September 15, 2019
Text: Luke 15
I want to begin by thanking you for your prayers in my battle with cancer and for the Spirit’s guidance to finish my book. I am happy to still be here and to be working on the last chapter of my book. Please keep those prayers coming.
A few weeks ago, the 8th Day Leadership Team asked me to lead off a series of once-a-month teachings about discerning our future as a church. Given the powerful history we inherit as a child of the Church of the Saviour, what now? What can we say about how God in Christ is working with us as a community now and what clues are given to us for how God is calling us into the future?
When I accepted this assignment my first instinct was to tell some of the inspiring stories from Church of the Saviour’s past. There is a lot to tell, but upon further reflection it occurred to me it would be better to start with “now” and a place or places where we perceive the Holy Spirit at work in our midst. So this is what I am going to do.
Recently, we have defined ourselves as a church as followers of Jesus or to use a New Testament definition “people of the way,” a title the early church used to identify itself. Before it opened its doors in 1948 to others, the seven founding members of the Church of the Saviour spent a year discerning what it meant to be a people of the way of Jesus. During that year they spent significant time on vocabulary which they found empowering when they reached the point of meaning roughly the same thing by the same words. For example, what comes to mind when we use the names God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit? Early Church of the Saviour folk, like early church people, were not interested in formulas or intellectual doctrines per se. What they were looking for was how they saw God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit at work. Matthew 18:19-20 says, “Truly, I tell you if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
What does it look and feel like to be on the same page in terms of gathering and acting in Jesus’ name?
Today’s lectionary text in the Gospel, Luke 15:1-10, gives us some clues of being and not being on the same page, especially when we add the third parable of the Prodigal Son to the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin and work with the Luke 15 chapter as one unit.
Some may ask: how can a story told 2000 years ago help us see Jesus at work among us now? My answer for 8th Day is … Barbara Williams. When I think of Barbara, I think of Luke 15. Let me explain.
For our visitors, Barbara Williams was a frequent attender here at 8th Day and the Potter’s House over many years. Barbara died recently and we had a memorial service for her in this room a week ago. Barbara had problems controlling her behavior. I would describe her as part sanity and part chaos. At times her inner chaos would get so bad when she went to the Potter’s House for a free meal or cup of coffee that they had to ask her to stay away until she calmed down. From time to time she was like that here, but several of us reached out to Barbara to connect with her, often to quiet her down so that she could participate.
Despite Barbara’s inner chaos I think we would agree that she was a special gift to us. In relating regularly to her, we were exposed to the pain and chaos on the streets of this city in a way totally different from reading about human suffering in a book or a newspaper. Barbara lived that suffering and was gradually learning and trusting us enough to hold herself together and relate to us as a fellow human being.
I ask you to keep Barbara in mind as we work with the three parables in Luke 15. In this teaching I am particularly indebted to New Testament scholar Kenneth E. Bailey and his book The Cross and the Prodigal. Kenneth Bailey spent forty years living and teaching New Testament in the Middle East. During this time, he often discussed Bible passages at length with Arab Christian village folks, learning from them what they saw and heard as they read between the lines what was really going on between Jesus and his audiences. During those forty years Bailey also spent a lot of time in Christian-Moslem conversations and has some important things to tell us from his conversations.
Bailey notes that Moslem faith and Christian faith are significantly different. This is not to argue which is the greatest but to caution us against trying to blend the two. You can’t blend real differences without doing injustice to both parties. Mutual respect is not about finding a way to blend diverse ideas but each side listening respectfully to the other and acknowledging what they have in common and where they differ.
Bailey says that across the centuries Moslem voices have charged Christians with perverting the identity and message of Jesus, pointing to the parable of the prodigal son as evidence. From the Moslem perspective, the father in the parable of the prodigal son obviously represents God while the youngest son represents humankind. The son leaves home, gets into trouble and finally decides to return to his father to seek his forgiveness. On arrival the father welcomes the son and thus demonstrates that he, the father, is “merciful and compassionate.” There is no cross and no incarnation, no “son of God” and “no savior,” no “word that becomes flesh” and no “way of salvation,” no death and no resurrection. The son in Luke 15 needs no help to return home. From the perspective of Islam, Jesus is a good Muslim. From their point of view the Koran preserves the true message of the prophet Jesus.
