Sermon: Sheep, Scribe, Sweeper

Texts: 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

Date: September 16, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            I learned a little melodrama at my mother’s knee that I’d like to invite you to participate in.  There are three roles, and we’re all going to play all three roles.  Take your paper napkin and scrunch it up in the middle so it makes a bow shape.  For the victim, it’s a hair bow; for the villain, a mustache; and for the hero, a bow tie.  Moving the prop signifies changing character and voice.  The lines are simple.

Victim: “I can’t pay the rent, I can’t pay the rent, I can’t pay the rent today!”

Villain: “You must pay the rent, you must pay the rent, you must pay the rent today!” (Repeat two more times, exaggerating affect)

Hero: “I’ll pay the rent!”

Victim: “My hero!”

Villain: “Curses—foiled again!”

            I happened to think about this three-role melodrama when I was preparing to preach and spent a long time trying to decide if I was going to be talking to sheep, scribes, or sweepers.  Put another way, are the people in the congregation the sinners, the self-righteous, or the seekers?  It seems like the message coming out of Luke’s text would be a little different for each group depending on who you were talking to.  And I wasn’t quite sure who would be here to listen.

            A teacher once, for her own reasons, said to her class, “Suppose all the good children in the room were painted green, and all the bad children in the room were painted red.  Which color would you be?”  Suppose someone put that question to you.  Which would you be—green or red?  It’s tough, isn’t it, when you only have two choices.  The teacher got her answer from one very wise child, who said, “Striped.”

            Ain’t that the truth.  It finally occurred to me that it might not be the wisest course to try to guess whether there would be more sheep, scribes or sweepers in the congregation this morning, because we have most likely each played all three parts on different occasions.  We are or have been lost sinners, in need of repentance and reclamation.  We are or have been self-righteous pickle-pusses annoyed at having to make room at the table for the undesirables.  We are or have been agents of mercy, ministering to the lost for the love of God.  It’s possible that we have shifted from one to the other in the space of a minute, just like in the goofy napkin melodrama.

               The Bible study students this week reminded me of this.  I was trying to make the point that in that particular room we were probably more like the 99 sheep that had not gone astray than like the one sheep that got lost.  Grandiosely generalizing, I said something like “We are among the righteous.”  And Mat Chamberlain just gave me this look; you should have seen it.  A look worth a thousand words.  A look that said, “You don’t know who you are talking to.”  I might lump Mat and her gentle, courteous, kind-hearted Bible study colleagues in with the saints, with excellent reasons for doing so.  But Mat knows, in her heart of hearts, about her own sin.  And I recognize the look she gave me because it’s the same one I probably give anyone who thinks I’m some great person because of the Rev. in front of my name. 

Did you notice that in the epistle reading St. Paul, that’s Saint Paul, calls himself the foremost of sinners?  We might protest that this pioneer evangelist who is largely responsible for opening the door of the church to non-Jews, changing the face of Christianity forever, could not possibly be the foremost of sinners.  But he ought to know.  I’m going to take his word for it.

            If you were going to compare the three sorts of people represented in Luke’s text with the three caricatures in the melodrama, would the “sheep,” also known as “sinners,” be most like the Victim or the Villain?  If we asked the religious leaders of the day, the scribes and Pharisees who were busy grumbling in the first two verses, they would be shouting out, “Villain!”  They didn’t have much patience with sinners.  But Jesus, in his teaching, would have leaned more in the “Victim” direction, right?  “Victim” is a very loaded word in our culture, and I wouldn’t say it is equivalent to the word Jesus used in these two brief parables, which is “Lost.”  But the ideas are in the same neighborhood—that is, that when looking at “sinners” we should look at them with compassion, and take the circumstances of their lives into consideration. 

In the parable of the lost sheep, the sheep wanders away, mindlessly following its appetites rather than its shepherd and flock.  It gets lost because that’s what sheep do.  There is some sense of volition there but not much.  The parable might remind us that humans, too, are weak.  We find it difficult to resist temptation.  We’re vulnerable to addictions of all kinds.  Sometimes we wander into sin by mindlessly following our appetites rather than our Good Shepherd.

In the parable of the lost coin, volition or will is not in play at all.  The coin gets lost through no fault of its own.  Does this metaphor remind of us any human sinners?  What about the child soldiers of Africa, children who are kidnapped from their homes and trained to kill before they are even 12 years old?  Are they morally liable for their sin?  Or are they more like the coin that falls into a dark, dank corner?  What about the young woman who runs away from an abusive home and turns to prostitution to support herself?  Isn’t she more like a victim than a villain?

