8 “Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won’t light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? 9 When she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost coin.’ 10 In the same way, I tell you, joy breaks out in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who changes both heart and life.” (CEB)
“Loss, Mercy, and Redemption: The Luke
15 Parables:” Week Two
It
sounds crazy. Like something that could
only be cooked up in today’s era of internet sensations and Youtube. And it kind of is. But it’s also fantastic: one man and his
camera traveling around the entire world just so that he could dance with all
kinds of people in all kinds of places.
And for perhaps his greatest exploit on this worldwide project of
choreography, I could do no better than to set the scene for this story by
quoting the man himself, Matt Harding:
At some point during the last ice age,
the Kjeragbolten rock became wedged between the two faces of a chasm some one
thousand meters above the water in the fjords of Norway. There is nothing man-made holding it in
place. It just got stuck. Several millennia later, I was emailed a
photo of the place. I knew I had to
dance there…
There is no net under the
Kjeragbolten. There is a considerable
amount of wind channeled into the chasm.
And it was snowing, so the Kjeragbolten’s curved surface was wet and
slippery. I’d been traveling for six
months by that point. I was only a few
days from flying home. The project had
taken on great meaning to me. I believed
the universe, or some unspecified entity sitting at its controls, wanted the
video to happen, and was keeping an eye on me at least until I got the job
done.
I believed the universe wanted me out
there on that rock…Dancing on the Kjeragbolten is the most dangerous thing I’ve
ever done…But if I hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t be the same video, and I wouldn’t
quite be the same person.
And
so say we all. After the most harrowing
thing we have experienced, we would not, we could not, possibly be the same person
afterwards. There are moments that are
truly life-altering precisely because that livelihood hangs in the balance,
like a rock with nothing underneath it.
With
Lent as a new season in the church’s worship calendar, you may notice a few
things different—we hang purple, we draw the curtains on our baptistry’s
portrait of Jesus, and, naturally, we begin another sermon series. This sermon series takes us through the 40
days of Lent to Holy Week—the week of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good
Friday, and Easter Sunday that is the most important time in the Christian
calendar (yes, I dare say, more important than Christmas!). And Lent traditionally is meant to be a time
of reflection and repentance as we do some even more intensive-than-usual
soul-searching in preparation for what will eventually be the empty tomb. And so we’ll be using this year’s Lenten
season to walk verse-by-verse through the three parables that make up the fifteenth
chapter of Luke’s Gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the
lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son.
These stories all have a common theme of being “lost and found,” so to
speak, but there is a much larger dimension at work here—Jesus is telling these
parables to the scribes and Pharisees—as Luke writes, “Now all the tax
collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were
grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”” And what Jesus is responding with, in so many
words is, “Yes, because it isn’t just about you!”
Luke’s
account began last week with the parable of the lost sheep—out of a herd of one
hundred sheep, one is unaccounted for, and so the shepherd leaves the
ninety-nine to search for the one, finds it, and celebrates with his neighbors
and friends that he has found his lost sheep.
In
Luke’s Gospel, Jesus then transitions immediately from that parable into this
one, the parable of the woman who has lost a coin, and there are several things
which stand out. First and foremost is
that, just as there was a character who very clearly represented Jesus in the
first parable (the shepherd), so too is there such a character in this second
parable: the woman.
That
likely does not shock us today. But it
should. Women, as many of you know, were
treated during Biblical times—and according to Biblical law—as chattel, little
more than property. Under Levitical law,
a daughter can be sold into either slavery or marriage. They were not seen as useful beyond the
obvious ability of childbirth, which is what makes stories like that of Ruth,
or Esther, or Israel’s female judge Deborah, all the more remarkable—they are
swimming upstream mightily in waters whose currents are very much pulling the
opposite direction.
And
Jesus—and therefore, by extension, God—is comparing Himself to a woman in this text! Which by itself is not so unprecedented in
Luke’s Gospel—in a story also accounted for by Matthew, Jesus in Luke 13
compares Himself to a mother hen looking after her chicks by gathering them under
her wings.
