Sermon for Luke 15:1-10
September 16, 2007
Jesus would probably find it very difficult today to find a church willing to have him as their pastor. You see, Jesus didn’t fit in the mold of what the church people (the Scribes and Pharisees) thought a religious leader should look like, or act like. Jesus didn’t wear all the priestly garb. He walked around in sandals with no collar. He didn’t sit in his ivory tower giving lectures praising them when they were right, or even scolding them when they were wrong.
Instead much of the time, Jesus made his home among the everyday people and simply told them parables—short stories that challenged their minds and made them think about their lives, their relationship with God and other human beings. Today Jesus challenges their/challenges our understanding of God’s unlimited love and forgiveness with two very simple stories—the lost sheep and a lost coin.
They are not stories about sheep herding and good housekeeping. These are two stories combined with our readings that teach about God’s amazing grace. Today’s lessons are about grace and grace only.
There is in them not one single note of earning or merit, not one breath about the rewarding the rewardable, correcting the correctable, or improving the improvable. There is only the gracious, saving determination of the shepherd, the woman—God to save the lost and raise the dead.
And while this should seem like extremely good news, we sometimes, really most of the times don’t buy it.
We like the Pharisees and Scribes feel there must be something we, more specifically there must be something others must do to gain God’s favor, and the readings, Jesus in particular tells us No! Not a single thing!
Let’s carry forward last week’s theme of not having God’s eyesight and not having all the answers by starting out today again asking what if. What if you died today and ended up at the pearly gates of heaven? There you are greeted by King David of the Old Testament. The author of Psalm 51 we just read. I think we might be very pleased with our reception—don’t you? At least we would think we are at the right place.
However, what if you died today and ended up at the pearly gates of heaven? There you are greeting by Adolph Hitler and Saddom Hussein? First you might wonder if your at the right place, and if you where, you might question the justice of God. How in the world did these evil scoundrels get to the same place as me—as David?
Yet if you think about it…wasn’t it David….author of Psalm 51…..that acted like an evil scoundrel in committing adultery and then having the husband killed? Didn’t I a few years back act like an evil scoundrel when I………well I won’t go into that?
Are there degrees of sinners? Like a scale or graph? Where here’s the lowest with Hitler and Sadam. Here’s the top of heap with maybe David or Mother Teresa? After all, David did write that beautiful prayer of repentance. And where is the cut off? Where do I fall in? Somewhere in the middle? Is that high enough? Or is it too low?
Yet what we see in today’s readings is God’s Amazing Grace is not limited to our understanding of forgiveness.
Sure we want to believe that God forgives me, and maybe even you, cause I know you a little, but to forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it, well that’s just not right—say the Pharisees and Scribes.
In the Exodus story we hear God refer to his people as “stiff-necked” or stubborn. It says, “God wrath burns hot,” or simple put God is quite angry. So much so, that God actually refers to them as Moses’ people for a good reason.
God has just delivered the Israelites from slavery and is leading them to a better life, but they begin to worship other things—this golden calf—forgetting everything the Lord has done for them and promises to do. In my opinion they should be punished.
Moses begs the Lord and reminds God these are your people. Did you set them free to destroy them? And text says, God changed his mind.
What is interesting, if you read on in Exodus you would learn that even though God changed his mind, when Moses came down from the mountain he did not have that same understanding of forgiveness. Moses slams the commandments on the rocks, breaking them into little pieces, and then ordered the troops to kill brother, friends, and neighbors—3000 were killed that day. I guess Moses too felt they had it coming.
Sort of the same view the Pharisees and Scribes, sort of the same view I sometimes entertain. Sure God can forgive me, I am a Christian, I confess my sins, I’m trying, these people, those people are still living in sin—they deserve God’s wrath.
But then why does Jesus in today’s story welcome and eat with sinners. Why does he tell them/tell us these two short stories?
If you want to shatter the concept that one can do something/anything to earn God’s gifts then think about this for a moment.
For all practical purposes a lost sheep is a dead sheep—by itself it cannot and will not survive, and so too a lost coin is a dead asset--useless. Neither the lost coin or the lost sheep in this simple story do a single blessed thing except hang around in its lostness.
Neither is good for a single thing, and to go one step further neither the lost sheep, nor the lost coin are even capable of any repentance or confession at all. You see, it was not David’s beautiful confession that saved him, but God’s grace.
Confession is not simply the admission of a mistake we have finally recognized and have tried to correct. Rather it is the admission that we are lost—dead in our sins—that we have no power to save ourselves. It is the recognition that our whole life is in the hands of a God whose wrath can burn hot—but His forgiveness is lifesaving.
If we tempt ourselves with the dismal notion of the Pharisees and Scribes that sinners must first forsake their sins before God will forgive them, or that the lost must somehow find themselves before the God the finder will even begin to look for them.
If we think this way, then we violate the meaning of the parable. We misunderstand the work of Jesus. We take the words of Paul to Timothy in today’s lesson as a lie, “That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost—Notice he say Am! Not was!
Therefore, I need not like the Scribes and Pharisees be the least bit concerned about who is a sinner and who is not—I know I am. Who might be in heaven and who is not—I know I shouldn’t be.
These two short parables are not stories designed to convince us that if we simply get pump up and try harder to wind ourselves up to acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us.
No, they are rather stories about God’s determination to make our awareness that we are lost sinners as the only tickets needed to find a new way of living. God gives it freely and fully at His discretion.
The only question that remains is what do we do now? We do nothing! Because as Paul writes to Timothy there is nothing we can do. He writes, I received mercy so that Jesus Christ will make me an example—so that Jesus Christ will make me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.
Think about this—God’s wrath may burn hot for the way I lived my life yesterday, and according to the law, you and I really do deserve death and damnation. Yet God changes his mind and drops every single one of our sins down the black hole of Jesus’ death. So now any guilt or shame that actually prevent us from living the way we are meant to live is wiped out.
God finds us in our lostness through the darkness of the empty tomb, puts us on his shoulders rejoicing, and begins to give you a bright and shinning future with meaning and purpose.
Jesus Christ will make you an example of those who would come to believe.
Today, right now you are a resurrected, a new creation living to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, and to this God be honor and glory forever and ever.
That’s what I call Good News. Now that’s what I call Amazing Grace. Amen.
