"Sit…Stay," the senior sermon of Jim Popham, Class of 2005, from the Diocese of Louisiana, delivered February 15, 2005, in Christ Chapel.

To paraphrase those poignant words on the sign in our veterinarian's office: Sit…stay…the preacher will be with you in a moment.

Matthew's Gospel today includes that ever familiar story of the lost sheep …Jesus leaves the 99, searches out the one lost sheep and rejoices mightily. This story I might suggest has profound implications for humankind's relationship with God … and just as profound a challenge to those of who stand on the precipice looking out on the panorama of ordained ministry.

I asked Lambchop to join me today, not only because of his very particular identification with this story in Matthew's gospel, but also because I am impressed with his credibility as a spokeslamb …. Especially for children, among the little ones Matthew alludes to. Some years ago, when she was responsible for assuring the compliance of the CBS owned and operated stations with the Federal Communications Commission's rules governing children's television, my wife, Jo, saw Lambchop testify before a Congressional hearing. Although my job at the time was to oppose adoption of any such regulations, representing as I did the interests of television stations not affiliated with CBS. NBC, and ABC, I regret to say that I missed that stellar moment in the annals of government when a puppet testified before a house subcommittee. My last iota of faith in the federal government was hanging perilously like a chad in Florida. Perhaps, then, I began to think I was in the wrong line of work.

But, I hardly can gainsay Lambchop's credibility. After he testified, pressure from congress on the FCC led to adoption of rules that for the first time required local commercial television stations to broadcast a minimum of three hours of educational children's programming each week. And, to be sure, some stations at that time were broadcasting little or no educational children's programming. But many stations, conscious of their legal obligation to operate in the public interest -- the regulatory equivalent of love your neighbor as yourself -- upon which hangs all the FCC's rules and regulations, were broadcasting four, five, or six hours of educational programming for children per week, and some of it was very high quality locally-produced and locally-oriented programming.

Well, what happened after the three hour rule was adopted? The few stations broadcasting less than three hours of programming -- and many of the stations that been broadcasting more than three hours of educational programming per week, started broadcasting three hours of children's programming per week, all of it provided from New York or Hollywood by their networks. The minimum became the maximum! And national uniformity soon replaced local diversity and variety.

Had the FCC only read scripture and come to understand what God already knew… the Law, however, lofty and well-intended it may be, will not bring about the kingdom of God on earth. After all, consider all the things God had tried to get the world's attention and keep it in line. God offered unending life in the Garden of Eden, apparently not good enough, and, failing that, total destruction of world (save Noah and company). Then came the Law, wise kings, pesky prophets, and even conquering armies. God's always reaching out to Israel, calling out, "Here am I," ready to accept repentance and renew God's covenant with Israel.

This notion of God awaiting humanity's reaching out to God is vividly portrayed in the motion picture version of Chaim Potok's The Chosen. The father, also a rabbi, portrayed by Rod Steiger -- closely resembling the winner of the Walter Brueggemann look-alike contest -- has not spoken to his son -- ever. Finally, as a teenager, coming up step-by-step from the foot of the stairs, the son confronts his father, begs a word from him, and asks him why he as offered him only silence. And his father, the rabbi, looming over him at the top of the stairs, comes down the steps to meet and embrace his son -- telling him "this is so you would understand our relationship with God: You must come as far as you can, then, then, God will come down to meet you where you are." It is a powerful cinematic moment.

But Matthew -- in an even more powerful and profound scriptural moment -- turns that theology on its head … in a little story about a meandering lamb and a capricious shepherd. God is not waiting for us to any more. God has come after us. God in Jesus Christ has walked among us, dined with us, taught us, healed us, suffered with us and for us -- all to save us, to extend God's loving hand to us, no matter how far we wander. We are saved not by our reaching out to God, but by God's reaching out to us. Martin Luther, honor is due. Sola gratia. "By grace alone." And not a grace that God imparts to us, that empowers us, at our initiative, to live acceptably as God would have us live … but a grace that exists in God's initiative, God's turning to us and accepting us -- however unacceptable we may be. However little, however lost -- God is coming after us, just as we are. What hope God offers us.

What an enormous challenge this poses to each of us. Consider who we are in this story of straying sheep: The lost sheep? one of the 99 that did not stray? the shepherd? Jesus? None of the above? In Matthew's story, we are none of these. We are the hearers of the story, because this is a story Jesus told to his disciples, to his motley crew, which we aspire to join. And our charge will be that of his apostles, to preach this great message of hope, always mindful that it is the little ones and lost sheep whose blips must glow with beckoning radiance at the center of our radar screens.

How are we to convey to a world largely devoid of hope, this great message of hope? To the little ones, the "have nots" for whom hope is inconceivable. . . and to the lost, the "haves," for whom hope seems unnecessary.

