All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. 2 The Pharisees and legal experts were grumbling, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3 Jesus told them this parable: 4 “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them. Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he is thrilled and places it on his shoulders. 6 When he arrives home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’ 7 In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to change their hearts and lives. (CEB)
“Loss, Mercy, and Redemption: The Luke
15 Parables,” Week One
The
young pastor (yes, there are other young pastors besides me!) went off to
seminary fresh out of college not just on a mission, but with a dream. He knew exactly what he wanted in life, and
from his calling, and thought that he could get it by attending this particular
seminary—as he put it, “it was like I got accepted to Harvard.”
And
for a kid who, like me, was born and raised in the Protestant church, it feels
like a good gig. You’re the young boy
who went out and made good. This pastor
wanted to be no different. As he put it,
“I wanted to be your average megachurch pastor.
I wanted to play the game, have a pretty wife (who had) a lot of
hairspray in her hair.”
And
that never quite happened. Because
something happened in seminary. He saw
ministry that did not occur in this bubble of megachurch-dom. He saw immigrant families face the prospect
of being torn apart. He had colleagues
come out to him. And in the process, he
realized something: people, especially young men, trusted him. This was real. This was ministry. And now, far from the dreams of a televised
sermon series on “How to be Your Best Self Today,” he pastors a church out of
his home while also working as a hospital chaplain and a volunteer prison
chaplain. Because, in the end, that is what
being a Christian is—to dream dreams that help others, rather than simply
yourself.
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
15 consists of a powerful trilogy of stories, and all of them are told as sort
of one giant rebuttal to this charge of the scribes and the Pharisees who are
present. Say you’re having a debate with
somebody. It could be about anything—whether
to have burgers or pizza for lunch, who you should vote for, or, dare I even
come close to such hotly contested ground…Huskies versus Cougars. But in this debate, when you say something about
your point of view, your opponent not only tells you that you’re wrong, s/he
explains at great length, using multiple examples with depth and
thoughtfulness, precisely, exactly, painfully why you are wrong.
If
you’ve had this happen to you, it feels a little like what it probably is like
to try to take a drink from a fire hose.
And that’s what Jesus does here—He’s provoked to respond to the grousing
of the scribes and the Pharisees, and he does so by unleashing a torrent of
criticism in His trademark way—by telling parables. Except where He might use just one or two parables—like
the parable of the Good Samaritan or the house on sand versus the house on
rock, Jesus tells three completely separate stories, right in a row, the last
of which is really quite elaborate.
And
that’s Luke 15 in a nutshell. It’s a
chapter of complete, unfiltered scolding from Jesus. And like all scolding, it relies on a few
assumptions. Namely, in this parable of
the lost sheep, it assumes that we, the audience, would agree that the shepherd’s
action of leaving the herd of ninety-nine to rescue the one is
appropriate. And of course we would make
that assumption, because in this parable, the shepherd is Jesus.
And,
like most stories in the Gospel, there is a proxy character in the audience as
well—that is, a character who we are supposed to identify with as we hear this
story being told to us. In the story of
the Good Samaritan, we’re supposed to sympathize with the man robbed on the
road to Jericho and left to die. In the
raising of Lazarus, we are meant to be as Lazarus himself was, being called by
Christ to awaken to renewed life.
And
I think traditionally, or perhaps sentimentally, the audience proxy in the
parable of the lost sheep is the lost sheep itself—that’s who we’re supposed to
identify with. It has the added bonus of
being profoundly humble, this notion that we are meant to identify with the
lost sheep, because that means that we see ourselves in the same lot as the tax
collectors and the sinners—the people who Jesus came to save.
But,
I have to say, I do not think we always belong in such esteemed company. Jesus is telling this story not for the
benefit of the tax collectors and the sinners—they’re already receptive to
Jesus’ teachings. No, Jesus is telling
this story to the scribes and Pharisees.
They are his audience. And they
are represented in this story by the other ninety-nine sheep. As New Testament scholar Sharon Ringe puts
it:
A valuable sheep that is lost merits one’s
full attention until it is found. What
is not said, but is taken for granted, is that during the search for the one
sheep, the others are left to their own devices “in the wilderness.” Apparently, those in the audience readily
accept the risk as worth taking to recover the valuable animal.
In
other words, we aren’t always the lost sheep.
Sometimes we are. But we share a
herd—a world—with many, many more sheep whose needs often take precedence over
ours, and sometimes even in a way that might put our needs at risk.
After
all, we’re all here. We all took time on
our Sunday to be here. Most of you are
members, many of you serve the church and the world in a variety of truly
wonderful ways. In that most basic
respect, I’m preaching to the proverbial choir here. I’m ministering to people who are already in
the flock.
Jesus
is calling us to minister to people outside of the flock, but that isn’t just
it, either. He calls us to do so even
when doing so directly goes against our own self-interest, or our own false
humbleness. I talked about this in my
sermon on Ash Wednesday, but our humbleness has limits. We’re fine calling ourselves sinners in the
abstract because we are all sinners, but once we start digging underneath the surface
of that, our egos make things testy very, very quickly.
And
you had better believe that this happened with Jesus and the Pharisees—it’s a
big reason why they wanted Him out of the picture! He was exposing their false humbleness for
what it was: a façade that hid the belief that they were better than and worth
more than their fellow Jews.
And
that is a terrible warping of religion, to create a hierarchy of worth. When I first read through this passage when
vision-casting this sermon series, my mind jumped immediately to a book my dad
introduced me to as a child—George Orwell’s Animal
Farm. That was partly because most
of the characters in both this parable and Orwell’s book are, well,
animals. But it was also because of how
the final commandment of the philosophy in Animal
Farm was warped. That commandment
began as, “All animals are equal.” But
somewhere along the way, that commandment got changed to say, “All animals are
equal, but some are more equal than others.”
I
might tick some of you off by saying this, but while Orwell was critiquing
Stalinist communism, it is a critique that is scathingly accurate to the church
as well. Far too often, we have space
only for the safe sins to be confessed.
If you play the penny slots at the casino, we can work with that, but if
you’re gay, well, you need to be fixed.
If you say the occasional four-letter word, you’re still salvageable,
but if you vote for the wrong candidate, you’re going to hell.
The
idea that some sinners are more sinful than others…church can never work that
way. Ever.
We
need to be the church not just because we are aware of our sinfulness and want
to break ourselves of it, but because we also are aware of how dark it is and
how much we can be there for someone craving spiritual fellowship and
enrichment but who is too afraid to ask for it.
Who
are they too afraid of? God, at least in
part. But also, honestly, some are also
afraid of us. That we would treat them
like the Pharisees treated the tax collectors.
And when we do that, we cease to give God reason to celebrate our own
righteousness. Jesus cannot put it any
blunter than He does in verse 7: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy
in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons
who need no repentance.”
It
is a choice that tests the very limits of anyone’s inflated sense of self-worth—would
you rather be righteous, and not give heaven any reason to rejoice over you, or
would you rather be a broken-down sinner, over whom heaven rejoices when they
are called and redeemed?
In
this story, the choice is clear. Jesus
sides with the lonely. He sides with the
lost. May we do likewise as well. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
17, 2013
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