Party Like the 1%
Luke 15:1-10
When I was a much younger man, long before I was a pastor or had any thoughts of even considering the ministry, I wanted to be a musician. I was in a band, a rock trio, that practiced weekly and played one or two gigs a month. Wanting more time behind the drums, I began taking lessons once a week from a private tutor who rented a studio not far from the publishing company where I worked.
Like a lot of musicians in New York, Dan had a full-time job and only taught lessons on the side. By day he was a middle-school social studies teacher. He wasn’t in a band himself, but every so often he’d play a gig for hire.
I went to see him play one night at a bar near NYU. Still dressed in his school attire of oxford shirt, khakis, and sensible shoes, Dan looked as if ready to explain the Electoral College to a bunch of 13-year-olds, not accompany an electric guitar in a downtown pub. Amused, I found a table near the stage and took in the show.
Afterward, as Dan was walking toward my table, he spotted someone else that he knew and asked me if I minded if his friend joined us. “Of course not,” I said.
Unlike Dan, his friend dressed like he was ready to rock ’n’ roll. Black leather biker jacket, black t-shirt, tight jeans, cowboy boots, and a head of long, dark hair parted down the middle—the uniform of a heavy-metal rocker. My first thought was, “How in the world are these guys friends?”
Dan’s friend didn’t just look the part of a heavy-metal musician, turns out he was one. As he mentioned almost immediately, he had once been the guitarist in a metal band that had a couple of hits in the mid 80s when I was in middle school. Only thing was, he wasn’t the guitarist at that time, having left the band before they recorded their breakthrough album. He was like Pete Best, the drummer for the Beatles before Ringo.
The three of us chatted a bit before Dan’s friend excused himself. After he left, I saw something underneath the chair where he had been sitting. It was a wallet. I looked for a driver’s license, but the only ID I saw was a scuba-diving certification. Sure enough, it belonged to Dan’s friend. I handed the wallet to Dan and thought nothing further of it.
At the start of my drum lesson the next week, Dan handed me a wad of cash. “What’s this?” I asked.
“That’s the cash that was in my friend’s wallet when you found it. He wanted you to have it.” Apparently, Dan’s friend had been frantic when he realized he had lost his wallet, but it wasn’t his money or credit cards that concerned him, it was the scuba-diving card, which I can only assume must have been expensive to replace. Feeling both relieved and joyful at having recovered that which he had lost, he wanted to share that joy with me.
As Jesus explains in the parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin, this is how God feels about finding us when we were lost to sin. God wants to rejoice. God wants to share that joy with the entire host of heaven. “Just so, I tell you,” Jesus says, “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” What an image! Imagine all of heaven rejoicing over you. Not celebrating your accomplishments but simply rejoicing in the fact that you were lost and have been found.
Today finds us back in the Gospel of Luke, where we will remain, with one exception, until just before Thanksgiving. Jesus and the disciples are making their way to Jerusalem. Along the way, large masses of people are drawn to him. The sick. The lame. The blind. The poor. The outcast. And also the curious. The bored. Even those who disapprove of him for a variety of reasons. Because he doesn’t follow the rules. Because he has no respect for tradition. Because he challenges their authority. Because he associates with the wrong sort of people. Disreputable types. You know, sinners.
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.”
“This fellow” really does seem a little too polite a phrase, but in the original Greek it carries an attitude of contempt. And contempt is what the righteous religious leaders such as the Pharisees and scribes would have felt for tax collectors. After all, tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes on their fellow Jews on behalf of the Romans. They were despised because they were seen as collaborators with the Roman imperialists.
And the “sinners” that gather around Jesus, who this fellow not only tolerates but even welcomes into his presence and around his table, are not run-of-the-mill sinners like you and me. We can present as respectable because we are so adept at hiding our sins. No, the sinners who are drawn to Jesus wear their sin on their sleeves. They are habitual sinners whose disreputable reputations precede them. They are like Hester Prynne, the main character from The Scarlet Letter, which you probably read in high school. Hester is forced by the community to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing to represent her sin of adultery. The sinners drawn to Jesus may as well have a scarlet letter emblazoned on their foreheads. They are moral disgraces, public outcasts.
So when the religious leaders—those responsible for promoting public decency and morality—see Jesus welcoming, accepting, befriending, and even sharing a table with such degenerates, they do not even try to hide their disdain. They grumble amongst themselves: Can you believe this rabbi has the audacity to teach about morality when he pals around with these good-for-nothing lowlifes?