Let me make the daring suggestion that when we do get around to it, we know reasonably well how to preach the Gospel of hope to the little ones, the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, the jobless, the thirsty, the hungry. Preaching the gospel as St. Francis would have us preach it, not so much with words, but with what we do: Warm clothes, warm beds, warm smiles, and warm conversation. Hot meals and hot tips for jobs. We do provide these "little ones" at least a germ of hope. But we often sense how inadequate this is. Are we not just alleviating symptoms, while the underlying disease persists?

The greater challenge, I would submit, is preaching to the lost, to those so enraptured by their material wealth and/or their worldly power that they can fathom no need for any Godly hope. Yet, these are the people with the ability, the power, the wealth to do "large" things to offer hope to the hopeless. And what a blessing it would be to enlist their skills and talents and financial resources and political clout to the work of establishing God's kingdom on earth. They might even contribute to the church! But whatever they might or might not do, they are still among the lost sheep that we are called to summon -- even to carry back -- to Christ's fold.

How many of us saw news clips of President Bush leaving church on the morning of his inauguration? He was leaving the so-called church of the presidents, St. John's Episcopal Church, at the corner of 16th and H Streets, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Next door to the world headquarters of the AFL-CIO and across the street from the luxurious Hay-Adams hotel and the offices of the Motion Picture Association of America -- this sermon rated "L" for long. One of the quaint touches at St. John's is kneelers embroidered with the names of each of the 43 presidents. I recall them as being uniformly maroon…but wonder now if there are some red and some blue. Look, I'm kneeling on Abraham Lincoln…O my God! He was a Republican!

But we also recall the homeless, huddled together against the cold on the steps of St. John's each night, and the 5 p.m. Spanish-language service, offered to the large crews of Hispanic immigrants who came to town each evening to clean the office buildings of rich and powerful. And there was Luis Leon, rector of St. John's, chatting casually with the president after morning eucharist, and before giving the invocation at the inauguration.

What might this well-respected rector have been saying to this Christian president, who led our Christian nation, to invade a Muslim country? What would we have said? To the president of the United States, to the president of Halliburton, or General Dynamics, or General Motors, or General Electric? Or to a prominent member of Congress, an Episcopalian, like Jim Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who recently introduced an immigration bill that Episcopal Migration Ministries and a broad interfaith alliance opposed because it would "erode a sacred … responsibility to give safety to those whose only protection comes from asylum in this country."

Few of us will find presidents or senators or members of Congress in our churches, but all of us will confront at some point the rich and powerful whose need for hope has all but completely atrophied. We all know well the Gospel we are called to preach. But how do we establish relationships of mutual trust with those whose contentment with wealth and power fully obscures not only their need for hope, but also compromises their ability to see the hopelessness of others? It might be easy to get in the face of the rich and powerful, but how do we get into their minds, and hearts, and souls?

It is appropriate to approach wealth and power with a hermeneutic of suspicion. But we make a great mistake when we slide down that slippery slope of suspicion and demonize the rich and powerful simply because they are rich and powerful and, therefore, somehow hopelessly malevolent. In 30 years of day-to-day contact with legislators and regulators, I never met anyone who I thought was truly malevolent, even the only professed atheist in Congress at the time. Arrogant, ignorant, misguided. misinformed, caught up in the scheme of legalized bribery we call campaign finance law, certainly, and some were not rocket scientists. Though I do recall one who was, a Republican elected consistently -- until a few years ago -- from a blue collar, heavily Democratic district. No doubt that took brains. Indeed, he functioned at such a cerebral level that I often wondered if he could tie his own shoes. But malevolent, evil. No, no way. If we succumb to that level of cynicism, we mock the hope we are called to proclaim.

Leviticus says that we should not defer to the rich and powerful. Matthew today tells us not to defer, but to confer with them. If they are rich and powerful persons, they are first human beings -- just like us. Let me offer an indelicate example in as genteel a fashion as I can muster. On our last visit to Washington, we had lunch with some former colleagues at an apparently trendy restaurant in Georgetown. A former congressman and cabinet secretary and now governor of an enchanting state immediately to our west was at a nearby table. It was Saturday. He was in jeans. Low ride jeans, if you know what I mean. Now that is human on the scale of Homer Simpson -- and you cannot get much more human than that. The rich and powerful may be lost sheep, but they first are sheep, just like us, having much more in common with us than their wealth or power can disguise. We must not overlook this common bond of humanity; it offers a universal foundation for constructing a trusting relationship.

We will all answer this challenge of preaching and reaching out in relationship to the lost in different ways, according to the gifts God has given us and the constant work of the spirit in our day-to-day ministries. And on those days when our efforts to reach out to the lost are confounded or our preaching of this Gospel of incredible hope seems to fall on ears so attuned to worldly values that our words and actions seem futile and wasted, we may face the challenge of losing hope ourselves. And we will have to recall that hope springs not from anything we do, but from the love of a God so incredibly constant that no one can become so little or so lost as to escape God's loving pursuit. So in those moments when doubt eclipses our sense of hope, let us call upon the words we started with: Sit, stay, your loving shepherd, Jesus Christ, will find you in a moment.