In Bailey’s conversations, Arab Christians see it differently. Bailey would argue, and I agree with him, that the modern secular world has more in common with Islam than New Testament Christianity. Bailey says that the Middle Eastern peasant culture can teach the difference by its insight into what lies between the lines, what is felt and not spoken – that is, what is of deepest significance.
For example, in the Middle East “everybody knows” that to be polite to your father is more important than to obey him. Jesus disagrees and backs up his disagreement with story of a father and his two boys in which the good son is the son who obeyed, even if he was rude to his father.
When Jesus tells the stories in Luke 15, he is on his way to Jerusalem where a violent storm is about to break out on him in an attempt to eliminate the threat he poses to the ruling elite. In Luke 15, the rumblings are obvious and expose a growing divide: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’.” (Luke 15:1-2)
There is a lot of pain in the stories. There is joy, too, because liberation is going on. One example are tax collectors. The way the Roman Empire collected its onerous taxes was to contract with tax-farmers who would buy from the Romans the right to collect taxes in a certain area and then the tax-farmers would hire local people to do the collecting. It was a corrupt system with a lot of graft. The local people who signed up as collectors were hated as collaborators with ferocious intensity. The tax collectors lived alongside people who hated them. Other despised people were sex-workers and the poorest of the poor deemed unclean because they failed to practice kosher. They couldn’t afford it. The unclean included shepherds whose profession ranked them at the bottom of the barrel.
Jesus mingled freely with people we identify today as “other.” He talked to them in a comfortable way of give and take. The crowning blow was that he ate with them. To eat with another person in the Mideast signifies acceptance at a very deep level. No wonder the poor and the “other” of that day were drawn to Jesus. They liked Jesus and he liked them. In DC society Barbara Williams was an “other.” To us she was a sister.
In Luke 15 Jesus tells three stories about the cost of discipleship in finding and bringing home the lost. It is Jesus’ way of telling people who he is. Some like what they hear. Others find Jesus offensive. Keep in mind a main point – the cost of discipleship.
Because these stories are so familiar and in the interest of time, I am going to skim over the details and focus on what Jesus is revealing and asking of his audience.
First, what’s the big deal about losing one sheep when you still have ninety-nine? In first century Arab village culture, one hundred sheep was a large flock with many owners. Aunt Susy and other relatives might own six or seven each and if the lost sheep were one of theirs it was a big deal. For a large flock, the village hired one to two or more shepherds who cost very little because this was the perhaps the only job they could get.
What is immediately striking in the parable of the lost sheep is that the shepherd is the hero in a culture where shepherds were looked down upon as unclean. Moreover, the parable is actually a retelling of the 23rd Psalm: “the Lord is my shepherd…. Though I walk in the valley of death, I fear not because you are with me.” In telling this story Jesus chooses a figure of low esteem to represent the good shepherd of Psalm 23 who is also the divine presence among the people.
The elite didn’t know what to do with Jesus. He was obviously smart and knew the scriptures, but his mission seemed to be to turn their traditions upside down. For example, between the lines Jesus is speaking critically to the elites, saying, in effect, “you, the leaders, have lost your sheep. I am going after the people you are despising and bringing them home. Now you have the gall to come to me complaining! Don’t you realize that I am making up for your mistakes.” Not a nice thing to imply.
What goes unsaid is the cost of finding and bringing home the lost sheep. In that day and today, society struggles with the question: does the lost individual matter or are “the people” alone important? Jesus gives his answer. When the shepherd pays a high price to find the one lost sheep, he thereby offers the profoundest security to the many. This is a reference to the price of the cross – Jesus dying on the cross for all humankind that offers security to every individual with God and before God. This is who Jesus is.
