A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt,
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 16, 2007

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10
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 I remember it was a cloudy, raw cold Friday in Jerusalem in March of 1996. Just the day before, Adele and I had bid farewell to the church group from Fort Myers, Florida, which we had led on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. With them we had traveled around Israel for a week, and now that they were on their way home, we were beginning a week on our own, exploring at our leisure the sites in and around Jerusalem.

After a week of leading and taking care of a large tour group, we were exhausted on that Friday, and to make matters worse, both of us were feeling sick, so after a bit of half-hearted touring in the city, we made our way back to the Jerusalem Inn Guest House where we had rented a small room for the week. There we rested and made plans for the remaining days in Jerusalem. We turned in early anticipating a long, restful, healing night. But it wasn’t to be.

After no more than an hour, or maybe two, of peaceful sleep, I was awakened by noise coming from one of the nearby rooms - excited voices speaking Hebrew, raucous laughter, and loud music. There was a party going on down the hall, and the noise of it sounded through the paper thin walls and filled our room. I tried my best to block out the noise and go back to sleep, figuring my exhaustion would eventually overcome the distraction.
 
But it didn’t. The party lasted all night long; and I was awake the whole time, listening to the bass thump of the music, the voices, the occasional laughter, and getting angrier as the hours passed slowly by. By sunrise all was quiet. Tranquility had returned to our little corner of the city.  But I have often thought since how one person’s celebration can be terribly annoying to someone else, particularly if the reason for the celebration is unknown!

That helps me understand what’s going on in this morning’s Gospel lesson. Luke tells us that the Pharisees and the scribes – that is, the hyper-religious officials of Jesus’ day - were “murmuring” against Jesus. Now do you know what murmuring is? It is grumbling, complaining, bitching, often in low, continuous, indistinct sounds. Murmuring is the opposite of dealing openly, honestly and straightforwardly with one’s feelings. Murmuring leads to backbiting and stirring up trouble. Murmuring is, famously, what the Israelites did against God and their leaders during the long sojourn in the wilderness. Alas, murmuring has not disappeared from God’s people after all these years.

The Pharisees and scribes murmured against Jesus. They complained that Jesus received, welcomed, and even ate with tax collectors and sinners. From the point of view of these self-appointed guardians of morality and religion, Jesus was celebrating with all the wrong people, these tax collector and sinners. There was a party going on. Jesus was in the middle of it, and the righteous people were annoyed. And they murmured.

Who were these “riff-raff” Jesus sought out and ate with on a regular basis? Some were tax collectors, and they were disliked intensely not just because, like IRS agents today, they collected taxes, but because they collected money for the feared King Herod or the hated Romans, or both. What’s more, to do their “dirty work” they had close dealings with Gentiles, and that alone made them unclean in the eyes of observant Jews. In their eyes, these tax collectors had a serious character problem which made them unfit for fellowship with God’s people. So why on earth, they wondered, would Rabbi Jesus be spending so much time with them.

And then there were those people the religious elite named “sinners.” “Sinners” was a broad category applied not only to people with moral issues, but also to people who were too poor, too uneducated, too busy just trying to survive to study Torah and observe the 619 laws which governed every aspect of daily life. The self-appointed religious experts regarded these people – these “sinners” - as hopelessly irreligious, out of touch with what God required of his people, and therefore not to be welcomed in the religious community.

With this in mind we can better understand when Luke writes, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear (Jesus). And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.”
 
You see, there was something about Jesus and his message, unlike the Pharisees and scribes and their hard, narrow, and exclusive teachings, which drew tax collectors and sinners near, made them feel welcome, breathed a spirit of grace, gave them hope, surrounded them with a sense of being loved by God, gave them an opportunity to re-orient their lives and live in God’s way.

Make no mistake, Jesus did not go around saying that such people were simply to be accepted as they are. He didn’t wink at their behavior as if it really didn’t matter. He didn’t let them off the hook on the grounds that that’s just the way they were. No. Jesus preached repentance, metanoia, turning around. He required a radical, 180 degree turn in a person’s affections, commitments, and behaviors.

The scribes and the Pharisees preached repentance, too. But by repentance they meant adopting their standards of purity and strict law-observance, in other words, becoming just like them. Jesus meant something else by repentance. When Jesus welcomed the tax collectors and sinners to sit down with him at a meal, he invited them to turn around and follow him and his way. That was the repentance they needed to make.

