Rev.
Debbie Cato
Luke
15:1-10
Fairfield
Community Church
September
25, 2022
Let us pray: Let the words of our mouths and
the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our
redeemer. As we approach your Word, may we be ready to receive the message you
intend for us today. Amen.
One of Ninety-Nine
A New
York Times travel article in April, 2008 on pubs in Oxford, England titled “A
Pub Crawl through the Centuries” commented that “a good pub is a ready made
party, a home away from home, a club anyone can join.” Scott-Bader-Saye, author and Academic Dean
and Professor at Southwest Seminary says, “One can imagine the Jesus of Luke
15 sitting in such a pub, eating and drinking with “anyone” to the chagrin of the proper and the pure. To
be more specific, in Luke 15, Jesus is eating and drinking with “tax collectors
and sinners” while the “Pharisees and the scribes” are grumbling about the
company he keeps – actually the company he seeks out. In response to this muttering, Jesus tells a
series of “lost and found” parables that have to do with homes and parties and
letting anyone in. Who is in and who is
out, who is lost and who is found? What
does it mean to be saved by Christ and what does it mean to be the community of
Christ today?”[1]
Would you be surprised if I told you that as I read this and as I studied, I kept thinking about our values and our meeting last Sunday when we put action to our values? The Holy Spirit, who is heavily involved in my sermon preparation, kept bringing to mind that we will be going out into our community. We will be welcoming our new neighbors with welcome baskets full of information about our community and letting them know they are welcome at our church. We will be serving a meal to our fire department and EMT volunteers to say thank you for all they do to keep our community safe. We will adopt PCAL residents who need some TLC and extra help and be prayer partners with them, extending our relationship beyond just what I do on Tuesdays. We will have monthly game nights at the community center and serve a meal, providing fun activities for families throughout our community and an opportunity for us to get to know our neighbors. Janel is going to help us match one-on-one with the preschoolers and pray for them throughout the preschool year, building those relationships with their families. We are going to serve and eat lunch a couple of times with our preschool families to deepen our relationships – really get to know them. Let them know we care about them. We are going to do community service projects on the 5th Sundays as a way of worship. In the spring we will do a hayride food drive and tail gate party, supporting our community food bank and building community all at the same time. Everyone will be included. Everyone will be in. And in the process of all these fun activities, we will learn what it means to be the community of Christ today.
So, can you picture it? The crowds are pressing in around Jesus to hear his teachings. All kinds of people make up this community that have come to hear him teach. They gather around Jesus for a variety of reasons: the disciples to receive instructions; the Pharisees and Sadducees to keep tabs on Jesus’ radical teachings; and the people who do not really belong anywhere because they have lived so much of life on the fringes – the edge of society. In this passage they are described as the tax collectors and sinners, which mean that they are the people no one else wants to hang around with, for fear that their reprehensible reputations would implicate the good reputations of the other. Somehow these outsiders have crowded into the community to listen.[2] This is a rather interesting guest list but here they are, all eating dinner with Jesus and straining to hear what he has to say.
I can imagine the whispering. “Wh0 invited them?” “Doesn’t Jesus know who they are? Doesn’t he know what they do for a living?” “Who is Jesus, really? He talks about godly things, but he eats with those kinds of people.”
Maybe Jesus can hear the whispers. Maybe he can sense the division growing in the crowd. But He begins to talk about the nature of God in ways that everyone gathered together that day will be able to understand. He uses economic terms, talking about things they value. He wants them to think about what is most important to them.
First, Jesus talks about the shepherd who is responsible for one hundred sheep. When the shepherd discovers that one of the sheep is missing, he leaves the rest of the sheep, all the ninety-nine sheep that are safe, and goes out searching for the one lost sheep. He will not rest until that one lost sheep is found. He values the health and safety of each and every sheep in his flock. Not one sheep has more value than the other. Finding the lost sheep, the shepherd brings that sheep back into the safety of the fold of the flock. Then he calls his neighbors to celebrate. The lost sheep is back where it belongs.