There is more. Sheep are pretty dumb animals. When they discover that they have wandered off from the flock they lay down as if paralyzed. When the shepherd finds the sheep, the shepherd has to carry it back on his shoulders to the village, assuming the other shepherds have returned the rest of the flock to their corrals underneath the houses of their owners in the village. The hardest job of the shepherd is the job of restoration. Barbara Williams came to 8th Day on her own. The tough and persistent job was the job of restoration, building trust between Barbara and the community. Some of you did that job really well.
Jesus addressed the Pharisees at the meal in Luke 15, as religious leaders, meaning the “shepherds of Israel.” Jesus in that setting is holding them responsible for any person who is lost from the community.
There is more. As traditionally interpreted, the lost sheep symbolizes the repentant sinner. Here we are in for a surprise. Jesus is defining repentance strangely. The one thing the lost sheep does is accept being found. The sheep is discovered to be missing. The shepherd pays the price to search for, find and restore the lost sheep to the flock. Terrified and alone, the sheep is overjoyed to be found. In the story it becomes a symbol for repentance. This means that repentance is not a work which earns our rescue. Rather, it is accepting being found.
Barbara did not have the capacity to change her life, but she came back week after week to this community because here she was being found.
The second story in Luke 15, the parable of the lost coin is basically a retelling of the lost sheep story. If Jesus is the Good Shepherd, he is also the Good Woman. Jesus who had both men and women as disciples wanted his message to resonate down deep. The woman in the second story has lost a coin worth a day’s wages, not an insignificant sum for a poor family. She probably berates herself for being careless but, knowing she has not been out of the house, looks high and low to find the coin in one of the many cracks in her floor. When she does find it, her joy, like that of the Good Shepherd, cries out to be shared with the neighbors. Since the coin was lost in the house, the coin is a symbol of the lost people within Israel.
Now the third story which drives home Jesus’ message to his audience, both the elite and the outcasts. A younger son does the unthinkable in that culture. He demands, receives and sells his share of his inheritance while his father is still living, indicating that he wished his father were dead and he wanted nothing more to do with him. The request is a form of mutiny. Theologically, Jesus is saying that humankind in its rebelliousness against God really wants him dead, or shrunk to the point that he no longer represents authority.
Initially, the younger son thinks only of himself. He does not break the law. Rather he breaks his father’s heart, and he doesn’t seem to care who else will be hurt. The wealth of a village family is not held in stocks or savings accounts but in clusters of homes, in animals and land. To suddenly lose one-third of their total wealth would mean a staggering loss to the entire family clan and put numbers of servant and field workers out of work.
The younger son is ungrateful for the love of his father whom he no longer wants in his life. In rejecting his family, he also rejects his village who in turn rejects him. The older son sees what is happening but does not pick up his expected role as mediator between father and younger son. In a village quarrel the two partners never make up directly. To do so, someone would have to lose face, which is unthinkable in that culture. The process of reconciliation takes place through a third party, called the mediator who fluctuates between the two parties until he arranges a solution that both sides can accept. In that culture there can be no winners and losers. The silence of the older brother indicates his refusal to mediate which is a clear indication of his own broken relationship with his father.
By granting the request of the younger son which no father in that culture would do, the father grants freedom even to turn away from him. Still, the father remains the father. He does not sever his relationship with his son. The relationship is broken by the son’s action, but the father still holds out his broken end of the rope of relationship. In so doing he suffers. The father’s suffering provides the foundation of the possibility of the son’s return. Bailey says that this story makes abundantly clear that Jesus has not taken an oriental patriarch as a model for God. Rather he breaks all bounds of patriarchal culture to present a picture of a father who alone should shape our image of God as our heavenly father. Each of the three actors reveal their character in the parable: the younger son by what he asks, the father by what he does, and the older son by what he does not do.
