The Hound of Heaven

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 16, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells Reading for address: Luke 15: 1-10 I once knew a young woman who told me “I get so angry with the Bible!” When I asked why, she said that her husband, who was new to Christianity, often had friends round for an evening, and one or two of them would like to pick up a Bible and open it randomly and read out an obscure passage and just laugh at how strange it sounded. For those of us who’ve been led to believe that the Bible is a good common sense guide for living, the young woman’s anger is understandable. Many of us have been led to believe, like her, that the Bible is fundamentally about us, and so of course it should speak to us straightforwardly in language we can understand. But the truth is the Bible is not fundamentally about us. The Bible is fundamentally about God. And our efforts to translate the truth about God into more or less useful guides for living are never anything other than provisional, and certainly never as tidy as we would like. Take our reading from the gospel of Luke. Jesus is surrounded by tax collectors and sinners, in other words people whose style of life made them ritually unclean and morally reprehensible. The one thing Israel was called to be above all was holy – remembering the words of Leviticus, “Be holy, for I am holy.” This was the aim of the Pharisees – to make sure, in the minutest particulars, that all the people of Israel were holy. There was no way in the world that the tax collectors and sinners could be holy, so the Pharisees and the scribes said, if this Jesus were truly of God, truly holy, he’d be keeping well away from them. And then Jesus tells these two stories. If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one goes missing, surely he would leave the ninety-nine and go after the one that was lost; and then, having found the lost sheep, he would lay the animal on his shoulders and rejoice; and on returning home he would have a great party with his friends and neighbours. Likewise if a woman has ten silver coins, and one goes missing, surely she would search her house without pause until she found it; and on discovering the coin, she would have a great party with her friends and neighbours. Now when we read these stories, tuned in as we are to assuming the Bible is saying something about us, we may think to ourselves, “Well, there sure are some pretty bad people out there. Some of them have made a hefty profit out of sin, like the tax collectors, and others have doubtless hurt themselves as much as anyone else and just ended up making a mess of their lives, like the people Luke calls sinners. But I guess we should be generous and broad-minded and care about those whom others might look down on. We should be shepherds who search out the lost, we should be careful householders who treasure each and every coin.” And so we become people who do good. One Irish writer describes such a woman in these words: “She had spent her life doing good to others. You could tell the others by their hunted look.” In short we become patrons – people who, out of our generosity, deign to give a hand up to a person in need. But becoming patrons is not what these parables are about. These stories are not fundamentally about us. These stories are fundamentally about God. The Pharisees realized this, better than we do. They would have been deeply insulted to think Jesus would have compared them to a lowly shepherd, and, uncomfortable as it is to admit, they wouldn’t have dreamt of being compared to a woman. Jesus isn’t just calling the Pharisees to be a bit more generous – he is calling them to repentance, a complete reversal of their way of seeing and being in the world. The point of these two parables is not for us to identify with the shepherd and the woman. We are not the shepherd: we are the lost sheep. We are not the woman: we are the lost coin. God is the shepherd; God is the searching woman. God is the one who takes the astonishing risk of leaving the ninety-nine sheep and coming to look for us, a journey of danger, daring, and devotion, a journey we could call passion. God is the one who carefully, thoughtfully seeks us out like a woman meticulously and methodically tracking down a lost coin. What Jesus is saying is, whoever you are, Pharasaic lawmaker or sinful lawbreaker, this is not a story about you. It’s a story about God. And the way to allow yourself to become part of the story is to stop running away, to stop hiding from the one who yearns and searches for you. Few people have understood these parables better than Francis Thompson. Francis Thompson was born into a well-to-do Catholic family in Manchester, England, in 1859. He was sent to a boarding school to prepare him for the priesthood. When it became clear his vocation lay elsewhere he was sent to train, like his father, as a physician. But his studies made him miserable, and, after the death of his mother, he started to take opium. He came to London at the age of 26, and fell into a low life on the streets, facing hunger, disease, and drug addiction. Two years later he was on the verge of suicide, when he was befriended by a prostitute, who took him in, cared for him through the winter, and encouraged him to write poetry. Two astonishing events followed. First, the literary editor Wilfred Meynell published one of Thompson’s poems and began a close friendship that was to endure for the rest of Thompson’s life. And second, the prostitute, who name is not known, recognized that Thompson had found a hitherto unknown peace among his new friends, and disappeared from his life. Her last words to him were, “They will not understand our friendship.” There is no other word in the Christian vocabulary for the publication of that poem but providence, and there are no other words in the theological lexicon for the ministry of that prostitute but Holy Spirit. One hundred years ago, shortly before his death, Thompson wrote a poem in which he recognized that all his life he had been running away, and fundamentally the one he had been running away from was not his own father but God. His own life was secondary to the fundamental narrative, which was God’s relentless pursuit of him. The celebrated poem is called The Hound of Heaven . It begins, “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him.” In the poem Thompson explains why he was fleeing: he admits, “though I knew his love who followèd, Yet was I sore adread Lest, having him, I must have naught beside.” Yet the hound of heaven pursued him with all “deliberate speed”. (You might recognize the phrase “all deliberate speed,” for it is re-minted in the second Brown v Board Supreme Court judgement on school desegregation in 1955.) In the end the reader of the poem is less fascinated by the reasons and emotions of the one running away, and instead captivated by the persistence, the relentless pursuit and most of all the passion of the hound of heaven, the love that will not let Thompson go. The hound of heaven is one and the same with the woman searching for a the lost coin and the shepherd searching for the stray sheep: each one is God in Christ who searches us out and knows us, who comes to us in any form we can receive him, even astonishingly, as for Thompson, in the form of a prostitute, simply because he is the love that will not let us go. In a few moments we are going to ask God’s blessing on our new Nazareth members. As I hinted earlier, if we see today’s parables as all about us – if we see ourselves as the shepherd and the woman – then we could suppose Nazareth is about searching for God. But we are a people who are learning to read these parables, and much else in the Bible and in life, in a different way. We are not the searchers in these parables: we are the found. God is not the goal of our seeking: God is the hound that tracks us down however hard and fast we’re determined to run away. And if we’ve discovered the joy of being found, how much we long to share that joy with others who’ve made a similar discovery, who know like us how profoundly they’ve tried to flee. These new friendships are not ones in which we do the seeking or the finding, but ones in which we experience the joy of being found. Here are we, thinking our heartsearchings of faith, our journey, ourselves are what the story is all about. But, brothers and sisters, hear the good news. The story is all about God. God is the hound of heaven who searches us out and knows us, God in Christ is the good shepherd who leaves the 99 to come and find us, God in Christ is the woman who cared so much that she set everything aside to find us, her oh-so precious lost coin. Faith is not a heroic journey: faith is the acceptance of being found. Francis Thompson tried to be a priest, and tried to be a physician, and ended up as a vagrant. All of these turned out to be different forms of running away from God. Only when he was able to receive real friendship did he stop running away. When we induct our Nazareth Community members in a few moments’ time, we’re commissioning them to find out who the God that is searching for them really is, and to stop running away. And we pray that here they will make new friends, friends who have discovered, like them, that we are not the hound of heaven. The hound of heaven is God.