"Look Who Jesus Hangs Out With"
Luke 15:1-10
Have you ever felt lost?
All of us, some days feel more lost than found, more wrong than right.
Perhaps we have acted like unthinking sheep and wandered off.
Maybe we have felt like a person who doesn't understand the questions on a math test, when everyone else seems to have figured them out.
So many things make us feel lost:
*The sudden loss of a job
* Debts we wonder if we will ever be able to pay
* A broken marriage
* The loss of someone we love
Sometimes we feel lost when we lose our patience, our sense of humor, our integrity, our purpose.
And it's been suggested-- and I believe it--that this lost feeling is the longing we have for God's grace--it's ingrained in every human--whether we know it or not.
(pause)
In our Gospel Lesson for this morning Jesus tells two parables.
And the context for these parables or the reason Jesus tells them is because "All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him."
And the Pharisees and legal experts were disgusted by this.
They grumbled to one another: "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."
It's interesting how, in the Gospels, Jesus spends so much time eating, drinking, talking, teaching, walking, fishing, and hanging out with folks who the Pharisees and legal experts call: "sinners."
We might ask ourselves, "What is a Pharisee?"
Pharisees were the leading Jewish religious sect of Jesus' time.
They believed in following the letter of the Law.
The word "Pharisee" itself comes from the Hebrew verb for "separate."
And so the Pharisees sought to separate themselves from the social outcasts.
And in their minds, Jesus must do the same if He is going to "get" to hang out with them.
But Jesus is the friend of whoever will have Him.
It just so happens this turns out to be the social outcasts, the marginalized, the lost, the lonely.
These are the folks who become Jesus' disciples.
These are the folks who flock to Jesus.
These are the "tax collectors and sinners" that Jesus welcomes and eats with.
These are the people that the Pharisees are grumbling about.
What if, we, good church-going folks of today were to see Jesus hosting a dinner party where He invites drug dealers, pimps, pornographers, muggers, thieves, sex traffickers, gang leaders, terrorists, unfaithful spouses, cheating tax payers, child abusers, computer hackers, con artists, crooked politicians, white supremists and greedy, reckless Wall Street Bankers?
Would we mumble and grumble?
Is this a guy we would want to hang out with as well?
Now to be sure, the Pharisees and other religious leaders were invited to Jesus' parties as well.
The only problem was that they wouldn't stay or even go in if these other "low life's" were there.
They kept themselves out.
What would we do?
In verse two, when the grumblers say: "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them"...
...the word used for "welcomes" literally means "hosts."
In other words Jesus is the host of sinners.
Which means Jesus chooses these folks to be His friends.
Jesus seeks them out.
Jesus invites them to be with Him.
Jesus chooses to hang out with the misfits, the cast-aways.
In Luke 19:10 Jesus declares: "The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost."
So, in the first parable, Jesus likens Himself to a shepherd who goes searching for a lost sheep until He finds it.
And even though Israel's history is full of references to God as a "shepherd", by the time of the 1st Century--when Jesus was telling this parable--shepherds were not very highly thought of.
They had gotten a bad reputation as being thieves and trespassers.
Most of them were very poor and their occupation as shepherds was dirty, backbreaking work.
So an unspoken message in this parable is that Jesus is one of the outcastes Himself.
God came to earth as a homeless outcast, a person living on the margins--a reject of society.
Have you ever felt like an outcaste?
I have many times.
Ever been bullied?
Ever been left out of a conversation?
Ever been the only one of your friends that wasn't invited to a party?
And as an adult, have you ever felt like you weren't as successful as you should be or thought you would be?
Ever compare yourself to someone else and found yourself wanting?
Have you ever tried to make friends with someone who won't give you the time of day?
Jesus stands in solidarity with the lost of the world--which, even if the Pharisees don't realize it--includes them!!!
So Jesus compares Himself to a lowly shepherd who searches for a lost sheep until it is found and then is so full of joy that He throws a party to celebrate the one He found.
In the second parable Jesus likens Himself to a woman who searches for a lost coin....searches and searches and searches...
...until she finds it.
And "when she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Celebrate with me because I've found my lost coin.'"
To put this second parable into perspective, think of a one-room stone house with a dirt floor, a tiny door and no windows.
It would be very easy to lose a shiny silver coin in a place like this.
And then consider that the money lost is a drachma.
A drachma is not that much money in the grand scheme of things, but it's a day's wage for a minimum wage worker.
Would a business executive drop everything to search for a check for one day's pay at minimum wage?
Probably not.
But what does the woman in the story do?
First she lights a lamp.
Then she sweeps the floor, slowly and carefully, looking everywhere for the lost coin.
This is a parable of proportion.
The well-to-do Pharisees may consider that coin to be "peanuts," and not worth their time.
But even the smallest of the small is important to God.
It's not only worth the search; it's discovery is worthy of a celebration--a big old party of epic proportions!!!
That's how God looks at you; that's how God looks at me.
It's been written and noted that no Pharisee would have ever dreamed of a God like this.
As a matter of fact, they thought God wanted to obliterate the lost, the unclean, the sinners.
And they thought this is the way things should be.
It's kind of what the Westboro Baptist Church believes, if you look into it a bit.
A great Jewish scholar has admitted that this is an absolutely radically new thing which Jesus taught about God--that God actually searches for us.
But this is Who God is.
And we find this out only through Jesus Christ--God become Flesh--Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
There is nothing more humbling than feeling and being lost.
And the most joyful experience is being found!!!
As we begin to prepare ourselves for Communion this morning let's remember that this is the Lord's Supper; we are the sinners and Jesus is the Host.
He invites us.
He serves us.
And we are found as we come and joyfully join in the party.
How could we not rejoice because of and with God for such a love and such a grace as this?
