Monday, September 12, 2022

Listen and Learn: A Sermon for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost

 

Sometimes, what you think you'll be preaching about ends up not coming to fruition. I had brought 
the parable of the lost sheep to our vestry meeting for Bible study a few weeks ago. I figured that discussion would help me to shape my sermon. But as I sat down to read commentaries and think through the passage, I became interested in the start of Luke 15 and who had responded to Jesus' command, "Those with ears to hear listen!" Based on some other conversations I'd been having with people both inside and outside of St. Barnabas, this seemed to be the thing that the Spirit was telling me: "Preach!" 

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Text: Luke 15:1-10

My dad had a lot of sayings.

He had been in the Navy during World War II so some of his words of wisdom came peppered with some colorful language.
But I remember one that he would use on me and my brothers when our mouths would get to moving a mile a minute… sometimes without thinking through what we were saying.
My dad would look over the top of his glasses at us and say, “Listen and you might learn something!”
Jesus has a variation on that one: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” 
In fact… that’s exactly what Jesus has said right before the reading we just heard this morning.
“Let anyone with ears listen!”
As it turns out… we can see from the Gospel that there were some who responded to that command…
” Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near and listening to him.”
Hmmmm….
This is the start of another round of Jesus making what the late John Lewis would call “good trouble.”
The people who are coming closer to listen to Jesus are the undesirables. These tax collectors are Jews who’ve taken this job with the Roman Empire and have the task of going to their fellow Jews to get money for the Emperor.
And that’s who got the money: the Emperor to enrich the occupiers and oppressors of the Jewish people. This wasn’t like our modern tax system where what we pay helps keep the state and the country running.
Tax collectors were notorious for charging more to skim a profit off the top, so they made their wealth off the backs of their own people.
Needless to say…these weren’t the most beloved members of the Jewish community.
Another group is also listening…albeit from a distance…and not with the same…hmmm…enthusiasm.
Off in the corner… there are the Pharisees and the scribes grumbling and shaking their heads.
“Would you just LOOK at who he’s with now? This fellow… this Jesus… embraces sinners and eats with them.” (15:2).
The verb in our translation is that Jesus “welcomes” sinners but scholars note that the Greek indicates that it was an even stronger word…one which means “warmly embraces” them… making this even more scandalous scene.
In Psalm 1, the psalmist opens with:
“Happy are they who have NOT walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor lingered in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seats of the scornful.” (Ps.1:1).
Jesus is breaking the rules… and the Pharisees and scribes know what’s what in the rulebook.
They’re angry, irritated, and passing judgment.
And they’re listening.
So now that Jesus has everybody’s attention… he decides to present them some stories to get them… and us… thinking.
He actually gives three different “lost story” scenarios, but our lectionary diviners have kept us with the lost sheep and the lost coin parables. The third one in this section of the Gospel is the story of the Prodigal Son…which we already heard earlier this summer.
One thing to pick up on in this passage is how Jesus moves us away from seeing a strictly “male” God.
In the first story… God is a man… a shepherd with 100 sheep…so a pretty well-off shepherd.
In the second story… God is a woman… a housewife with ten silver coins.
To our ears… this may not sound like anything. But neither women nor shepherds were particularly powerful people in First Century Palestine.
Shepherds were outcasts. They were stinky men who weren’t allowed to testify in legal proceedings and such. We can probably see this shepherd as being like the despised tax collectors sitting beside Jesus.
Jesus tells the whole crowd a story of how God is like this wealthy shepherd who abandons 99 sheep in the wilderness to go find that one careless… good-for-nothing… A-D-H-D sheep that has gone off somewhere.
In the second instance… Jesus describes God as being like this housewife… who lost part of her two weeks’ worth of wages in between the floorboards or in the seat cushion in her house and stops doing all her work for her family to search for the blasted thing.
In both cases… God is extremely concerned about the one… and makes extraordinary efforts to find that one so it can be restored. Once found…there’s so much rejoicing…that God is running around to the neighbors’ homes and calling everyone out into the street to party and dance and rejoice because God found this one little lamb or one silver coin.
I can imagine these two sets of people listening to Jesus’ stories. And he’s looking at everyone and saying, “Isn’t that great?”
Well….hmmm…
When I was in massage school… I lived on a goat farm. Now goats and sheep are not the same… but they’re both animals. And while goats have an independent streak in them… sheep will tend to move in a flock.
In this scenario Jesus is presenting… God is so interested and cares so deeply for each one of us… that God will leave this flock of 99 sheep in the wilderness… unprotected… unsupervised… on their own… to go look for that one.
And—miracle of miracles—all those sheep are going to stay put?
No wolf is going to come and devour them?
This seems highly suspicious.
With ninety-nine of them… there would bound to have been a few that would have figured out that they’re unsupervised. After eating everything in front of them… they’d have likely  wandered away to find greener pastures.
One commentator… a Lutheran professor named Richard Swanson… says his uncle had a sheep farm. The uncle gets furious when he hears stories about God as the shepherd looking for the one lost sheep.
It’s so foolish and absurd for a shepherd to think that 99 sheep in the wilderness are just going to hang out and wait for the shepherd to come back… let alone be excited to see ol’ fickle Flopsy returned to the flock!
In that same vain… the housewife tearing up her house to look for one silver coin is outrageous. Nothing else is getting done while she peers under every piece of furniture and those depending on her are left wanting and waiting.
This disrupts the order of the household… and breaks the rules of good housekeeping.
And here’s Jesus saying:
Yes! This is the way of God. Rejoice!
This is the God who is crazy enough to put aside everything… go on a tear… bust through every obstacle to take the risk of searching for us.
It doesn’t matter what we’ve done…or where we’ve been… or who we’ve been hanging out with… God will keep searching for one of us.
And there is much rejoicing in the finding.
And how good it is to be found!
When we listen to God’s call, and feel ourselves immersed in the depth of God’s love for us, we can take that back out into the world.
It’s when we’ve listened and learned this way of God’s love that we’re ready to take on what ails our communities.
I think too many times we miss that call.
Too often…I think the tendency is to be more like the Pharisees and the scribes.
We know the rules. We know right practices.
We set up barriers.…
We keep telling ourselves that we must pass some sort of worthiness test… to be OK enough to receive that love of God.
We listen to the judgmental voices of those who are the self-appointed culture warriors deciding who gets to be part of the “clique of Christ.”
Somehow… we can’t see that in all these practices…we’re only pushing ourselves and others further away from Jesus.
It’s interesting that it’s those in the Gospel being the most judgmental and so sure of their own righteousness who are really the new lost ones so in need of being found.
If only they’d listen to Jesus calling to them.
Jesus’ mission was to keep bringing more and more people in closer… and embracing some of the least loveable characters. Showing them this God willing to up end order just to find them. That includes you and me.
The love of Jesus is life-giving and liberating. All those with ears to hear, listen!
In the name of God…F/S/HS.
 

 

 


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