Jesus Includes the Excluded
Pentecost + 17 - September 15, 2013
Incarnation Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI
“The saying is sure and worth of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners...” (1 Tim 1:15)
This is what the author of First Timothy says. And this is what we, as Christians, believe. Or what we say we believe, anyway. But though it sounds good, and it might look good as a pithy religious quote hanging on someone's wall, it's a lot harder to live out than we might think at first. When we start to think about and realize what that really means, it's a lot harder to give it our full acceptance, no matter how worthy of that acceptance it may be.
We tend to just give it lip service. It sounds great, and we're glad that Jesus came for us, and for most of our family and our friends. But we don't want to take it the next step. We don't want really want to believe that Jesus came for “those people” too, whoever “those people” may be. For the Pharisees and the scribes in the gospel reading for today, “those people” were the tax collectors and sinners who were coming near to listen to Jesus. Tax collectors who were in cahoots with the enemy, doing well for themselves by doing the dirty work of collecting money to support an oppressive foreign regime that all the people of Israel resented. Sinners – a word used not the way we might understand it as Lutherans; we're all saints and sinners at the same time, after all. No, these were people who had broken God's law as handed down to Moses, and everybody knew it. No longer were these “sinners” allowed to enter the temple to offer sacrifice or worship or pray. They weren't welcome in the synagogue to hear the word of God with their friends and family and neighbors. These two groups represent all of those who good religious folk considered the other. Outcast. Outside God's forgiveness and mercy and grace. Unwelcome in polite society. Those people! And they're exactly the ones who are not only attracted by Jesus' words and actions – they are actually welcomed by him, invited by him. Jesus brings the outsiders in. He includes the excluded! And the Pharisees and scribes, textbook insiders if ever they existed, don't much like what he's doing! We know that from what Luke says, “And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'"
And we, living so many years later, still wrestle with including those Jesus will not exclude. All of us have individuals or whole groups of people we think are not worthy of full acceptance by the One who came to save sinners. Terrorists. Crazed madmen who shoot up movie theaters or school buildings. The mentally ill. The homeless. The addicted. Or maybe we're happy to have Jesus save them, so long as he doesn't expect us to welcome them in too. They make us uneasy, uncomfortable. They don't look like us, don't act like us, refuse to conform to our image of the kind of person Jesus would come to save.
I laughed this week as I listened to an interview with Nadia Bolz-Weber on NPR's program “On Being.” Nadia is a pastor in the ELCA, founder of a church called House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. Now I've never met her, but from all I've read and heard and seen, I can safely say that she is not your typical Lutheran pastor. Having grown up in a very strict, conservative Christian denomination, in her adulthood she wrestled with addiction and depression. Her body is covered in tattoos. She uses language that might make you cringe at times. So as you might imagine, the congregation Nadia serves is not your typical congregation. When she felt called into ministry, it was to be a pastor to a very specific kind of people, folks who are kind of from the underside of life. Convicted criminals, addicts, the gay, lesbian, transgendered community, the punk kid with the pink mohawk. These are the people she feels called to reach, people who most likely would not feel very welcomed in a “traditional” congregation. But she tells a story of one year when she was invited to preach at the Easter Sunrise Service at Red Rock, and the local paper did a full page write up about her and about her ministry, and come the next Sunday, her worship attendance doubled. Her little church went from about 45 people to 90 or 100, in the course of one week. But instead of being happy about that (like almost all pastors I know would be), Nadia was appalled! Because, you see, these weren't the right sorts of people. They looked, she said, like bankers wearing Dockers, like soccer moms, like they could be the parents of the people she was really trying to reach. She resisted. She rebelled. She grumbled, because in her mind, these people didn't belong at the table Jesus was setting in her community of faith. There were other tables for them – why did they have to crash her congregation?
Funny, isn't it? We all find it easier, most of the time, to point to someone else as the lost sheep or the lost coin, and though Jesus says to his listeners, then and now, “which one of you wouldn't be like the shepherd who leaves his 99 sheep in the wilderness to go find that lost one? And which one of you wouldn't be like the woman who loses one coin out of 10 and light the lamp and bend over with the broom and sweep and sweep and sweep until you find it? And which one of you wouldn't then call everyone you know and invite them to a big party to celebrate with you when you found your sheep or your coin?” Which one of us wouldn't, Jesus? Tell me which one of us would go to those lengths and risk so much else? Which one of us would rejoice with such lavish, exorbitant, costly displays? Not most of us, Jesus, that's what I think. We'd be content to keep what we have – why bother with that lost sheep or that lost coin? Why go out to seek “those people,” Jesus, when you have so many other unlost already with you?
But the thing that Jesus reveals in these parables is that everyone is worth searching for to God. The God we believe in, the God we follow isn't willing to lose any of us. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and he will.not.rest until we're all brought safely home, even those of us who didn't realize we were lost in the first place. And it's not just about our salvation as individuals. Salvation happens in community, salvation happens in the whole body of Christ. Though 99 sounds like a good number of sheep, and 9 coins sounds like plenty, biblically speaking, those are incomplete numbers. One hundred is a number that represents completion. So does the number ten. The 99 need sheep 100 if they are to be whole. The nine coins need coin # 10 if they are to be complete. And we need each other if we are to be who and what God intended us to be.
This is what Jesus calls us to. This is what Nadia Bolz-Weber discovered over time in her community of faith. Because even though she struggled with what it meant to welcome “those people” into her congregation, they needed to be there, and the community needed them there. Convicted criminals serving communion to elected officials, the teen with the pink mohawk holding the soccer mom's baby, all of these saints and sinners welcomed under one roof, invited to one table, with Christ himself as the host, his body and blood as food and drink for all, rejoicing to see the lost restored, the outsider called in, the community made one in Christ. This is what Christ longs for in each of us, in all of our churches, the lost now found and sent to look for each other, rejoicing and sharing the good news of the One who who came to save us all and will not stop looking until each of us comes home. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
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