“Give me that old time religion”
This is a translation of the homily for the Fifth Sunday of Trinity (year III), in the churches of Hatlestrand and Husnes, Norway, Sunday 13th July, 2025. The readings are as follows: Jeremiah 6:16-19; Galatians 1:6-9; and Matthew 18:12-18. Unless otherwise noted, when quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE), corrected to British spelling.
Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):
Let us Pray:
Let us Pray: God, you sent the prophets to testify and proclaim your will. We pray: Let the Church be the voice of truth in the world. Protect us from false voices and seductive words, so that we can stand firm in the faith in your grace, through your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.
Today we have come to one of the more famous parables of Jesus, concerning the lost sheep. This is a parable that we may remember from Sunday school. At least I remember it from there and from various Christian children’s books. It is a story about a man who loves his sheep. “And if he finds it [the lost sheep],” says Jesus, “truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.” The parable of the lost sheep is perhaps the children’s version, the one we know from Sunday school, from children’s books, from family worship. But in today’s Gospel we also get the “grown up version.” Where the parable can be read from a distance, the rest is more confronting, perhaps a little uncomfortable. Because it refers to real life.
Jesus says that we should hold our Christian brothers and sisters accountable when they sin. Of course, that also means the other way around. We must also be prepared to be held accountable for what we have done. Perhaps it is more difficult, and to point out something else Jesus has told us, we must first remove the beam from our own eye. But here Jesus gives us a kind of recipe for how we should behave when we confront others. We should first take it up with them, then with a few others, and then to the congregation. So not like we usually do it now, when we go straight to social media to “expose” or even “cancel.” Because what if we are wrong? We also see that Jesus here is critical of the individualism of our time. Because when we sin, it is not just a private matter. We belong together and everything we do has an impact on those around us. The hundred sheep belong together in one flock and we belong together in one church.
If a Christian brother or sister strays, we must do what we can to bring him or her back into the fellowship. But it is not pleasant. Perhaps we will lose friends, perhaps we will become unpopular. Perhaps we will think the same thing when we are confronted with our own mistakes, our own sins. Therefore, we must always do this with love.
We must be like the good shepherd who goes out to find the sheep. Maybe he does not find it, maybe the sheep runs away. But he still goes out to search. But, and there is an important but: we cannot force anyone. As the Danish theologian and hymn writer Grundtvig said in one of his hymns: “Coercion to faith is the speech of fools.”1 The shepherd is an image of God, Jesus tells us. “And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
We also see this elsewhere in the New Testament. Take John 10:11-15, where Jesus says that he is the good shepherd:
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.
Jesus has done everything He could for us. He went straight to death for us. But he does not force us. We might imagine that God, who is all-powerful, could just command that the sheep should return. He could just force him. And if we follow a strict Reformed or Calvinist teaching, the answer is yes. God has chosen those He wants to be saved and the rest to be lost. But we do not find this in the Bible. There we read, in 1 Timothy 2:4, that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And in 1 John 2:2 we read about Jesus that “he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Salvation is therefore something that God wants to give to everyone.
But why does anyone get lost, then? Well, that is a mystery, but it is because God does not force anyone, and He gives us the opportunity to say no. The parable of the lost sheep is not a parable about all lost sheep returning. It is an open question. “And if he finds it,” says Jesus. “If he finds it.” Maybe he will not find it. Maybe the sheep refuses to come back with him. Of course, all images will fall apart at one time or another. We are probably smarter than sheep and therefore we can say no. And we can do that because God does not force us. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, but He is not the compulsion. He wants everyone to be saved, but He is not a tyrant. He is love. We must always remind each other of this. We must encourage each other and always remind each other of the gospel, of the love that has been given to us in Jesus. Nothing but ourselves can separate us from this, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:38-39
For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We have much to thank Jesus for, He who is the good and faithful shepherd who seeks out all those who have gone astray. But He is the good shepherd, not the tyrannical shepherd. He forces no one, and when He finds and wins back His own, then we will be allowed to rejoice with Him, as we heard from today’s gospel. He is the source of our love, our joy, our song. In Him, we find all good, and from that we can pass on to others.
