Please take one minute to pray silently. It can be about anything that comes to mind. After a minute, continue on.
During that minute, statistics
would indicate, around 105 people died, and 5 or 6 of them were probably in the
United States. And by the time I’m done talking, we would expect 100s more to
have died worldwide. On average, that’s over 150,000 deaths a day and over 55
million a year. Some died peacefully, some violently, some were young, some
were old. They were fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and
sisters, friends and enemies. Some were rich. Some were poor. Some may have
been celebrities; most were not. Some were Christians, some Muslim, some Hindu; some were other religions or atheists. Some were LGBTQ, some not. Some were
conservative, or liberal, or communist, or socialist, or… Well, you get the
picture. But, they were all people. They all lived and they all died.
In
their lives, they each experienced acceptance from some and rejection from
others. Some were judged as evil by one group and righteous by another. They
each lived a hybrid existence of unity and division, acceptance and rejection.
They each struggled with life, relationships, work, injustices, with defining
their identities, their values, and meeting their own needs and the needs of
their families. Despite these things we
all share as human beings, as we live, we become aware pretty early on, that we
are all different. We see the world through our own eyes, sometimes struggling
to see it through another’s. We tend to
divide people up in our heads, considering who’s bad and who’s good, who’s
deserving of our compassion and who’s not, who is a threat and who is a friend,
who’s to blame for the way things are and who isn’t. We all come together today,
for better or worse, admittedly or not, with differences in our world views and
mindset. And we live as people divided from each other our whole lives, until
the day we die, ironically, just like everyone else.
In
spite of those lifelong dividing lines, we are all people, gathered here today,
to worship God and to hear something of Jesus’ teachings. We are gathered here
today, to encounter the good news of Christ and to contemplate what that good
news might mean for us. We are gathered here today, as human beings, who
struggle with our flaws, our limited human perspectives, our ignorance of so
many things, our susceptibility to injury, sickness, pain, loneliness,
discouragement, fear, and our awareness that death is present all around us,
all the time.
And
the same was true of those who gathered around to hear Jesus in our Gospel
reading. They came together to hear Jesus from places characterized by
division. And the parables that are told by Jesus in Luke 15 are told in the
context of these divisions. The Pharisees and the Scribes were upset that Jesus
welcomed sinners and ate with them. The pharisees and scribes were the
religious leaders, tending to be more wealthy and of higher social status. By
virtue of their position in that society, they could perform more of the religious
duties and purity laws than the common folk could. They looked down on tax
collectors because they often thought that tax collectors were collaborating
with the enemy (Romans) and used corrupt practices to gain their wealth. And, in
the eyes of the religious, the people who were labeled sinners were those who
did not keep up with the ritual and purity laws, who were morally deficient in
some way, and who they thought generally dragged the society down.
Meanwhile,
those who were labeled tax collectors and sinners would have seen the religious
folk as a group to be resented. From their perspective, the scribes and
pharisees were judgmental and condescending, continually ostracizing, alienating,
and rejecting them for no good reason.
These
people did not like each other, socialize with each other, respect each other,
or get along. In many ways, they saw each other as enemies. Yet, Jesus ate with
the religious leaders and taught them and Jesus ate with tax collectors and
sinners and taught them. And because the religious leaders were upset with
this, Jesus told the parables that we heard today. These parables, then, were
meant to bring about some repentance, that is, a change of mind or perspective.
Jesus
tells us that God seeks the lost, whoever they are. One lost sheep is worth
going after even if you’ve got 99 others. One lost coin is worth searching the
whole house for, even if you’ve got 9 more. Just so, even if there were 99
righteous people, God still wants to find the one who isn’t and restore that
person to the community. God loves the people we want to exclude. God sees
people as people rather than all these other labels we tend to attach. The
question becomes, who are the lost?
As we
continue reading through the Gospel of Luke and the New Testament, we find that
there is no such thing as 99 people who have no need of repentance. Tax
collectors, sinners, pharisees, scribes… everyone is being called to repent,
that is, change their perspective, change their minds to be more in line with
the mind of God who sees people as people.
The
point that Jesus will eventually demonstrate is that we are all lost. You and I
are not part of the 99 righteous ones who need no repentance, patiently waiting
for God to bring in the unrighteous. We are all the unrighteous lost in need of
God’s incredible mercy. As we are told in the book of Romans, quoting the
Psalms, “There is no one righteous, not even one.” “There is no one good, not
one.” Everyone is lost.
And,
we can’t find ourselves. We can’t redeem ourselves. Even the very best of us is
in need of daily repentance. A daily cleansing of our mind through the gracious
forgiveness of Jesus Christ and a reintroduction to his perspective.
We are
all human beings and we are all stiff-necked because of it. We misplace our
loyalties, fastening them onto idols of one sort or another. We follow the
wrong leaders, take to heart the wrong messages, corrupt or abandon Christ’s
teachings for personal gain, apply critical thinking only to others and not to
ourselves, assume we are right, assume we are faithful, assume that we are the
ones called to save the lost. But we are the lost.
And that fact is good news for you and I and everyone else
out there. We are all in it together. We are lost. The world is lost. We want
to live forever, but we are all going to die. We want to be seen as right, but
we are often wrong. We want to be seen as successful, but we are so often
failures. We want to be the 99 righteous, but we are all lost. We want to be
seen as the good ones, but we are the sinners. We want to be seen as so many
things, but Jesus sees us as the lost human beings that we really are.
Pharisees and Scribes, Tax Collectors and Sinners… All lost.
And this is good news because Jesus only seeks the lost.
Jesus only saves and forgives real sinners. Jesus only heals the sick. Jesus
only dies for the unrighteous. Jesus only raises the dead. That’s good news for
me…, for you…, for the world.
When that last minute in our own lives comes, may we find
peace in the lives we have lived knowing that we are not alone, but united with
the human race. But, not just united in our human failings. We are also united in the grace of God that
has been extended to us. We are the lost… And, we are also the found. Let us rejoice
with God and the angels in heaven as we celebrate the grace of our Lord who
leads us to a new perspective and a new life with God and one another. Amen.
