Poolesville Presbyterian Church
09.11.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
I seem to have misplaced one of my children. The evidence is strong.
These last couple of weeks, I’ll wander through the house, and passing that bedroom find it still neatly kempt. The downstairs sofa, unoccupied. The upstairs bathroom sink, devoid of beard trimmings.
There’s a missing kid. Haven’t seen him in weeks.
I know he’s somewhere in Harrisonburg, Virginia. But I’m not particularly stressed about it, although that was once not the case.
I remember that feeling, when they vanish. You wander into IKEA with Child A and Child B. Child A noodles about as you wander through the maze of oddly named cheap objects, the Huurvissmurkl leather sofas and the Leifmoosen hatracks and multicolored Nurp sock storage boxes. You are, as best you can tell, heading the the right direction, as you fiddle with the pencils and checklists and storemaps. It’s a good thing you’ve decided to go with the man-to-man approach to child coverage, because Child A is noodling about aimlessly, struggling to track along with you as you drift through the pseudoScandinavian plywood.
And then your spouse surfaces, and Child B is not with them. “I thought you had them.” “No, you had them.”
There’s a moment of panic so intense it borders on sublime, a great wallop of adrenaline and full on stress hormone production. Your senses are heightened and sharpened, and the flow of time itself seems to slow. You look around, wildly, but all you see is Huurvissmurlk leather sofas and Leifmoosen hatracks and multicolored Nurp sock storage boxes.
Every part of your being is turned towards that goal: find the missing one. And sure, you’ve got a replacement child, who appears completely unphased by the sudden disappearance of their sibling. But you don’t care.
You chase after them until they are found.
Our culture doesn’t value the lost. We are, after all, a society that values winning and winners, and people that are lost don’t fit into that category. It’s easy to assume that this is because things have gotten worse over human history, that we’re at a place of degradation, that a century of crass industrial consumerism has left our souls empty and uncaring. If we lose a set of earbuds, we just order another pair on Amazon.
We feel, it seems, increasingly the same way about other souls.
But then again, as we listen to Jesus this morning, maybe things aren’t so different from how they were back in the day. Human beings have 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 households of the rich, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. Pharisees and scribes 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, on the other hand, would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about. But shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers didn’t do field work. 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 ROI 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 between Matthew and Luke? Remember, Luke’s gospel was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so its 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, pitching it out 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. You start seeing them as means to an end, valued for what they can do for you. You give up on them.
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.
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.
What Jesus asks us to remember, this morning as every morning, is that we share a little bit of that anticipatory joy in heaven at the possibility that what was once lost will be found.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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