And that is what this Sunday is really about, passing this on, preaching the gospel, testifying to the truth in Jesus. In the second reading, from the prophet Jeremiah, it says:
Thus says the LORD: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”
So it is about “that old time religion.” It was good enough for the disciples, and it is good enough for me. And the ancient paths lead us to the perfect, the real, the eternal, not the imperfect, the fallen and the transient. But often we would rather focus there. We probably will not always admit that we are lost sheep who need help. But we need it, and we get it in Christ, even if we lose some of the glory, power, and wealth here in this world. But that is like dust to be counted in comparison with what we receive in Christ, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer man is wasting away, our inner man is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” The central thing is therefore God, our eternally unseen Lord, whom we find when we ask for the ancient path, for the path to goodness and when we walk on it, so that we find rest for our souls.
The one necessary thing is the One necessary, God, our Creator, Lord and Saviour. The unseen is not something abstract or vague, it is that what lies behind everything, it is God. Our calling is to share in the fullness of God. If we all the money, power, and glory of the world, but lack the humility to realise that we are sinners in need of salvation, we lose everything. Because all this is just a shadow. We share in something much greater, in the wealth of Jesus, in the gospel. And that is what it is all about, as St. Paul says today. We must preach the one gospel. He writes about people turning away from Christ’s grace, and to another gospel. So we must point to the one true gospel: that Jesus gave Himself for us and that He will give us a share in His salvation, completely free, by grace, and that He shows us a way away from the transitory to the eternal, to Himself, He who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” The gospel is therefore Christ Himself, and what He has done.
In today’s collect, which I prayed just before the readings, we ask God:
Let the Church be the voice of truth in the world. Protect us from false voices and seductive words, so that we can stand firm in the faith in your grace, through your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one true God, world without end.
This means that we must always tell the truth, that we must endure to be honest, not only with each other, but just as much with ourselves. We must tell the truth about our sins, both the bad things we have done and the good things we have failed to do. We must tell the truth about how serious it is, what sin can do to us. To use biblical language, we must preach the law, so that we are convinced of sin. But it can never stop there. That would be abuse. No, when we have preached the law, we must preach the gospel. We must preach how gracious Christ is. And that is precisely what this Sunday is about, that we should preach the one gospel, that there is grace, there is salvation, but it is found only in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, who took upon Himself our sins to atone for them, so that we could be reconciled to God. He is the good shepherd who goes out and seeks the sheep. But He does not force anyone. The gospel is that the eternal, unchanging, and actually incomprehensible God became man for you, for me, for all of us, so that He could make amends for us. And by what He has done, man is reconciled to God. And we can receive this by faith, through the means of grace that Jesus has given us, the word and the sacraments. And here we see something interesting. Yes, we have a calling to seek what is perfect, real, and eternal, but paradoxically we do not do this by leaving here. No, we do it by Christ using us to bless this world, in all its materiality, so that it can become a channel for God’s grace and be perfected in Him. As St. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 4:4-5: “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for then it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”
The foremost expression of this is Christ himself, who is true God and true man. As it says in John 1:1-3.14:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father.
In Christ, the created and the uncreated are united completely and wholly. God became flesh, God became man. And He has given us gifts that we can sense and perceive, so that we can reach Him. But it is always with our eyes fixed on Him. The created is blessed because it shares in God, when “it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.” It is not about the seen being prioritised, but that it is transformed into a channel for the eternal and unseen, for divine grace and love. We can see this in the collect for the day in the Church of England, where we ask God that we must always seek him, seek the eternal, through the creation that bears witness to him:
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that with you as our ruler and guide we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not our hold on things eternal; grant this, heavenly Father, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.2
Here we see that we can come to God through the seen, for God is not in competition with creation, but meets us through it, through creation and especially through the word and the sacraments. But the seen must always be understood as subject to the unseen and eternal, subject to God. As it says in 1 Timothy 6:16, God is te One “who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.” But He nevertheless meets us through the seen, as long as we understand that He has priority. And then creation suddenly becomes a portal to God. In the celebration of the Eucharist, God is there, Christ is there, with all of Himself, with His divinity and His humanity, for He is all of this, always. And He is there, as He has promised, for our salvation, for our life. So when we celebrate the Eucharist, come forward and receive. The sacrament is neither our work nor a reward for piety, but the gift of Christ. It is salvation bestowed upon us under the species of bread and wine, in something we can sense, in something seen. But beneath the seen, Christ is truly present with His promises of forgiveness of sins, life, and blessedness. So we do not need to ponder, wonder, or stress. For the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, has promised us that there, in the Eucharistic elements, we will share in His salvation, on His promise. In Him we, like lost sheep, can find our way back to the flock. That is the gospel, that is good news. So just receive!
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
Original: “Tvang til tro er dårers tale.”
Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House, 2000), 410, cf. p.482; The Book of Common Prayer, standard ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162.