A sermon on Luke 15: 1-10 & 1 Timothy 1: 12-17 by Nathan Nettleton

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Message

Jesus reveals to us a God who is never willing to write off the wayward problem members of his flock.

Sermon

I hasn’t been a good week for the public image of those who bear the name of Jesus Christ. The anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks always creates plenty of airspace for those who want to inflame the idea of a religious war between Christianity and Islam, and this year has seen more tension than ever. Pastor Terry Jones from a small church in Florida managed to grab a ridiculous amount of world attention by threatening to hold a symbolic burning of the Quran on the day. I was pleased to see that John Upton, the President of our Baptist World Alliance, spoke out against this threat with a distinctively Baptist emphasis on the religious freedom of all people. He said, “This (action) disrespects the right of all persons to worship according to their own convictions. (It) is not in the character or spirit of Jesus Christ and misrepresents the true nature of the Christian faith.  It is our prayer that Rev. Jones and his congregation will repent of this threat and ask the forgiveness of the Islamic community and discontinue his caustic rhetoric.” (Read full statement here)

Among the caustic rhetoric, I heard one statement from Pastor Jones that grabbed my attention and gave me pause for thought in relation to today’s readings. When Pastor Jones was challenged with the idea that his actions would incite further attacks on Americans by Islamist extremists, he said, “Why don't we send a warning to them? Why don't we send a warning to radical Islam and say, don't do it. If you attack us, if you attack us, we will attack you.”

I’m at a loss to find any words of Jesus that might be used to inspire or support such a statement. I can find words of Jesus that might lead us to send a warning that if you attack us we will turn the other cheek, or if you attack us we will ask God to forgive you, or if you attack us we will love you and pray for you and seek God’s blessing on you. But what is a leader of the followers of Jesus doing suggesting that we threaten to attack anyone who attacks us?

In the reading we heard from Paul’s first letter to Timothy, the Apostle said, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is quite clear that threats and violence are part of the life he has been saved from, not the life he has been saved into. Threats and violence are things for which he stood in need of the mercy of Jesus. They are sins, and as sins they are things Jesus comes to liberate us from and cleanse us of. “This saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance,” says Paul, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.”

Why does he see himself as the foremost of sinners? Precisely because “I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.”

But the emphasis in the passage doesn’t fall on the naming and shaming of the sin, or a cataloguing of its severity. The emphasis falls on the mercy of Jesus towards the individual sinner; on his gracious welcome and restoration. “For that very reason,” says Paul, “I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost sinner, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Now this emphasis is not surprising given what we heard from the gospel according to Luke. The question that prompts Jesus to tell the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin is precisely about how do we respond to sinners. It says now all the sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus, and the strict religious people were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Now it has become somewhat customary to hear this as more or less saying “This fellow welcomes the poor and eats with them.” And there is some justification for this. It is true that in the society of Jesus’ day, the poor were regarded as self-evidently sinners. And so by equating sinners and the poor, we make this about an agenda of social inclusion and egalitarian community. That’s not wrong. It is that. But I suspect that when we read it mainly that way, we miss most of the challenge that might lie in there for us. You see, in both of these parables, the focus is not so much on how we reach out to those who have never been part of the community, of Christ’s flock, of the church, but on how we value those who have been part of the community, but who might easily be lost and written off by the community.

In these stories, the shepherd is not looking to add a new sheep to his flock, and the woman is not looking to expand her savings. Instead their quest is to rescue one who is already in, but who is becoming cut off and is in danger of being lost forever. In other words, it is about the sinners in our midst. It is about the difficult people, the people who cause us most of our internal trouble and dissension. It is about the blasphemers, the persecutors and the violent ones among us. It is about the people within the church community who insult us and pick fights and stir up animosity and behave aggressively and rudely and appallingly towards the rest of us.

I have never known a time when we didn’t have a few such people in our congregation. And I’m sorry to say that most of them ended up having a major falling out with me and I guess I won the fight because I’m still here and they’re not. But I stand condemned for that by these stories of Jesus. What Jesus is telling us is that he grieves more over the one who was lost than he rejoices over the more congenial and harmonious group who were left. That’s not to say that he loves us any the less, but that he is never willing to cut his losses and give up on the difficult ones. And therein lies the real challenge. Because mostly we are willing to do just that, to cut our losses and give up on the difficult ones. Mostly we are willing to say, “We’d probably be better off without that one. Perhaps if we give up on that one and let them go, we’d be a healthier place and able to be a more welcoming and attractive place to others. After all, what’s one sheep from a hundred. Its only a one percent loss, and that one percenter might take forty percent of the conflicts and difficulties with them. Surely we could be a proper loving church if they were gone. Let them go!”

