Disposable Sheep

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.16.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10

No-one likes losing stuff. But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?

We don’t live in the same era, and in our society, we’re pretty far away from caring about the stuff that clutters and piles up in our lives. We’re just so very used to tossing things away. Sure, you could use that plastic container a hundred times or more, or reuse that plastic spork for a dozen meals without it breaking. But we don’t. We drink, we eat, and we discard.

The boys and I often hike over to a neighborhood fast food establishment...I won’t tell you where, ‘cause my agent wasn’t able to negotiate enough compensation for this product placement... when my dear wife is off traveling or at a meeting. There, we consume plenty of empty calories, but also an amazing quantity of paper. After we’ve eaten, a mound of cups and fry containers and balled up hunks of wrappers piles high on that tray, seemingly taking up more room empty than they did full. They get dumped, of course, into the wide open maw of the trash bin.

It used to be worse. We used to get the boys kid’s meals, which not only had mounds of paper and cardboard, but also came with...a toy! These toys weren’t anything like the doofy little cardboard crowns that I used to get as a kid. No, these toys were real toys. Little handheld video games, batteries and all. Wind up cars. Action figures. Spongebob Bobbleheads. Little stuffed animals. Every last one was a marketing tie-in for a film or a T.V. show, but they were the kinds of things that you’d have paid good money for back when I was but a lad. Progress!

Only... the kids played with them for about 30 minutes, then forgot them. If you go once a week and you get two toys each time, they...well, they start to pile up. Bins full of them, buckets full of them, until it started to feel a bit like that scene from Fantasia with the replicating brooms, like we’d accidentally put a boy happy meal toy in the same cage as a girl happy meal toy. You can’t give them away...they’re just...disposable. So we finally threw them away, and just stopped getting kids meals. The boys didn’t mind. The meals were still the meals...but the toys were worthless. They weren’t even worth having.

Ours is a society where things are either disposable or soon worthless. In the relentless march of progress, the relentless consumption of stuff is necessary to keep the great wheels spinning along. It’s something called planned obsolescence. If we don’t get rid of our stuff, or feel that our stuff is no longer good enough stuff, then there’s not going to be a reason for us to buy new stuff. So products are planned that will only last...or only be desirable for a few years...and then they’ll be undesirable, not worth searching out, not worth having. The legendarily fast product cycle of the iPod is a perfect example. If you drive a car that was made in 2002, it’s still basically a decent car. But who’s going to buy a second generation iPod...shoot, they didn’t even really have the click wheel going the way it should. Of course, there are 90 million iPods out there that have just been rendered obsolete...but if you lost one, are you really going to go look for it? Of course not. We wouldn’t bother. You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPods and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPods...not just the new HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time. And why not? We’re too rich in possessions to care about such things.

Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that. As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath. Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.

The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.

So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear. Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new sheep from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? It’s not worth the time.

Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.

I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten fifty dollar bills. Fifty bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, seven hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $500, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?

But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.

Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. You also make the mistake of viewing people further down in the pecking order as somehow less worthy than yourself. The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.

That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in Montgomery County has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...who, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.

The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.

Does the feeling of helpless anger that fills the hearts of those day laborers who’ve been cast back out onto the streets in Herndon matter less to God because their documentation isn’t up to snuff? There are some who think so. Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God? Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than a piece of crumpled burger wrapper that blows by in the wind. Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.

But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more importantly, shown...that God and those who follow his Son care for them. Because our good shepherd does not have a single disposable sheep.