The Important Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.15.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10

What’s important to us?  That can change 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 time, or the same culture.  Our idea as to what is important, what matters, what’s worth putting in the extra effort for?  That’s changed.  Our sense of what has value, what is deserving of our energy and focus?  That’s changed, too.

This week, the focus of attention for a day or so was a slightly disappointing Apple event, as fans of that particular brand awaited news of the next and latest and greatest.  Which, as we found out, wasn’t just another rectangular phone with a screen, but...drumroll, please...two of them.  The iPhone 5C and 5S, they are, which best I can figure out stands for iPhone 5 “Cheap” and iPhone 5“‘Spensive.”   

Which means, now, that my fragile glass telecommunications brick is even more worthless than it was at the beginning of last week.  If you drive a car that was made in 2007, it’s still basically a decent car.  But my iPhone, which still more or less works, except for the rackafrackin’ home button?  It’s drifted off into oblivion, buried somewhere in the towering mountain range of better and faster and shinier devil boxes that came after.  It’s worth less than nothing.  Actually less than nothing.  They give away better phones now as an upgrade.  You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPhones and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPhones...not just the 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.

But something else has happened in this era.  It isn’t just that things that come rushing at us.  Through those little screens and our larger ones pours an endless cornucopia of stimulations, a rushing fountain clamoring for our attention.  What you want right now is right there.  You can set out towards a goal, and then somehow an hour has passed, and you’ve managed to crush a whole bunch of candy or whatever it is you do in Candy Crush Saga along with 100 million of your best friends, but that report isn’t quite written.  And you’ve somehow managed to spend real money on something called a Lollipop Hammer.  You can be in a family gathering, surrounded by human beings who love you and cherish you, and yet your mind is not on their stories or their lives, but on buying those Lollipop Hammers and extra lives that will get you through that impossible level.

It becomes harder and harder to tell what is and is not important.  It becomes harder and harder to know what is valuable.

But then again, as we listen to Jesus this morning, maybe things aren’t so different.  We’ve always struggled to know that matters, what is truly important.  Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that in his own time.  That’s particularly true when it comes to understanding the importance of our relationships with others.

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.  And not just him.  More significantly, they were annoyed that Jesus didn’t seem to understand who was important.  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 one from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? My time is more valuable than that.  The return on investment just isn’t there.

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 one hundred dollar bills.  A hundred bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, eight hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $1,000, 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. It also begins to color your relationships with other human beings. 

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 MoCo has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...which, 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.

In a society where we are choking on both an abundance of stuff and an abundance of things competing for our attention, Jesus reminds us of what is ultimately important.  Rebuilding relationships is important.  Turning your whole self towards the task of reaching out to the broken and the outcast is important.  

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 that chiclet phone that sits abandoned in the back of a kitchen drawer.  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 significantly, shown...that God and those who follow Christ care for them.

Orienting our lives towards the restoration of what has been broken?  That’s the Gospel call, and that’s what is important.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.