the new
things that are coming.
Losing and lostness loom
large in today’s Gospel reading - so that was one thing I knew I wouldn’t need
to change today. Jesus tells stories about a lost sheep and a lost coin, and
how those who lost them felt. The word “bereavement” literally means to have
something torn away – riven – from us. When someone precious to us dies, we soon
realise that a piece of the landscape of our lives is missing. We notice the
empty chair, the silence where there should be a voice, the shoes that still
hold the shape of the feet that once wore them.
We lose people in the present
and future when they die, but we can also find we’ve lost their past too. We
realise there are questions we never asked, and that we’ll never know the
answers to now, knowledge that’s vanished with them. And though time may soften
the sharp edges of grief, the gap can never be filled.
When someone dies, it’s often
not just them who we feel we’ve lost either; there can also be a sense that
we’ve lost ourselves too, at least for a while. We lose our role in their
lives, our identity in relation to them, the things we used to do for them and
with them. They don’t need our help anymore. In the case of the Queen’s death
there is a sense of a whole era slipping away, out of our grasp. We don’t even
quite know what to call ourselves. A week ago we were Elizabethans, but who are
we now? The jury seems to be out on whether we are Carolines, Caroleans,
Carolingians… Time will tell, though I do how we won’t just be Charlies…
“You don’t know what
you’ve got till it’s gone” they say,
and it’s true. Often we only realise how much something matters to us when
we’ve lost it.
As I said earlier, lostness
is fundamental to the parables Jesus tells too; a lost sheep, a lost coin. But
it is only the starting point of those stories. It’s what happens next which
really matters in them, as the shepherd tirelessly searches for and finds the
sheep, and the woman turns her house upside down until she discovers where that
lost coin has rolled away to, and both of them celebrate joyfully because of
it.
Why do they search so
diligently? It’s because the sheep and the coin are of such great value to them
that they know they can’t afford to write them off. We don’t search like that
for things which don’t matter to us or are easily replaced. I have lots of
pairs of cheap reading glasses, because I know I will never be able to remember
where I left them, so I just have to trust that one or another pair will come
to hand when I need them. But that one sheep matters to the shepherd. It’s
unique. He’s even prepared to leave the others in the wilderness so he can go
after it. And the coin the woman lost was probably part of her dowry, the money
she brought into her marriage, which was the only thing, in Jewish law, that
she owned independently, and was often a safety net to be kept in case her
husband died or abandoned her.
“Which one of you wouldn’t
do the same for something that really mattered to you?” asks Jesus. The context of the story is that he is
being attacked by the Pharisees, religious experts who considered themselves to
be the in-group, the favoured ones. They disapprove of the time and energy he’s
giving to tax-collectors and sinners, marginalised people who were often written
off, or simply not noticed.
Jesus’ reminds his critics what
it feels like to love and treasure something or someone. “Think of something
or someone you would go to the ends of the earth to find,” he’s saying “That’s
how God feels about these people you despise, because that’s how God feels
about everyone. They are of infinite value to him, just as you are.”
Ours is a God, says Jesus, to
whom nothing and no one is lost. Ours is a God who holds together everything in
heaven and on earth, saints and sinners, monarchs and commoners, the past, the
present and the future, the things we knew were important and the things we
didn’t give a second thought to until they were taken away from us. Ours is a
God who will go to the ends of the earth to rescue us, whoever we are, who will
“feed his flock like a shepherd, gather the lambs in his arms, and gently
lead the mother sheep” who will recognise our need, come to us where we are
and lead us home.
As we say goodbye to a
much-loved monarch, letting her go into the arms of the God she served, and who
inspired her service to us over her 70 year reign, we recognise that we are
also saying goodbye to a whole era. We may be painfully aware of what we have
lost. We may feel lost ourselves sometimes. But we are not lost to God, any
more than our late Queen is. The God who found her and held her throughout her
reign, and now holds her in the life and joy of heaven, also finds and holds
us, wherever we are, and wherever we wander, and that is the comfort we really
need. Amen
