It’s good to be back from vacation. I had a great couple weeks of getting outside in the Sierra mountains, visiting friends, hanging out with my husband, and a lot of park time with the three dogs, watching them play.

But vacation for me can also be kind of hard, at least at the beginning. It takes a while for my nervous system to calm down enough to feel like it’s vacation. Has that ever happened to you?

You get out on the road, or you power down your computer from your last email, your down time has begun and yet you still feel like a bundle of nerves for a while? It’s like being a party and you’re just not in that same head space, even though you’re physically there.

Maybe for you, it’s not my weird vacation issue, but it’s grieving or dealing with big issues when others around you aren’t. There may be many reasons we may have a hard time joining in with the good times going on around us. I wonder if that’s what’s going on for the Pharisees today in our text.

The Pharisees are religious leaders and the center of society. So, as Jesus is teaching them, he’s saying, “You guys are the 99. You are fine, so get over yourselves already, and take care of those who are on the margins of society.” Get over your rules. Get over your self-importance. Get over your need for things to be done right and get busy loving people. Go find the lost ones and bring them back into community, even if it means breaking the rules.

This is an important way to read this scripture for ourselves. Indeed, we can pretty easily see ourselves as the grumbly Pharisees in this story, right? Jesus is telling us to get over our rules and love others more!

However, I’m wondering about the Pharisees and wondering why they are such party poopers. And if they are the party poopers, they are the ones not participating in Jesus’ party. So, does that make them the lost sheep, too?

What if we read this as if Jesus and his rejected friends (the tax collectors, the poor, the sick) are actually the 99? What if they are the “in crowd?” After all, they are the ones having a great time with Jesus while the Pharisees are the grumbly ones who don’t know how to join in or are so lost that they don’t know they should want to join in. What can we learn from this text if we read as if they are indeed the lost ones, the ones who don’t know how to join Jesus’ party.

When I worked at Note-Able Music Therapy Services, we did a lot of community events and performances featuring the talents of adults and children with disabilities, neurological disorders, and other diagnoses. I cannot tell you how many times people would come to see the band, listen to their awesome musicianship, and be overcome by tears that they may not even understand. Or they watched some of the other participants perform who weren’t “good” in a technical sense, but were on fire with the love of their dance or their song.

These moments would often melt people. In that melting, the audience could enter into community with people with disabilities; into their joy, love, and community – not the other way around.

We may think that we’re always the ones to go out and find the lost sheep or the lost coin. And indeed we need to do that, particularly as mostly relatively comfortable folks. There are a lot of people who need the care, love, and advocacy we have to give. But maybe we are also lost. Are we not sometimes just like the grumbly Pharisees? Don’t our hearts and ideas of correct-ness need to soften and melt so that we can join Jesus’ party?

There are people who may already be enjoying God’s party in ways we don’t expect or see, until we have eyes to see. After all, haven’t well all heard many stories of people volunteering at shelters or wherever who say they were the ones served, instead of the other way around? So, again, who is lost in Jesus’ parable?

From a justice point of view, the lost ones are those who are marginalized socially and economically. In our gospel, the Pharisees are the religious leaders. They are in the center of this society, so from a justice point of view, they are not the lost ones. Jesus is telling them to break societal rules so that those who are excluded and impoverished can thrive. However, from a love and joy point of view, maybe it is the Pharisees who are lost. Perhaps Jesus is also reaching out to find them. He’s inviting them into the party, into community with those who are marginalized.

That’s Jesus’ party, the one that includes everyone and the one that transforms the lives and hearts of everyone, including the grumbly ones.

At Note-Ables’ event, it was palpable and surprising to people how healing it was for them to simply meet people with disabilities, see them in a new way and celebrate them. They felt a softening of rules and norms inside of them. I felt that in me. It’s healing. In this way, we are both the 99 and the 1 at the same time.

I was at a fundraising event for Note-Ables when I was in Reno. They always include a sing-a-long or some participation in music with every event. Now, as Lutherans, we sing all the time and this wouldn’t be weird. But in our secular world, people don’t really sing. One of the big donors for this project told the person he was sitting with he going to sing-a-long. “No one needs to hear that,” he said. Then the band, formed of all adults with disabilities, began to sing It’s a Wonderful World. The music started, it was in an easy key, he had the lyrics in his hand, and within a few beats, this man was singing along. He wanted to join that party and I would say that a small part of him became more whole in that moment.

We all have wounds around art, creativity, or self-expression, probably in part from some teacher or parent who insisted we color inside the lines, not be so loud, or whatever. We gather so many wounds from life, little ones and big ones. Maybe these are also like the lost sheep, lost inside of us.

These lost sheep may be part of what keep us from joining fully into Jesus’ party in the world, the wounds that keep us so attached to rules and control. They are the lost sheep in us that cry, ‘What about me?’, even at moments when we are called to care for others. And yet when we open up, like Jesus was inviting the Pharisees to do, these wounds in us, these lost sheep are found one by one by God the shepherd, by God the determined woman looking for her coin. And the in that moment of healing and reconciliation, “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God.”

This is God’s promise for you. This promise is for you and all your lost sheep in you.

The promise is for you to be ever more deeply in the flow of Jesus’ party for you and all people. On our own, we can’t hustle our way into the flow of love and service to all. And there’s a danger we may think we’re too screwed up and grumbly to be good for anyone. We may think we need to just keep our grumbly selves to ourselves. Thankfully, our God is more generous than that. When we show up and open up as we are, God will be there to flow. As we open more to God, more to love and each other, the lost sheep of our scars and wounds will be healed by God. Bit by bit, we enter that glorious party more and more for the sake of ourselves, and for the sake of the ones we grow in our capacity to love and celebrate. God’s promise is that we will get less grumbly and be more in the flow Jesus’ party with love for all.

Friar Richard Rohr wrote this week in his daily emails something along these lines. He wrote:

“What evolves in us [in our relationship with God] is less and less control. More and more we sense that Someone Else is for us, more than we are for ourselves. We realize that this is a radically benevolent universe, and it is on our side despite the absurdity, sin, pain, and dead ends. It will be more like letting go than taking on.”

Thank God that God is more for us than our grumbly selves can be. Our grumbly selves want rules and control. If you’re like me, you want jobs to do and tasks to mark off. Jesus tells us, “No. That’s not how you join the party. You join the party by being found, picked up, and wildly celebrated.” Sometimes we have a hard time with that, just like I have a hard time getting into vacation mode.

Having faith and trust in Jesus may mean taking these parables seriously, that God is searching for the lost sheep and finding them. The lost sheep that is you, the lost sheep that is in you, so that you may in turn love and care for the lost sheep around you.

AMEN