Jesus is telling us that the economy of God’s realm does not work that way. Jesus is never willing to write someone off and give up on them. Jesus never thinks that we’d be better off without them. Jesus is majorly thrilled every time he can carry home the wayward and alienated member of the community and rejoin them to the flock. Jesus is seriously grieved and distraught every time a wayward sheep spits the dummy and storms out. And he is even more grieved and distraught if those of us left behind just breathe a sigh of relief and cut our losses and think that perhaps we’re better off without them. Every time we do that, we sacrifice a bit more of our right to bear the name of Christ, of our legitimacy as a community of Jesus’ followers.

But this is by no means a call to meekly tolerate bad behaviour and allow the wayward ones to go on mistreating us unchecked. These stories speak of a tremendous effort being put in to restore the lost one to the community. The lost ones must be pursued and sought out. Paul talks of the patience he was shown by Jesus and by the followers of Jesus, but it was patience, not sweep-it-under-the-carpet tolerance. When someone in the community insults us and treats us harshly and aggressively, we are called to patiently endure the insult and to turn the other cheek, but also to assertively seek restoration. And that means naming the issue and challenging it. It means speaking up and saying, “There is a problem here and we need to talk. We need to sort out what is happening here and both be open to change.” Tolerating the person and tolerating the behaviour are not one and the same thing. Actively challenging the hostile behaviour and calling to account is part of the work we are called to do to seek out the lost and prevent their being lost forever. There is no one percent that we can write off and gladly do without. Everyone, no matter how troublesome, is precious in the eyes of Jesus, and if we are to follow him, we are to treat them with the same resilient tenacious love that he does. We are to treat them with the same resilient tenacious love that keeps on saying, “You can insult me and abuse me and mistreat me, but I will not give up on you. I will continue to both name and challenge your destructive behaviour and to stretch out my hands to you in peace and reconciliation. And you can continue to slap those hands back, but I will continue to love you and pray for you and to offer them again and again.”

Now, one more twist before I’m done. One of the times when it becomes hardest to live this out is when the wayward misbehaving members of the flock are holding positions of leadership in the community. And the higher their profile, the more difficult it becomes. The Pastor Terry Joneses of this world are so embarrassing and so infuriating, that we are eager to be rid of them, to wash our hands of them and distance ourselves from them as far as we can. They give us all a bad name, and surely we’d be better off without them. Surely they are a one percent that we can cast out and be well rid of. But the truth is that we don’t know Pastor Terry Jones at all. For all I know he may be a man of faith and integrity and a very genuine follower of Jesus who perhaps lost a loved one on 9/11 and has not managed to resolve his grief and anger and has thus been poisoned by vengefulness. I hope at the end of my ministry I will not be judged solely for the stupidest thing I ever did or the most public mistake I ever made. But even if there are no mitigating factors at all in Pastor Jones’ case, he is still a beloved child of God who Jesus longs to draw back into the communion of love and grace and mercy, and if we jump to write him off and cat him out we will have set ourselves against the will and the intent of our Lord.

That’s why I feel proud of the statement from John Upton, our Baptist World leader, because he challenged the behaviour and called for repentance, but he didn’t write Pastor Jones off and make out that he is to be cast into outer darkness. Maybe Pastor Jones will repent and emerge as the next Apostle Paul. He’s certainly no worse than the one who described himself as the foremost sinner. “I tell you,” says Jesus, “there will be more joy in heaven over one Terry Jones who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” You and I can rejoice in that, because if it were not so, we would have been written off at some point. The grace that would seek out and save Terry Jones is precisely the same grace that is seeking out and saving you and me. And it is perfectly possible that you and I have every bit as much repenting and changing still ahead of us as Pastor Jones, but the resilient tenacious love of Jesus, unwilling to write off even one percent, will keep seeking us out and offering us mercy and restoring us to the flock until we finally know that we are loved and we belong and we are saved.