Luke 15:1-10
Just Do It
James Sledge -- September 12, 2010
In case you’ve missed it when I’ve said so before, I think the Pharisees get something of a bum rap. The Pharisees were a reform movement in Judaism, a group that worried about a faith too focused on rituals, festivals, and Temple sacrifices. They had read those verses by the prophet Amos where God says, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” And so the Pharisees were serious about doing more than professing their faith. They tried to walk the walk. And they encouraged other Jews to do the same. And their movement was a rather successful one. They were the forerunners of modern, rabbinical Judaism.
Of course when you start to focus on how people live it gets fairly easy to tell those who are serious about faith from those who aren’t. And the tax collectors and sinners we just heard about in our gospel reading certainly belong to the latter group. These tax collectors had nothing in common with our IRS or local tax office. They were Jews who secured, often bought, their position from the Romans. It was essentially a license to steal, and corruption was an integral part of the system. These tax collectors had a set amount to collect for the Romans, and everything they collected above that was theirs. And they could used Roman soldiers to bully and strong-arm folks. They were hated and regarded as traitors because they worked for a foreign power and grew wealthy by cheating their fellow Jews.
Similarly, the sinners in our gospel reading are not those who have had some small lapse and needed forgiveness. These were clearly distinguishable folks who did not keep the moral law or follow the purity rules. They lived outside the faith community, either by choice or because they engaged in unsavory occupations. To eat with these folks was to become unclean and impure yourself. Their status as sinners is not questioned, not even by Jesus.
And so the issue is not whether the Pharisees have judged these tax collectors and sinners too harshly. The issue is why Jesus feels so at home with them. To explain, Jesus tells a parable. Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”
Jesus begins his parable with this question, but it isn’t really a question. He presumes that every one of the scribes and Pharisees listening to him is nodding in agreement. “Oh yes, of course we would drop everything, leave the ninety-nine, and run look for the one lost sheep.”
But I don’t know if I would. It doesn’t seem to me a cost effective way to run a business. That one sheep is a paltry one percent of the sheep farmer’s total investment. It seems difficult to justify jeopardizing ninety-nine percent for the sake of one. Better to safeguard the ninety-nine percent, forget the one, and take the tax write off.
But I suppose shepherds in Jesus’ day viewed it differently. Their small flocks became like extensions of their family. They knew each sheep individually, and they couldn’t leave the one out there alone.
The Pharisees seemed to get Jesus’ parable with no problem, but it isn’t quite the same no-brainer for me. So what would be a no-brainer? What would make me immediately nod my head yes, would justify dropping everything?
I know one thing that it isn’t, not for me or apparently for many others. It isn’t the loss of scores of mainline church members. Mainline, Protestant congregations have lost millions of members since 1960. Some of those have joined non-denominational mega-churches, but most have simply left active church life. Presbyterians alone have lost around 2 million members. We’re about half the size we were 50 years ago. We’re not talking about any one percent here. Surely this would cause us to take notice, to drop everything. But in fact we have mostly shrugged. We wonder where they all went, but we’ve pretty much kept doing exactly what we’ve always done. We’d love it if they all came back, but…
What sort of thing would cause you to drop everything you were doing? What would cause you to set aside everything else and focus all your energy on that problem? How about if you heard that someone you love dearly had just had a terrible accident and was on the way to the hospital? I know that would do it for me. If I learned right this moment that one of my daughters was in an ambulance headed to the hospital, I would not be staying with you for the rest of this worship service. And if I found out she was going to be okay, I would be calling everyone to tell them the good news, to share my joy.
And Jesus says God feels that way about all those who are lost, about the tax collectors and sinners of that day, about the drug dealers and gang members of our day. Jesus hangs out with such folks and God is ready to rejoice and throw a party when they repent.
So where do we fit into all this? How do we become a part of this thing that God is so passionate about? How do we become a part of something that God wants to celebrate? I think that we often have difficulties with this because we misunderstand what Jesus is talking about in today’s parables. We misunderstand what it means to be lost, to be found, to repent.
You can see this when people talk about evangelism. Anytime I’ve been part of such a discussion, invariably someone says, “I don’t know enough to share my faith with someone.” In this view of things, evangelism is about transmitting enough convincing information that someone decides to believe in Jesus. Lost equals not believing in Jesus, found is what happens when that changes, and repenting is the move from lost to found. Trouble is, the Jesus we meet in Luke’s gospel doesn’t talk this way.
Jesus spends most of his time teaching about God’s kingdom, God’s new community, something Jesus insists has come near. It is a new day that will lift up the poor and oppressed, that will bring justice to those who have been mistreated. When Jesus sends out his followers he tells them to proclaim this kingdom and to cure the sick. In the beginning, being a part of the Jesus movement was less about believing the right things and more about living in ways that conformed to the kingdom, that cared for neighbor even when it was costly, that reached out to those others found unclean and undesirable. And I suspect that those tax collectors and sinners came to listen to Jesus because it sounded like they were welcome there, that God wanted them to be part of that new day every bit as much as the go-to-church-every-Sunday folks.
And that means that getting involved in what God is passionate about, getting involved in what makes God want to celebrate, doesn’t require an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible or a seminary understanding of Christian doctrine. It merely requires a willingness to welcome and love people wherever you find them, just like God does. It merely requires sharing the amazing love Jesus give us with others.
On most days, every single one of us encounters someone who is hurting, who is suffering, who has been made to feel inferior, who has been told she isn’t wanted or needed, who is lonely, who is frightened, who feels there is something wrong with him that makes him unacceptable, who has been shunned by others. Almost every single day, we meet people who need us to drop what we’re doing and move toward them, to reach out to them, to help them, to let them know that they are not alone and not outside God’s embrace.
And so, almost every single day, in ways large and small, each one of us has an opportunity to become a part of what God is passionate about, to become a part of what God is excited about and wants to celebrate. Every day, we all have the chance to be the living body of Christ to others. We don’t need to know more. We just need to do it.
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