Sunday 12 September 2010
Rejoice with me

Luke 15:1-10

This is the third time I have spoken here this year. In January it was the Baptism of Jesus, in May it was Pentecost, and today it is ordinary time. There is not the same ring to it is there – Baptism, Pentecost and ordinary time.  By this we mean ordinary in the sense of position – an ordinal number – a means of keeping track of where we are in the church year. More precisely today is the 16th Sunday after Pentecost. But I like the more commonly used meaning of ordinary too – for in the ordinary, the commonplace, we might just experience the extraordinary grace of God.

This sense of working within the ordinary would I think appeal to Father Bob Maguire, who has been the Roman Catholic parish priest in South Melbourne for nearly 40 years. He is a man who's spent his lifetime passionately advocating a fair go for everyone. And it's got him into a lot of trouble. When interviewed on Talking Heads recently (23rd August), Father Bob, as he is affectionately known, was asked why his ministry “so got up noses of the church hierarchy”. He replied that it’s a matter of style. The flat structures he uses in his ministry are diametrically opposed to the hierarchy of the church. “My style” he said “is that we are all in this together – any man, woman or child of goodwill is in there.”

Later in the interview, he was asked about the severe criticism he received when he buried a notorious Melbourne criminal, Victor Peirce, in 2002. He responded:

“And I say, one he’s dead, which is a start. And secondly, I say ask his son just coming out of the church and down the steps of the church with the coffin. I said, ‘Ask the kid’.”

Although the funeral service in the Catholic Church is a Mass for the Repose of the Dead, Father Bob was saying his ministry is about meeting the needs of the living. He summarised his approach with the marvelous phrase, “You see the founder of the firm insisted on mixing with everyone.” The founder of the firm, Jesus, insisted on mixing with everyone.

Isn’t this reminiscent of today’s gospel reading? For in Luke 15, we find: Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:1-2)

The crowds are pressing in around Jesus to hear his teaching. All manner of people make up the crowd and they gather around Jesus for a variety of reasons. The disciples to receive instruction; the Pharisees to keep tabs on Jesus’ radical teachings; and the people who do not really belong anywhere – those who have lived so much of life on the fringe – they are hearing a new message.

Luke records that Jesus is attracting tax collectors and sinners. Now I imagine “tax collectors and sinners” is a term Luke uses generically to refer to those people no one else wants to hang around with, for fear their reprehensible reputations will implicate their own good reputations. Tax collectors were collaborators with the occupying Roman government and “sinner” is not simply a moral description but a term applied to religious and hence social outcasts. For example, the sick were considered sinners because their illness was thought to derive either from their sin directly or through the sin of their parents. Somehow these outsiders have crowded in too, and here they are eating with Jesus. The side conversations begin immediately. The whispering starts. “Who invited them? Why does Jesus embrace this woman, that man? Does he not know who they are, what they do for a living? Who is this Jesus anyway? He talks of godly things, and yet he eats with them.”

Breaking bread together was a serious act – an act of full embrace – it demonstrates how fully Jesus welcomed and accepted those on the margin. And his sharing of a meal offended the Pharisees greatly. After all, they were the ones who were intimately acquainted with the rules, the ones who drew the boundaries, the ones who enforced the holiness codes of clean and unclean. And here was Jesus flouting their rules. No wonder they were upset.

And so in response to their grumbling, Jesus tells them the wonderful and memorable story we now call the Parable of the Lost Sheep – where a shepherd who has a hundred sheep leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one that is lost. Luke follows this with the Parable of the Lost Coin – where a woman who has ten silver coins loses one. She immediately lights a lamp, sweeps the house and searches diligently until she finds the lost coin. Luke then completes the triplet of parables (although it is not part of today’s lectionary) with the Parable of the Prodigal Son (better named as the Parable of the Loving Father) – where a son takes his inheritance, squanders it, eventually comes to his senses, and returns home. In each parable that which was lost is found.

John Dominic Crossan defines a parable as “a fictional story with a theological punch” . Well, in these three parables, I can see at least three theological punches:

Firstly, we find God is active as the seeker. The stories are not about us seeking God, but about God seeking the lost. It is not so much “seek and you will find” as “know that you are loved”. In answer to the complaint that he had overstepped the mark by eating with sinners, Jesus tells the Pharisees that those whom they are dismissing so readily are so precious that God is willing to drop everything and search for them. He makes the matter personal by asking them the question “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep …?” In so doing, he invites them to join God in the search.

Second, we find Jesus using outrageous and shocking images for God, when he portrays the seeker as a shepherd and a woman. Both are figures from the underside of Jewish society. Shepherds had notorious reputations and were generally avoided as outcasts. Women were treated a second-class citizens. The mere choice of these two as images of God must have given the listeners a tremendous shock. Can you hear them? “God is like a shepherd, God is like a woman – what’s he saying?”  Even in the third parable, where Jesus uses the more familiar and acceptable image of God as Father, he shocks them by telling them that the father, seeing his lost and dissolute son far off, runs to welcome him. I picture the father holding his robes up high so as not to trip; completely insensitive to his own dignity. Such behaviour would be unheard of for the patriarch of a Jewish family. What a God this is that Jesus portrays, and such images still have the power to shock some people today.

