Scripture Luke 15:1-10
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.”
So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, 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? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Sermon
When I was seventeen, I left Ventnor, NJ, where I had grown up, for Chestnut Hill, MA, the place where I would go to Boston College. And I loved it. There was something about Massachusetts that immediately felt warm and welcoming. Strangely, it almost immediately felt like home. I made friends. Based on my application, I was invited to a retreat for religious-minded freshmen. Of course, I immediately fell in with the crowd who played music at the campus masses and started volunteering to work with a team that led worship. And fall on a New England campus was every bit as beautiful as all the pictures.
But one night that first fall, I was walking through the campus to my dorm, and I saw students coming out of a chapel. And I was struck with a sense of emptiness that terrified me. Everything—on a campus I loved, where I already had friends—was bleak. And the idea of God—which had always been a part of me, never questioned, never doubted—suddenly seemed crazy. Absurd. Foolish. I was lost, and I could not see a path that would take me home again—not home to New Jersey, home to myself, the person who trusted God completely and loved to sing songs of praise.
The fifteenth chapter of the gospel according to Luke contains one of our most beloved parables in scripture—the parable of the prodigal son. But that parable is part of a set—the third in a trio of what are called “the lost and found” parables. Jesus shares these parables in response to grumblings he’s hearing from a crowd of religious leaders.
Parables are tricky. They are stories, usually brief, always told for the purpose of putting some new and unfamiliar idea in the mind of the listener. And these ideas are often uncomfortable, unsettling. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says,
If we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough. Such listening is not only a challenge; it is also an art, and this art has become lost. [i]
Let’s find the challenge Jesus is putting to his listener. Our first task is to notice: What kind of grumbling is Jesus responding to? So here’s the opening of our passage:
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.” (Luke 15:1-2)
First, let’s talk about the tax collectors. Even in our day a lot of folks have hard feelings about taxes. But the tax collectors Jesus is hanging with are particularly hated by their people. A., These are Jews who are collecting taxes from their own people. B., they are collecting taxes for the hated Roman Empire; and C., they are collecting more than the Empire is asking for and skimming off the top. They are considered traitors. Naturally, they are not welcome at any of the fancy dinner parties Jesus has been invited to by the religious leaders. They are shunned.
The word ‘sinners’ here is often sexualized—women in the sex trade, for example. But these people known as “sinners” might also include people involved in other sketchy business dealings; people who ignore the laws of purity; and people don’t go to the Temple to make sacrifices.
But here’s the thing: Jesus is well-attuned to the relentless drumbeat throughout scripture that insists it is sinful to ignore the plights of the most vulnerable, spelled out as orphans, widows, and immigrants. Again and again scripture calls these out as the categories of people we must help, lift up, and honor. Jesus calls them out, too.
Jesus is eating with undesirables, and the religious elite are demonstrating their scorn. In response, Jesus tells three parables. Remember, someone who’s listening is not going to be comfortable.
How many people, Jesus asks, losing one sheep, wouldn’t go off and leave the ninety-nine to find that one sheep? Let’s talk about sheep. They have a reputation for not being the sharpest of God’s creations, and they can wander, mostly due to instinct, in search of good nibbles. And—we can relate. We can say, well, we can be like sheep. We can wander away. We can get lost! Absolutely true.
But that question Jesus asks? That, hey, wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine and go and search for the one sheep? The answer is, absolutely not. No. No shepherd worth their salt would leave the flock unattended in the wilderness. Shepherds are too good at math to go looking for the one at the risk of losing ninety-nine others.
Jesus is cheerfully suggesting that people would do this strange and un-shepherd-like thing, PLUS throw a big party at the end, because this is how parables work. They challenge the status quo. They describe everyday things in topsy-turvy ways. They challenge the listener to question their priorities. This is the challenge these parables present to the religious elites: What is our responsibility towards those who have been called “the least, the lost, and the left out?” [ii]
The same is true of the parable of the lost coin. The coin has the distinguishing characteristic of not being able to wander away. It is an object with no consciousness, no instincts, and no autonomy. Yet, in this parable it stands for the lost soul. The woman makes every effort to find the coin, even though she still has nine others. Again, this is a highly unlikely scenario, the woman choosing to burn expensive oil to look for a coin when she still has others. Yet, Jesus claims that she would not only undertake this potentially expensive search, but she would also splurge on a celebratory party once she had found it! A party that could cost more than the value of the coin!
The people in Jesus’ audience are shaking their heads. They’re wondering what is with this guy. How can he get things so wrong? So… out of the norm for human behavior, as far as they are concerned?
Scholar Levine goes on to explain, not this parable, but all parables:
Too often, we settle for easy interpretations: We should be nice like the good Samaritan; we will be forgiven, as was the prodigal son…If we stop with the easy lessons, good though they may be, we lose the way Jesus’ first followers would have heard the parables, and we lose the genius of Jesus’ teaching. Those followers, like Jesus himself, were Jews, and Jews knew the parables were more than children’s stories…They knew that parables and the tellers of parables were there to prompt them to see the world in a different way, to challenge, and at times to indict. We might be better off thinking less about what these parables ‘mean’ and more about what they can ‘do’: remind, provoke, refine, confront, and disturb. [iii]
If Jesus is confronting the religious leaders with anything, it’s the ease with which they write off the people they consider dispensable. Jesus is suggesting that God’s love for her creations is fierce—especially for the ones usually written off. God’s fierce love knows no bounds. In fact, the three parables here—the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son—all feature God’s grace showing up with or without repentance on the part of the lost. I have often heard this analogy for salvation. We are drowning, and God will throw us a life preserver, but we have to grab on. Here, Jesus is saying something more like: We are drowning, and God dives into the water to carry us out. After all, didn’t God dive into the pool with us by coming among us as a human being? God-With-Us?
I guess the fact that I’m here tells you the end of my first-semester of college, dark-night of the soul story. I could tell you who I talked to, and that I was fortunate/ blessed to have some very wise and holy mentors in those days. But the truth is, God came and got me. Just like God may have come and gotten you, at some time in your life. And that God will come and get us, like a crazy, irresponsible shepherd, and like an obsessed woman cleaning her house, and like a parent, who is just, so, so, glad to see their child, that they run to them, take them in their arms and say, You’re home.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2015.
[ii] Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas, eds., Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2010), 696.
[iii] Levine, op. cit.