The headings above today’s scripture reading in most Bibles are simple enough: the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin. Over the years, this passage has lent itself to stories about not being able to stray so far from the fold that our God of relentless love cannot find us. Then there are the sermon illustrations about lost household items.
Given that I recently spent more time than I’d like to admit looking for keys I dropped while out for a jog around Central Park with our double-wide stroller, I was tempted to take the easy path and narrate that misadventure or go see what’s sitting in the lost-and-found box here at the church and drag it into the pulpit. Imagine the possible joy of one of you being reunited with your long-lost item!
However, a couple of years ago, the musings of a college student who had never attended church blew the parable of the lost sheep wide open for me. “I had never heard this story before,” he told a friend of mine in campus ministry, “but I guess I think of it as the parable of the incomplete community.”
This is a story about God’s relentless love creating a community of belonging and authenticity. It’s about the ways in which we exile one another or exile ourselves. It’s about sin and, more importantly, it’s about grace.
Let’s listen together for what the Spirit is saying to the Church in 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.”
The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
The religious insiders’ response to Jesus’ inclusive table ministry was hardly a welcoming reception. As the crowd grows, the Pharisees grumble.
The story begins with two groups of people who had been set apart from society gathering near to Jesus and crowding around the table. One was the scribes and the Pharisees, whose name comes from an Aramaic word meaning “the separated ones” and who attempted to follow the way of life set forth in the Law God had given them through Moses.
The other group was the tax collectors and sinners, whose separation from the rest of the community may not simply have been the result of societal marginalization—as we tend to hear in progressive religious circles—but may also have stemmed from their actions.
Tax collectors were often assumed to profit from Rome’s oppressive taxation at the expense of their own people. Their role strained their relationships with their neighbors. We can also speculate about why the so-called “sinners” had been labeled as such, but the text doesn’t tell us, so their specific transgressions may be beside the point.
The point is this: Have you heard the phrase, “Be careful of the company you keep?” Luke’s version of the gospel makes it abundantly clear that Jesus keeps company with those the Pharisees presumed to be the wrong sort of people.
Prior to this passage, the Pharisees have twice mentioned with disapproval that Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners (5:30; 7:34). On one such occasion earlier, he replied, “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (5:31-32).
Here, the parables he tells the Pharisees present a challenge to them, and maybe they challenge us no less today. First, being at the top of a stratified religious system, the Pharisees did not appreciate the privilege and attention Jesus provided a group of outsiders at the bottom of the system. Perhaps the Pharisees also considered themselves spiritually well and couldn’t perceive Jesus’ welcome of sinners as an invitation that included them, too.
They therefore excluded themselves from the radically inclusive community Jesus was forming around himself—a community whose membership regulations have nothing to do with righteousness, occupation, economic standing, or any other social marker people could construct then or now, a community whose only entrance requirement seems to be recognition of human need for God’s gracious acceptance.
Was that bar too high for the Pharisees? Is it too high for us?
Please humor me and raise your hand if your favorite part of any worship service is the prayer of confession.
A colleague in the ministry once cautioned me that, “when we talk about sin from the pulpit, we usually end up slapping all the wrong people.” And she’s right! I suspect many of us have experienced versions of Christianity that emphasize guilt over grace, or that label people as sinful simply because of who they are or whom they love.
The practice of confessing sin in worship has come under scrutiny in recent years. Some people object to what they perceive as other people putting words in their mouths, while others don’t like feeling guilty at church, and still others worry the practice is off-putting to spiritual seekers and out of touch with the humanism of our time (1). Of course, there are truths in all these objections.
A mentor at Vanderbilt Divinity School who retired this past month, Jim Hudnut-Beumler, outlined just those critiques of the practice of confession in a church lecture series he called “Confession in Two Keys,” an analogy in which sin is the minor key and grace is the major key. I share some of his thoughts with you now, because they have shaped my own understanding of why confession is so hard, and why it is so central to the life of faith.
With cultural expectations to have it all together—maybe especially at church—we may already feel we’re not good enough without confessing extra sins we didn’t really commit this week. And who likes feeling guilty? We don’t come to church seeking a good scolding.
We crave wholeness…and yet we risk sharing only half of the gospel if we only talk about grace without acknowledging why God’s mercy is such good news, without wrestling with the fact that brokenness and separation in our lives and in the systems with which we’re entangled is what drives our desire to be made whole (2).
Theologians in the last several decades have taught us that sin is not only pride, selfishness, or rebellion against God. It is also self-annihilation and the failure to honor oneself or one’s neighbor as a bearer of God’s image in the world. In both of these views, we “miss the mark” when it comes to realizing who we are in relation to God and the rest of creation.