And not just the tax collectors and sinners, but the scribes and Pharisees too! These, even though they would never admit it, were as much, if not more, in need of the repentance Jesus preached. But instead of repenting, turning around, following Jesus and his way, and joining the party, they murmured, complained, bitched, backbit, and stirred up trouble.

So, in defense of his ministry, Jesus told them two parables, and a third, famous one if we read beyond verse 10. We mistakenly think that Jesus went around telling these little, homespun stories to give moral and spiritual instruction in a memorable way. Wrong! For Jesus, his parables were attempts to defend what he was doing, stories to explain why he was doing the things he did, reasons for celebrating with these undesirable characters.

So, first, he told a story about a shepherd who goes looking for a lost sheep. When he finds it, he lays it around his shoulders, comes home and throws a party for his friends and neighbors. “Rejoice with me,” he tells them. I found my lost sheep!”

Jesus then followed the lost sheep story with another story about a woman who lost a coin, one of ten coins which probably represented her entire savings. She turns her house upside-down and eventually finds the lost coin. Then, like the shepherd in the first story, she throws a party for her friends and neighbors, saying to them “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost.”

Now, I want you to notice something important. After each of the stories, Jesus comments that there is rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who turns his life around and follows Jesus and his way. That’s why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. He finds that they are responding to him. That’s the reason for the party. Those who had been written off by the religious establishment are beginning to turn their lives around and follow Jesus and his way. All heaven is having a party, the angels are joining in, and we ought to celebrate too, says Jesus! But the religious people murmur.

What a great comfort this is! God is a God who searches for the lost, even when it’s only one. God is a God who rejoices when the lost is found. What a different picture of God than the ones people typically carry around in their heads: God the Stern Lawgiver, God the Taskmaster, God the Vindictive Judge, God the Divine Scorekeeper, God the Distant Clockmaker, God the Nebulous Cloud, God the Absentee Landlord, God the Natural World, but here we have God the Hound-dog searching diligently after one who is lost.

God the Hound-dog is not as irreverent a picture as it seems at first hearing. The 19th century poet Francis Thompson wrote a famous poem entitled “The Hound of Heaven” based on the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus, maybe even based on these little stories Jesus told. It’s a lengthy poem, too long for reciting here and now, but the opening stanza is irresistible. It has lodged itself in my memory, and both comforts in my lost-ness and disturbs me when I want to be distant from God. Listen to the poet’s words.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him…
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed,
Followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat…

This is very good news! The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the Hound of Heaven determinedly searching for every one of his lost creatures, even when, in their lost condition, they wish not to be found!

There is one more thing I would have you notice about this familiar passage. You see, this passage is more than a comfort; it’s a challenge to the church, a challenge posed as a question, “What would the church have to be doing in the public world in order to make people ask the question to which stories like these are the answer?” Let me put it another way, “What should we Christians be doing in the community that would make people ask, ‘Why are you doing something like that?’ and thus give us a chance to tell stories about finding something that was lost?”

In other words, God’s determined search is going on today, and we are called to be those people whom God sends out in Jesus’ name to find the lost, to extend a gracious welcome to follow Jesus and his way, and to celebrate when they are found. If we’re content merely to exercise our discipleship here within the hot-house of faith, we have missed out on our purpose. And, therefore, the world around us has no cause to ask us what we’re doing, and we have no opportunity to explain by telling stories like the lost sheep and the lost coin.

Some of us here were gathered last Wednesday evening in Fellowship Hall and heard a quotation from Archbishop William Temple who, in a sermon he delivered in 1945, said this, “The church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of its nonmembers.” That’s so out-of-step with everything we experience, so counter-intuitive, that the church usually gets it wrong, figuring that of course the church exists for the benefit of its members, and then murmuring when a church dares do something different.

The scribes and the Pharisees were convinced that their religion existed for the benefit of its members – for the benefit of the righteous, the meticulously law-abiding, the morally-upstanding. So they murmured against Jesus when he acted as if their religion existed for the benefit of its nonmembers, the tax collectors and sinners. The good, religious folk of Jesus’ day didn’t understand that God is the Hound of Heaven and that there’s a party going on in heaven every time the lost is found, every time someone turns around and follows Jesus on his way.

The choice for us – for the good, religious folk of today – is either sitting back and murmuring, or joining the Hound of Heaven in searching for the lost and then, having a party when the lost are found.

Now to the One
who by the power at work within us
is able to do far more abundantly
than all we can ask or imagine,
to God be glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus
to all generations, forever and ever.
Amen.