The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Year C (Proper 19, BCP)

Saint David’s Church, West Seneca

16 September 2007

The Day of the Annual Parish Picnic

Jesus is keeping company with sinners, and it is a scandal! The Pharisees and scribes grumble and take him to task for consorting with people whose manner of life clearly alienates them from God. The concern of these religiously observant people is that Jesus is condoning sin when, for example, he chooses to eat with tax collectors (Luke 5.29-31). Tax collectors, in first century Palestine, were people who had chosen to break with the covenant community and cooperate with the oppressive Roman overlords. Not only did they implement the intake of revenue for the Roman government, but they added their own commission, enriching themselves at the expense of their overburdened fellow Judeans. At times, they used force, threats, and extortion. They were scorned by the religious community as traitors, and treated as Gentiles, which is to say, excluded because they were deemed morally and socially unfit, and lost to God.

Jesus did not argue with his critics, but he told them three stories, of which we have just heard two in Luke’s Gospel. The third, not in today’s portion, is perhaps the best known of Jesus’ forgiveness stories, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which might better be called the Parable of the Prodigal Father. As he so often does, Jesus manages to talk about several things all at once: wandering sheep, coins, and children (which are, of course, us); God, the relentless shepherd and lover of souls; and the breadth of the kingdom of God.

There is a contemporary truism about the various sorts of relationships that comprise our lives: You have only one chance to make a good first impression. In our fast-moving, materially preoccupied, success-oriented world, missing that chance can be pretty costly. But God does not see as the world sees. All the lessons for today tell us God looks again, at situations and at people.

The Lord spoke to Moses. Then, “Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24.3-4). After that, God called Moses up on the holy mountain, Mount Sinai, where he talked with him for forty days, which is an ancient way of saying for a very long time. While he was up there on the mountain, the people God had led out of slavery in Egypt were encamped, becoming more nervous and frightened with every passing day. They had experienced the fearsome holiness of God, manifested in thunder and lightning, the deafening sound of a trumpet, smoke emanating from the mountain, and tremors in the earth. For all they knew, Moses might be dead, having offended this mighty, invisible presence. “We do not know what has become of him” (Exodus 32.1). Now, we must remember this is a very early moment in the history of human perception of the nature of God. For the people of the Exodus, God was terrifyingly powerful, but the idea of God as also merciful and compassionate was a thing they had yet to learn. They asked Aaron, their priest, and Moses’ brother, to make gods for them, tangible images that would given them comfort in their fear they had been abandoned in the desert and left to die. And Aaron, not so steadfastly obedient to God in his brother’s absence, agreed to violate the very first words God gave to the people. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath…You shall not bow down to them or worship them…” (Exodus 20.4-5). Up on the mountain, God knew, and said to Moses, “…’Go down at once! Your people [note the change in emphasis: your people, not my people], whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt’” (Exodus 32.7-8). I will destroy this, and make a new nation from you. But Moses interceded for the people, saying, remember your promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (who is Jacob). “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32.14).

In the history of Israel, the most serious sin the people committed was apostasy, turning to other gods than the one God who had saved them and made them the chosen people. They did it again and again, from the very beginning of their relationship with him, and continuing century after century. They suffered, then they repented, and God kept calling them back, looking at them again, remembering they were his own beloved children.

With thankful heart, Paul says in the First Letter to Timothy, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners  –– of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1.15). He, who had persecuted the followers of Jesus in his zeal to defend sound doctrine and the purity of Jewish belief, became one of the most faithful proclaimers of Jesus message of forgiveness and inclusion. “…for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Timothy 1.16). When he encountered the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul saw his error, even as his sight was taken temporarily from him. He had sinned against God in doing what he thought God wanted of him, maintaining the Judaism in which he had been raised and educated. Paul came to himself, came to his senses, when he understood Jesus’ message of a God infinitely more concerned to find and restore his lost children than was the institutional religion of their day (or even, at times, ours). God looked, as the Psalmist says, into Paul’s heart for truth, and made him understand wisdom. God found in him an Apostle, worthy to announce the Good News.

The religious leaders complained about Jesus because he ate meals with religious and social outcasts. He associated with those who offended observers of the letter of the Law in thought, word and deed. First, I would like to suggest we give thanks for that proclivity of Our Lord Jesus, because it is how we come to be included in his circle. However, we should not sentementalise these people. Like the people in the story of the golden calf, and like Paul in his period of ignorant violence against the disciples of Jesus, those social outcasts made choices for their lives that hurt themselves and others. The Pharisees were not wrong to object to their behavior, and keep themselves separate from it. But they were wrong about who God most urgently wants in the Kingdom. Jesus’ stories of the lost sheep and lost coin teach us that God searches for his own wherever they may have strayed –– in brambles and ravines, in dingy alleyways and dark closets, both literal and figurative. That is very good news for us, for most of us have sinned against God in our lives, hurting ourselves and others, and not choosing, first, to give glory to the God who made us to delight in and care for his creation.

God truly loves those who seek to live their whole lives as an offering and sacrifice to God. But few of us succeed in doing that, with never a misstep. God equally loves those who mess up, recognize their fault, and turn again to him. There is “more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15.7), because the one thought to be lost and dead turns out to be, after all, alive and present. Every life, every lamb, even you, even I. Every one of us whom God made, in order that he might love us, is precious in his sight, and welcome at God’s banquet table.