Having just recalled valid objections to the communal practice of confession, on the other hand, I also recall beloved children of God in and outside the Church whose heartbreak and shame I have witnessed over the years—the lonely, survivors of violence, the high-achieving, people struggling with addiction, the rejected, the popular, the happily married, the divorcees, the hospitalized, the imprisoned, the well-respected. Their life experiences differ widely, yet their stories are united by an undersong that goes something like this: “If people knew the parts of me or my story that are unlovely, they might not accept me.”
John Pavlovitz, author of A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community, amplifies this refrain. He writes:
“This is one of our most treacherous fault lines of organized Christianity. Though the Church is supposed to be a ‘come as you are’ gathering, we realize soon after arriving that for any number of reasons, we can’t really come as we are.
Over time we all learn how to continually read the room to determine the exact parameters of our personal mess that we can reveal without alienating ourselves. We begin to craft a Church-specific self, and life becomes about perception management more than open and true pursuit of God.
Though full authenticity in our faith communities should be invited and celebrated, in reality it’s often a terrible liability.” (3)
He’s onto something, yet the good news is that God offers us a much deeper sense of belonging than this. Scripture tells us that none of us is perfect (cf. Rom. 3:23), and yet we’re all welcome at the table anyway because Jesus invites us.
That’s why this story from Luke’s gospel speaks so powerfully to me today. Moving from separation to community, and then from community to celebration, it compels us to consider how we all need God’s healing to remove barriers that keep us from envisioning the ever-expanding table of the messianic feast we practice for whenever we celebrate communion.
In confessing the truth of our brokenness, we can wholeheartedly celebrate the greater truth that we are made in God’s image and—as they say in the Iona Community in Scotland—that God’s goodness is planted more deeply in our hearts than all that is wrong (4).
The Church’s practices of confession and communion prepare us for the work of repairing relationships and seeking justice in society. They are deeply connected with our practices of inclusion and equity in communities beyond the sanctuary.
One such community that comes to mind as we reflect on these themes is the youth and staff at Monroe Harding in Nashville, the group home where I worked while I was in divinity school.
In that home, an eclectic cast of characters who somehow all fit gathered for dinner.
I sat with my coworker, a coach who had overcome obstacles to begin his own nonprofit and mentor at-risk youth. With us were five hurting and angry young men.
Some were taking steps toward re-entering the broader community after incarceration, some had bounced around the foster care system with no stable home, some had rival gang affiliations, some struggled with addiction, and all had experienced trauma and had too many reasons not to trust others. Still, with the help of therapists, we invited them to establish a distinctive culture in our cottage—a space for healing where they could openly acknowledge past mistakes and seek support in moving toward a better future.
Have you ever experienced the miracle of community coming into being—that moment when an assortment of individuals begins to feel like a collective for the first time?
That’s what I felt that evening as Coach Ty went around the table, looking each young man in the eyes and saying, “You have worth, and you belong here.” Some stared at the ground while others teared up. We all locked fists around the table and one of the youth offered a blessing for our meal.
These youth later became the hosts, providing hospitality to a revolving cast of staff and other youth, eagerly welcoming newcomers to our dinner ritual, and taking turns leading the blessing. Some days, dinner was like a ceasefire—a sacred pause from tensions that at other times threatened to erupt—and other days it was like a beautiful and boisterous reinterpretation of a Norman Rockwell painting. Coach Ty and I worked together to provide clear boundaries and hold these young men accountable. Likewise, their stories remind me of my own complicity in systemic sin and of the Church’s accountability to create spaces in society where all youth and their neighborhoods can flourish.
Today, as we go from the sanctuary to the Mission Fair—moving from this worship service to our Summer of Service—remember this communion table, remember Jesus’ calling previously separated groups to crowd together around the dinner table, and anticipate the heavenly banquet table, where all will be celebration and abundance.
Friends, whatever your stories, trust that you have worth, and you belong here at this table.
As our gospel story has reminded us, we are known and beloved by a God who seeks us out…
to bring us into community,
to transform us by God’s grace,
and to send us out to help God transform the world.
Individually, we are invited.
Collectively, we are called.
And it’s not a party until all the lost are gathered in God’s love!
Sources:
(1) James Hudnut-Beumler, “Confession in Two Keys” (The Blake Lectures, February 22–23, 2004, First Presbyterian Church, Franklin, TN).
(2) Ibid.
(3) John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 77.
(4) The Iona Community, “4A Morning Service,” from Iona Abbey Worship Book (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2016), 69.