In summary, the younger son “gets out of Dodge” as fast as he can, goes to a distant country, and proceeds to quickly exhaust his inheritance in spendthrift living perhaps in a futile effort to “win friends and influence people” and establish himself as “somebody.” He becomes desperate, surviving at the bottom when he decides upon a face-saving plan. He will go home, train and then work as a craftsman. Living independently, he will be able to avoid his brother, earn some money, pay his father back and thus save himself through his own effort.
The text says that the younger brother comes to himself, thinks how his father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare; therefore, rather than perish in hunger, he decides to arise and go to his father. The verb “arise” is key. A resurrection is needed, only the younger son thinks that he can accomplish that resurrection on his own. There is no contemplation of reconciliation or restoration to sonship. However, before the story ends there will be a genuine “resurrection,” at the edge of the village, accomplished by his father’s costly love.
As he heads for home the younger brother does not yet understand what he has done and what it really means. He has not faced the fact that he broke his father’s heart. Reconciliation is not a part of his game plan. He will get some job training, establish himself in a new trade, earn a living and be able to eat. He has no idea of what reconciliation means or what it costs. At the edge of the village he is still lost. This is soon to change, not by what he does but what the father does.
As the younger son returned to the village, he expected his father to remain aloof in the house, while he made his way through the village and faced the hostility. But this is not what happened. His father saw him in the distance and “races” to him, not in the slow ambling walk expected of a man of his age and stature in that culture. Taking the front edge of his robes, he runs as he hasn’t run for forty years to get to his son before the villagers do, breaking all rules of oriental patriarchy. He knows what his son will face in the village and takes upon himself in the eyes of the village the shame and humiliation of the rebellious son. Bailey says that when he does this, he becomes a symbol of God incarnate. He does not wait for the prodigal to come to him but rather at great cost goes down and out to find and resurrect the one who is lost and dead. Without citing the story itself, Paul gives its meaning: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.”(2 Corinthians 5:19).
The action of the father shatters the son’s prepared speech, leaving him speechless. The father gives him in the sight of the villagers several significant gifts, all symbolizing restoration and reconciliation. He then gives instruction to the servants to kill the fatted calf saved for a very special occasion to honor his returning son. The whole village is invited to join in the celebration. By coming, they follow the lead of the father in also accepting the son. For his part, the son does nothing except surrender without reservation to the love and generosity of his father. His response will come later, not in the story, but in his resurrected life. This is what we were beginning to get to with Barbara Williams, her acknowledgement of being at one with us and God.
Then the story comes to the older brother, the silent one who is outwardly obedient but inwardly as estranged from his father as his younger brother had been. In that culture the older brother was expected to stand beside his father to welcome his returning brother as well as the villagers who joined in the celebration. He can’t bring himself to do this. The father is told he is standing outside so again the father is called upon to humble himself by going out to try to persuade his older son to join him and take up his role in the banquet. Because of his refusal to empty himself of the past, he has no future in that space.
The elite sitting closest to Jesus at the village meal must have recognized that Jesus was talking about them. But rather than let themselves be “found” and “carried” by Jesus to a new way of seeing and living, they surrender instead to their anger and rejection of Jesus and later join the scoffers at his crucifixion and as deniers of his resurrection.
In summary, I believe Luke 15 helps us address two really important questions for us as a congregation
First, what does it mean to be followers of Jesus as a congregation?
Second, what might Jesus be calling us to as his witness in the world in a time of serious danger of chaos and losing our democracy?
With regard to the first question, I believe that the Church of the Saviour was founded over seventy years ago as a people committed to stand with Jesus against his opponents. This means that anyone who wants to be here, whether rich or poor, black or white, male or female, liberal or conservative, coming with your life in order, in chaos, or a mixture is welcome. I am proud of that legacy and it is my perception that we have been faithful to it and can authentically praise God for our evidence of faithfulness.
With regard to the second question: what might Jesus be calling us to now, I sense stirrings to help raise up a public voice in response to the threat of losing our democracy. Here I would remind you of the Chinese proverb that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The Church of the Saviour tradition has had a lot of experience with taking small steps that lead to bigger steps.