Then Jesus tells of the woman who has ten silver coins. This is hard-earned money she has scraped together and saved to feed her family. If she loses just one of those coins, Jesus says, she will light a lamp, sweep the house, and diligently search for that coin until she finds it. Those coins are how she will support her family and we can all understand the value of providing well-being for our children and family members. Likely, her coin was a drachma, worth the price of a sheep or one-fifth the price of an ox. When she finds it, she is overjoyed. She calls her friends to celebrate finding the lost coin.
Think of that thing that is most precious in your life and what it would be like to lose it, whether through carelessness, or intent, or theft. Something on which you place extreme value goes missing. You would be devastated. You would search and search and search until you found what you had lost.
God is like the shepherd who values each sheep in the flock, like the woman who accounts for every silver coin in her purse. God treasures every child of the family. When one goes missing, God goes into search mode. God’s nature is love, and love looks like one who goes out tirelessly searching, because the one who is lost is so lost that she cannot find her way back home.[3]
I wonder who we will find as we go about our community? Who will answer the door when we knock with a welcome basket? What we imagine when we start something like this is enthusiastic surprise and delight at the door that we would think to welcome them in such a wonderful way. “Thank you!” we imagine. “How nice of you to do this for us.” We imagine them being thankful. We even imagine them coming to church the next Sunday and joining our church family. This could happen. It’s possible. But I hope that’s not why we are doing it. We could be met at the door with a less than welcome response. A skeptical response. We may not get a thank you. We may feel like the family “didn’t deserve our gift.” Like they are “that kind of family.” I hope that’s not why we are doing it. Every single new neighbor we meet is a beloved child of God, loved beyond measure by the Sovereign God who created them. And we are charged to love them as well. Who is in and who is out, who is lost and who is found? What does it mean to be saved by Christ and what does it mean to be the community of Christ today?[4]
I wonder who will come to our monthly meal and game night at the Community Center? If I was a betting person, I would bet there will be families that we meld with better than others. Families that are “like” us and families that are different. There will be kids that we gravitate toward and kids that we don’t. We will be tested. Why are we doing this? Every single person, every single child and youth that shows up is a beloved child of God, loved beyond measure by the Sovereign God who created them. And we are charged to love them as well. Not because we find them loveable but because God loves me. Who is in and who is out, who is lost and who is found? What does it mean to be saved by Christ and what does it mean to be the community of Christ today?[5]
With everything we do, we will be challenged to love. We will have to continually ask ourselves, “Why are we doing this?” Is it for self-gratification or is it to be Christ in our community? To be the church? To do the things that we are charged to do because God’s grace and love flow over us each and every day? Because when we were lost, Christ came looking for us?
Who is in and who is out, who is lost and who is found? What does it mean to be saved by Christ and what does it mean to be the community of Christ today?[6] Let us pray.
Loving
and compassionate God. Thank you for
searching for us when we get lost. As we move forward with the things you have
laid on our hearts, help us to let everyone in; to love without condition; to
do without expectations. Help us to find
the lost in our community. In Jesus
name, Amen.
[1] Feasting on the
Word, Year C, Volume 4. Proper 19. Luke 15:1-10.
Theological Perspective. Scott
Bader-Saye. P 68.
[2]
Feasting on the Word, Year C,
Volume 4. Proper 19. Luke 15:1-10.
Pastoral Perspective. Helen Montgomery DeBevoise. P 68
[3]Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume
4. Proper 19. Luke 15:1-10.
Pastoral Perspective. Helen
Montgomery DeBevoise. P 70.
[4]Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume
4. Proper 19. Luke 15:1-10.
Theological Perspective. Scott
Bader-Saye. P 68.
[5] Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4.
Proper 19. Luke 15:1-10. Theological Perspective. Scott Bader-Saye. P 68.
[6] Ibid
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