Jesus was urging those who would listen to think “victim” before “villain” when confronted with someone whose behavior offends.  He doesn’t want them to remain lost, to be perpetual “victims.”  He wants to reclaim their lives.  And there is incredible joy released when a lost life is reclaimed!  My mom gave me a book compiled by a friend of hers who works as a prison chaplain which contains testimonies from some of the inmates.  One of them, a man named Gino, writes, “Looking back on my life of gangs, drugs, and crime, I remember that even from a very young age, Jesus was calling me.  All of my life, whether I was in jail or out in the world, strangers would come up to me out of nowhere, tell me how Jesus loves me, and how he can save me.  I just wasn’t ready.  I thought I was in control of my life.  Boy, was I wrong.  I had no control.  I was a slave to sin!  At age seven, I took my first hit of grass.  At age nine, I had tasted my first drink of alcohol…At the age of sixteen, while most kids are learning to play football, I had a needle in my arm, and experienced juvenile hall…Coming from a poor, dysfunctional, broken home…in a rough east Denver neighborhood, I took to the streets, gangs and drugs to escape the reality of being abused.  I totally lost contact with who I was or why I was in this world.” 

Gino wound up spending his twenties and thirties in and out of jail.  “I knew I was lost,” he says; “I just didn’t know how to get to normal.”  When he was jailed for attempted murder, he bottomed out and found himself in total despair.  He began wailing at the top of his lungs, over and over, “OH GOD, PLEASE HELP ME!”  The guards though he was dying.  Gino says, “I thought I was already dead.” 

Over the course of several nights Jesus came to him in his dreams, crying, pleading with him to repent and change his life.  Jesus said in these dreams that he loved Gino and wanted him to take his hand and follow him.  “He said to choose.”  Gino chalked these visions up to drug withdrawal hallucinations, but on the third day of the same dream, he surrendered his life to Jesus.  He says, “I haven’t been the same since.  I have been delivered from being a slave to Satan…God has saved me, cleansed me, and now I am a new man in Christ!”  The title of his essay: “I Am No Longer Lost.”[1]

Rejoice with me, Jesus says.  Rejoice when the lost are found.  Don’t grumble about how they are not as worthy of God’s grace as you are.  Jesus is addressing the religious leaders of his day who are confused about which role they are playing when they are squeamish about the company Jesus keeps.  They think they are playing the role of Hero, making sure that the standards of propriety and purity are being upheld in the community.  But in fact they have slipped into a kind of villainy when they harshly judge the lost and assume God feels the same way about them that they do. 

We do need to remember that the scribes and Pharisees sincerely believed that keeping the community pure and free of undesirable characters was what would please God.  They spent a lot of their life’s energy maintaining boundaries between the clean and the unclean because they believed it was God’s will.  So we shouldn’t be too hard on them.  They were lost in their own way.  They had lost their vision of a compassionate God.

Your view of God affects every decision and relationship in your life. Kathleen Chesto wrote to Catholic Digest to tell them about an incident that occurred in her family. Her five-year-old child approached her one day in the kitchen and asked, "Mom, is God a grown-up or a parent?"  Mom was a little puzzled by the question. "I'm not sure what you mean," she said. "Is there a difference between a grown-up and a parent?" "Oh yes," her five-year-old answered quickly. "Grown-ups love you when you are good and parents love you anyway."

I think there are a lot of people who believe God is more like a grown-up—that God loves us only when we are good, or loves only the good people.  Since we are apt to change roles in our lives depending on circumstance (victim, villain, hero, etc.) we project this changeability onto God.  We imagine a God beaming with pleasure at the good children and a God scowling with displeasure at the bad ones, even willing to consign them to eternal punishment.  But what Jesus asserts in these parables and other teachings is that God’s grace and mercy are of unfathomable depth, and this doesn’t change.  The metaphors of the diligent shepherd, and the woman who turns the house upside down with her broom, and of the forgiving father (in the Prodigal Son parable that follows these) all reveal a God whose compassion never falters and whose patience never fails.

This is so hard to grasp that religious people are forever trying to represent God as a grown-up instead of a parent—even some of the writers of our very own Bible.  No wonder people of faith can get confused.  How blessed we are to be able to look to Jesus as we wonder what God is like.  In prayer, Jesus addresses God as “Abba,” Daddy.  Jesus reminds us of the great joy in heaven over every sinner who repents, whose life is reclaimed by love.  Jesus teaches about a compassionate, giving God and then embodies his words by living a compassionate, giving life.    He is our “hero” (“I’ll pay the rent!”), paying the price for human sin as he boldly challenges the narrow faith of his countrymen. 

This Jesus is no hero we simply admire from afar.  He calls us to be like  him.  We may have been or even are now one of the lost, the victims who need saving.  We may have been or even are now among those who look down on the lost from some imaginary pedestal, muttering “Curses!” when mercy is shown to someone we think undeserving.  Isn’t it time for a costume change?  It’s hero time—time to join Jesus in a diligent search for the lost, sweeping into every dark corner with the good news of the God of unfailing love. 

[1] McDonal, Yong Hui V.  Maximum Saints Make No Little Plans  Maximum Saints Productions, 2007, p. 18-21