Third, we find the whole of heaven rejoicing when that which was lost is found. This joy of finding is central to the each of the parables, and the joy is so abundant it calls on everyone to share in it. Salvation consists not purely or even primarily in rescue, but in being drawn into exuberant celebration. There are no longer such categories as “the one” and the “ninety-nine”; all are included. Jesus is calling on his critics to join him (and heaven) in celebrating the presence of the tax collectors and sinners in their midst, rather than grumbling about it.

The thrust of the parables, therefore, is not to call sinners to repentance but to invite the righteous to join the celebration: “Rejoice with me, for I have found … the sheep … the coin… the son … that was lost” (Luke 15:6 and 9). Indeed, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we get Jesus’ message expressed most emphatically, when he has the Father (God) address the elder brother (religious insiders) with the words: “But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, he was lost and has been found.” (Luke 15:32)

Those whom the religious authorities had defined to be outsiders, and irredeemable, are being welcomed and brought inside by Jesus. He is challenging his hearers to consider what it means to be in community, and to consider what boundaries, if any, there are for that community. In so doing, he invites us also to consider our response to the lost; to ask ourselves the questions “Who is missing?” and “Whom do we keep on the outside?” And as we ponder these questions, we may just realize that they are us  – for haven’t we all, at some time, felt the misery of being an outsider, of being lost.

As some of you will recall, in the mid-1980s Mae and I and our children went to Washington for two years – this was to be our first stay over there. We lived in Northern Virginia and attended the local Presbyterian Church. The people there were pleasant, good folk but there was no great sense of community. We would attend a church social event on a Saturday evening – all good fun – and then be treated like complete strangers on Sunday morning. I found it truly soul-destroying. By the time we came back to Canberra, I still had some sort of faith in God, but was having serious doubts about the church. You welcomed us back warmly into this congregation. It was your love, your nurture, your friendship, and your strong sense of community that enabled me to slowly feel again that I belonged. In a very real sense, you “saved” me and I am grateful. Thank you.

The power of a parable lies in the use of the familiar to remind us of our own links to the story, and to bring us into a deeper understanding of God. Maybe we need some new parables for the modern age. In order to speak authentically to our neighbours, maybe we need to reexamine the language of the faith – not to dispose of it but to revitalize it. For example, in his book Thank God for Evolution, Michael Dowd argues compellingly that religion and science are mutually enriching. He speaks about faith from a modern evolutionary world-view and in the context of the ever-expanding knowledge obtained through science. It is an important book. 

For Michael Dowd, faith is synonymous with trust. It is about relationship with God rather than adherence to a set of beliefs. With regard to being saved, he writes:

“If a person is expected to give mental assent to word-based propositions in order to be “saved”, then God’s love is hardly unconditional, nor is God’s wisdom infinite. To interpret “faith in God” as meaning that one must subscribe to a particular way of seeing the world in order to go to an … otherworldly place called “heaven” is to miss out on the this-world saving grace of the gospel.” (page 198).

In other words, it is not about some future reward, but about experiencing God’s grace in the here and now. And again:

“To know the joy of reconciling when I’ve been estranged; to experience the relief of confession when I’ve been burdened by guilt; … to feel passion and energy when I’ve been forlorn; … to find comfort when I’ve been grieving; … to sing when I’ve been short on hope; … to embrace truth when I’ve been in denial … each of these is a precious face of salvation” writes Michael Dowd (Page 182).

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a former prison chaplain. He told me that when working with prisoners, especially juvenile offenders, the golden rule was “always relationship before doctrine”. Which is what I was getting at last time I was here, when I said that I believe a primary mission for the church today is to provide a safe place for people simply to be.  Indeed, this is just what this congregation did for me in the 1980s. You see it is about empowerment, and providing a place where relationship comes first. It is about enabling people to be engaged, fulfilled, and whole. In short, it is about community.

Just how this gets worked out in practice is a matter for each local church. Again from Father Bob Maguire, in military parlance: “Every parish should be a living example of how to adapt to the terrain.” What you do here in Tuggeranong will be different, and should be different, from what we do in Sydney. Your mission and ministry are best determined here, where you know your own circumstances best.

But, however the practicalities get worked out, we are reminded this morning, from the parables of the lost being found, that God is about a hospitality that seeks to forgive, restore, and rejoice. We are reminded that when one goes missing we are all diminished. When one is restored we are all the better for it. So let us rejoice, for our God is a caring and searching God, who seeks to bring us into deep communion. Amen.