Dear Parish Family,

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is taken from the 15^th Chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, which has three stories of Lost and Found, The Lost Sheep, The Lost Coin and The Lost Son. Everyone will have some experience of being lost or feeling lost. In every one of these experiences there are common elements of feeling alone, helpless, fear and in some cases losing hope in the future. Some of these situations have been caused by our personal choices that inadvertently turned out to have negative consequences.

Acknowledging our imperfections, allowing ourselves to feel the damage that results from our poor decisions can lead to two positive results.  We can have a clearer understanding of God’s love and we can treat others with more compassion. It takes a sinner to understand the love of God.  Those who are blind to their imperfections or ignore the weight of their sins completely misread God’s love.   They assume that God is loving them because they are good.  They do not understand that God’s love does not result from what they do. God loves them because God is love and God chooses to love.  It takes a sinner to understand the truth of the parables in today’s gospel, to understand why the shepherd goes out to seek the lost sheep, why the woman carefully cleans her house to find the coin and the father runs to welcome his wayward son.  It is a free decision to seek what is lost, a choice to love without any regard for the merit of that which must be found, a decision to act which is independent of a person’s virtues or vices.  Those who acknowledge their own sinfulness are those who understand the depth and the freedom of God’s love at once.

So owning our imperfections gives us a new orientation towards our neighbor.  It allows us to see others with compassion.  When we know that we are not perfect, we have greater patience with others who are also weak.  When we realize our own flaws, we have greater understanding towards all the other flawed individuals around us.  Those who are always criticizing and judging others are those who are blind to their own sins, those who do not appreciate the damage that their poor decisions have caused. Every priest in their training to be qualified to hear confessions is made to understand that they are ‘broken healers’ in the hands of a compassionate Father. It surprises some people that returning to confession after many years, they ‘get away’ with a small penance and a lot of encouragement, while they were expecting some reprimands and hard to carry out reparations. 
We are called to admit our sinfulness, to own it, and to realize the damage we have done, so that we might for the first time really understand why God loves us, so that we can with compassion deal with all the other sinners around us. God does not want us to be sinners.  But that is what we are.  So there is nothing wrong in claiming the truth.  We do so not so that we can become depressed and dejected, but rather so that we can love God and neighbor in a deeper, truer way.