Pentecost 15

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Pentecost 15
PROPER: 19 C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 13, 1998

TEXT: Luke 15:1-10 - Twin Parables of The Shepherd's Lost Sheep and The Woman's Lost Coin.

"Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost."

ISSUE: The poor, the lost, the least, and many outcasts are coming near to Jesus. His ministry is one which raises them up as worthy of God's acceptance and redeeming love. The pharisees on the other hand grumble at his daring ministry. In the parables, Jesus calls for a rejoicing over the recovery and the restoration of the lost to the community. The church was wrestle today with its grumbling over change and renewal and rethinking, and the utter rejoicing over reaching out and recovering the lost and those different.
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Over the past several weeks now we have been dealing with some of the great reversals of Jesus as he challenged the culture of his time: The last shall be first and the first last. The proud shall be humbled and the humble shall be exalted. If any one does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters. . . he cannot be my disciple. Rather than living comfortably, one takes up a cross. Rather than accumulating, one gives up all possessions in order to be a disciple. Jesus teachings come across as counter cultural, the reversal of trends.
Today in the Twin Parables of The Lost Sheep and The Lost Coin we have another reversal of trends and of the culture. It was basic common religious belief in Jesus' time that good upstanding righteous people were not to associate with sinners. According to John Pilch (The Cultural World of Jesus C) there was a rabbinic teaching: "Let not a person associate with sinners even to bring them near the Torah." Sinners were people who conducted themselves in an immoral fashion. Bad conduct. Sinners were those who had occupations that often led them to an immoral life, such as tax collectors who meddled in unclean freight, or were subject to being involve in extortion. Shepherds were unclean not keeping the law, and were often separated from family, and considered to be perhaps bawdy and an unclean folk. The outcasts were the sick, the blind, the lame. These were people excluded from the Temple because they were believed to be the cursed of God. Interestingly enough it was praise worthy to feed the poor and sinners. But you did not associate with them.
In Luke's story today, Sinners are coming near to Jesus. They are approaching him, and his ministry was undoubtedly one that associated with the so called sinners of this time. This conduct on Jesus' part was considered to be outrageous by the Pharisees and religious leaders. Jesus bucked the system. For all we know, Jesus himself may have been a pharisee and he was demanding a change in this religious group, or at the very least showing another way that he perceived as a more Godly way.
So the sinners are coming near, and the pharisees are grumbling and outraged at Jesus' association with them. He then tells them an outrageous, if not an insulting, two parables. The first is that of a shepherd going looking for a lost sheep. The parable is not outrageous to us in 1998, but it sure was to the pharisees in the first century. Jesus makes a sinner the hero of the parable. Shepherds were despised, and considered unclean. In effect he is saying even sinner-shepherds know more about mercy, forgiveness, and compassion than you pharisees. What shepherd who has a flock of an hundred sheep when he loses one does not go in search of the lost one. A flock of 100 was a very large flock, and probably represented the flock of several shepherds, of a community. In any event the shepherd goes in search of the one that is lost. He finds it, and brings it home rejoicing, not grumbling.
A woman, and we know that Pharisees prayed thankfully that they were not born a woman. as the hero of a parable would also have startled the pharisees. Women were like sinners in that they could not hold office or be witnesses in legal proceedings. Even a woman says Jesus who loses a coin from her jewelry lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully sifts through a dirt floor until she finds the lost coin. She then calls in the neighbors for a party. She doesn't grumble. She searches, seeks, finds, and rejoices that the lost is found.
It shouldn't surprise us that the Parable of the (Loving Father, Two Sons, Prodigal Son) follows and is linked to these twin parables. Two sons humiliate their father. One wishing his father dead by wanting his inheritance takes it and squanders it away. The other son humiliates his father's compassion in public by grumbling and refusing to come into the party. Yet the father slaughters a fatted calf so the whole community can rejoice that the sinner son that was lost is now found.
Jesus intentionally develops a ministry of compassion and mercy. It is one of explicit forgiveness and welcome to the (repentant) lost, least, last, and little. A signficant issue here is not so much his compassionate mercy, but the call to rejoicing. Both men like the shepherd and women like the woman who lost her coin are called together in a solidarity of rejoicing in the mission of Christ in finding, welcoming, and restoring the lost to the community. The pharisees found this hard, difficult to accept, but Jesus needled them with his challenging parables.
A truly fascinating aside is the reading from Exodus (32:7-14) this morning. Moses had gone up on Mt. Sinai to be with God to g et the commandments. He was gone for quite some time and the impatient people under the leadership of Aaron decided to take on the ways and worship of the culture. They collected all the gold and melted it down for a golden calf. Thus, they chose, you see, to worship in the Cult of Baal a non-moral religion based largely on fertility worship. After God had finished with Moses, and learns what the Israelites have done, he is angry, grumbling, and furious. His fury shall burn hot against them. But it is Moses, like Jesus, who says no to God. Hold on God, remember the agreement you made with Abraham. Don't destroy them. You promised that you would make for Abraham and nation that would multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven. Moses pleads for God to turn away from his wrath and restore his community and rejoice in the mission of redemption. What Jesus is doing is like that and he reminds the men of Moses, the Pharisees so intent on keeping the Law, that they should rejoice in the mission of the restoration of all of the people of God.
This concept of mission and restoration of the poor and the lost was a difficult concept for the righteous people of Jesus' time. It's hard for us too. It is praise worthy for us to collect a few bucks and give it to the poor. It is very different for us to be able to reach out to, and to live with and and among and to welcome the poor, the sinner, the outcast, and those who are different from us. We resist putting up a well lighted welcoming sign that will be welcoming to a growing community. We resist involvement with associating with the poor and those who are difficult to communicate with, and are challenging to our way of life and thinking.. We resist handicap access that confronts us with the brokeness and the frailty of our humanity and humaness. We are inclined to value only the strong, and resist rejoicing in and with the weak and the frail. Today we face many changes in our world, which requires significant adjustments in our thinking if we are to continue to be the church of Jesus Christ in that world. It is easy enough to be a grumbling crowd about how awful the world is, and how everyone else is different from us and has it all wrong. It is more difficult for us to rejoice in being open and welcoming to different kinds of life styles.
There are now many kinds of family styles. There's the traditional family of mother, father, and children. There is also the single parent family that needs finding and welcoming into the church. There are the same sex families that need finding and welcoming. There are the blacks, the hispanics, the poor and the non-affluent; there are the handicapped and disabled that need to be found and welcomed. There are the immigrants and people of differing cultures that need to be able to feel welcomed into the family of God. Women struggle and continually need to be able to be seen and found as valid candidates for ministry in all ministries in the church. An isolated and exclusive church in this world will die and fall away regardless of its endownments. It may go on and on, but it becomes spiritually dead as a community of grumbling righteous folk. The issue of these parable today is whether or not we can learn to rejoice in mission and with Christ to search and welcome the the lost, the little, the least, and the last. It challenges and dares us to associate with them as real neighbors and friends.
In the Epistle today, Paul rejoices that he was in his righteousness dead and lost. But by the marvelous grace of God was found and converted to a meaningful and joyful life in servanthood with Christ. We, in our love of being the powerful and the righteous, our love of the traditional, our affluence, our exclusiveness, our abilities to be quickly condemning and grumbling may also at times, perhaps many times in our lives, need some startling and needling bright light to call us to our senses and to a profound conversion, that we too, may learn to rejoice in the call to a servanthood mission as the people of God in Christ's church.