But
that’s a little bit different. Jesus is
making a metaphor using animal behavior we all are familiar with—it would be
like anyone today describing cunning like a fox, or courage like a lion. It’s a type of colloquialism, a universal expression
that everybody knows.
Here,
Jesus is out-and-out saying: those people who got the seriously short end of
the stick in our laws? You know, the
other gender who makes up half our population?
Yeah, I’m like them, too.
If
this were not, on face, humbling enough, the reason Jesus gives for comparing
Himself to a woman is even more remarkable: this is a woman who is almost
certainly of very modest means. She has
ten denarii, ten silver coins. In Israel
under Roman occupation, a single silver coin represented one day’s wage for an
unskilled laborer. It was the de facto
minimum wage of the time. And this woman
has only ten of these coins—she has only ten days’ worth of minimal wages. So losing just one of them is a big deal.
Jesus
isn’t just identifying Himself with a woman.
He’s identifying Himself with a poor woman. And there are, in my mind, two reasons for
this. One is to demonstrate His
solidarity with, and love for, the most marginalized, outcast, and mistreated
among us. The other is to demonstrate
that He still has a long way to go to fulfill His mission and ministry of
saving us.
In
case it isn’t obvious by this point, if Jesus is the woman, we are the coins
themselves. And, like I said, the woman
only has ten of them. Compare that to
the shepherd with a flock of one hundred sheep, all of which were worth far
more than a single day’s minimum wage.
This is a dramatic shift from the first parable to the second—Jesus is
saying that His own resources of people to call and redeem are limited. He is not yet rich in followers, in people
who believe.
Jesus
is saying, in effect, that sometimes, it is a rarity to have, as He puts it,
one sinner who truly repents. Which of
course makes it all the more reason to celebrate, all the more reason for the
angels of heaven to rejoice—we tend to celebrate that which is rare, not that
which is common.
But
it shows that this mission of calling and saving and redeeming us, as fragile
and tenuous as that mission might be, defines Jesus. Just as the ten coins represent the woman’s
livelihood, our living for Jesus defines Jesus’ own livelihood, at least until
He returns again. Jesus lives today in
bodily form only because His message and love live in us. As Saint Teresa of Avila so poignantly put
it: “Christ has not hands but yours.
Christ has no feet but yours.”
Brothers and sisters, until Christ comes again, we represent His
livelihood, modest though it may be, here in this world.
Which
is, in the end, what this parable is about.
It’s about us, broken and limited and sinful us, living on the edges of
our own finances much like the woman in this parable, sometimes making it one
day at a time, one paycheck at a time, until something happens. Until we find that lost coin. Until we find something we had previously
lost, and our lives are the better for it.
Because
just as the coins would have value to us, so too does this mean that we…again,
broken and limited and sinful us…have value to Jesus and to God. Just as we would recognize a sheep as having
obvious value to a shepherd, so too are we meant to recognize that a coin with
monetary worth would have obvious value to a person of poverty. And in both stories, the message Jesus is
sending is the same.
We
are worth something to God. God values
us.
And
it is even more remarkable in this story—because materially, a single silver
coin does not carry much worth. It
represents the minimum wage. But to this
woman, it carries value worthy of celebration and rejoicing. And so too is it for us. We may think that because of how messed up
and screwed up we are that we are worth only the bare minimum to an all-present,
all-knowing God. And on the outside, we
would be forgiven for believing this.
But
we have worth to God surpassing yours or mine understanding.
Because
if we didn’t, there would be no need to redeem us in the first place. There would be no need for Jesus to define
His mission in those terms of loss, mercy, and redemption. And it would make Him look like a fool for
dying for us on the Cross.
No,
the only way…the ONLY way…this works is if we believe that we are worth
something to God And as we extend that
belief to ourselves, Jesus calls us to extend it to all people, including the
people living on the edge, with no net to catch them if they fall. People who are just like us.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
24, 2013
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