I know it’s easy for us to think of the scribes and Pharisees as these Olympian hypocrites, but let’s remember that they are the religious establishment. They are, in their own eyes, certainly, but also within the context of their society, the good, upstanding people. They are the keepers of the faith, the upholders of tradition, servants of the one true God. They are the presbytery, the pastor, and the congregation.
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine the most loathsome, the most vile public sinner you can think of. Someone whom you’d see on the street and say instantly, “There goes a sinner if ever there was one.” Whatever person you have in your mind, now imagine them parking themselves in the pew next to you. What would your reaction be?
If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d probably feel embarrassed, maybe even a bit uneasy. “What are they doing here? Don’t they know this is a church?”
It’s just this sort of disdain that Jesus observes in the scribes and Pharisees that leads him to tell these two parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. The parables follow the same basic format:
a person (shepherd/woman)
in possession of something dear to them (100 sheep/10 coins)
loses one of them (sheep/coin),
searches diligently for it,
and upon finding it, invites others to join in the celebration
“Which one of you,” Jesus begins the parable of the Lost Sheep, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Sounds reasonable enough, but is it? What shepherd worth his salt would leave the rest of the flock, exposing them to danger, to go after one dummy who wandered off on his own? Why risk the 99% to save just 1%? The math doesn’t add up. Any sensible shepherd would chalk up the one as lost and preserve the ninety-nine.
“Or what woman,” Jesus begins the next parable, “does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully” until she finds her lost coin? Again, perfectly reasonable. But then we’re told that this woman is so elated to have retrieved one-tenth of her wealth that she proceeds to blow it all on a party with her friends and neighbors. Isn’t that a bit extravagant, even wasteful?
But such is the joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. All of heaven bursts out in riotous song. Cue the music, God says. Forget the paper and plastic; bring out the good china. Tap that wine barrel marked “special reserve” that we’ve been saving for the right occasion. It’s time to celebrate. This sinner who was lost has been found!
Why risk the 99% to save just 1%? The math doesn’t add up.
I mentioned a moment ago how these two parables follow the same basic outline: person loses something of value, searches for it, finds it, and celebrates with friends and neighbors. Another thing they have in common is that if the lesson of each parable is repentance, then the metaphor used in each parable doesn’t quite work. A sheep doesn’t repent; nor does a coin. In the parables, neither the lost sheep nor the lost coin does anything to be found. The sheep doesn’t find its way home; the shepherd puts it on his shoulders and carries it. And the coin is an inanimate object. All either one contributes to their being found is simply to be lost. All of the action that leads to them being found comes from the one searching for them—the shepherd and the woman. In other words, from God.
Now, I’m not saying that Jesus is using the wrong metaphors, not by any means. But I think the lesson he is teaching isn’t primarily about repentance but about the nature of God. What Jesus is saying is that God is not sitting back on his heavenly Barcalounger watching to see whether we repent. “Oh, look! Martha repented of her sin. I guess I should get up and welcome her back.”
No! God is like a shepherd who leaves the flock and goes off in a desperate search to find the one that has lost its way. And when God finds that one, God doesn’t say, “Let’s you and me walk back home together. You do your part, and I’ll do mine.” No, God is like a shepherd who hoists the sheep on his shoulders and carries it home.
And God is like a woman searching frantically for her lost coin, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house, and searching carefully until she finds it, not resting until she finds it. And once she does find it, as with the shepherd, she celebrates, and not by herself, but with all her friends and neighbors. Because her joy is so great that it must be shared.
Now, I know all this talk of joy and celebration seems out of step with the events of this past week—both what happened out in Utah and what happened just down the street from here. One of the blessings of preaching the gospel each week is that no matter how bad the news of the world is, the gospel is always good news. It’s good news because the truth is that we are lost. Each one of us is lost in our own way, but I’m going to specifically mention one way in which so many of us are lost.
We are treading water in an ever-rising tide of tribalism in this country, and we are at risk of drowning. There’s a well known contemporary theologian named Miroslav Volf. He’s from Croatia, and much of his theology was formed by his experience of the mass bloodletting that followed in the wake of the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia. In his book titled Exclusion and Embrace he talks about the challenge of recognizing the full humanity of those we perceive as enemies. He writes, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans, even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”
Community of sinners. It’s tempting to look upon those we regard as enemies or unmitigated sinners in the same way that the scribes and Pharisees do, as the other. “Would you look at those sinners over there.” But rather than thinking in this legalistic way of righteous vs sinners, we ought to understand ourselves first and foremost as lost. For we are all lost, and yet the good news is and always will be that Jesus is determined to find us and bring us home.