Sermon Cliff Note: Sheep Lost & Sheep Found and Those Who Seek Them

Scripture:  Luke 15.1-7 (the parable of the lost sheep)

It’s a story we know so well, this tale of the one lost sheep.  The unfairness of it all – even the downright foolishness – this risking a whole group in order to save just one, arises:  Who does that?  How unfair is that to the 99?  Really?  You’d endanger 99 for just one?

These questions are the questions of the Pharisees.  They’re not bad people; they’re the good people.

And Jesus is spending time with the dregs of society.  He talks to them.  He eats with them.  He takes them seriously.  He thinks they matter.  And everyone knows they don’t – everyone, that is, except Jesus.

Instead of just going to Jesus, instead of trying to understand what he’s doing and why, the good people talk among themselves, grumbling and complaining.  They’re jealous.

At its core, jealousy is giving space to the 2-year-old who once lived inside us all.  But we’re not 2 anymore!  The time for baby talk and humoring is over – when we’re 2, it’s all about us.  But we’re not 2 anymore and it isn’t and we know it.

The problem, or at least one of the problems, is in understanding what the love of God looks like and what it requires.  So it’s back to basics . . .

God’s love is risky   God holds nothing back of God’s self in order to love and care for us.  And God gets hurt in the process.  God risks and requires that we do the same.  Was it risky to leave the 99 to look for the one?  Of course it was.  But the greater risk was to simply let the one go.  

God’s love is extravagant When I have more than I need, I can either decide even that’s not enough and demand more (the 2-year-old response) or I can share (the grown up response).  To risk the whole herd for the one is extravagant.  To risk our life together here in this church in order to love and serve our neighbors not here today is extravagant.  God isn’t always calling us to do more, but God is always calling us to be more. . . to be more loving . . . more understanding . . . more willing to risk what we think of as our ‘all’ – so that – we can come to the place of understanding that the ‘all’ we think of as all was little indeed.  

God’s love is exorbitant – God seems to think there’s more than enough love to go around.  But maybe we’re right and there’s not.  Yet even if there is only so much to go around, maybe that’s what we’re here for – to offer it all.  I doubt any of us have ever truly gotten to the end of ourselves.  But even if we have, so what?  To spend ourselves on behalf of others is why we’re here.

God’s love is seeking - God is a seeking God who calls us to be a seeking people.  God is a seeking God, searching out the lost and the lonely, the sad and the haggard, the down and out as well as the up and coming.  God seeks.  So too must we.

God’s love is contagious.  Love, like laughter, is contagious.  It spreads.  It can’t help but spread.  It’s that little light we were taught to sing as children – it cannot be hidden – it must shine.  And in its shining is its attraction.

In Jesus’ parable story to the grumblers, perhaps we, like them, are the sheep, the 99.  The question that hangs waiting to be answered is: are we content to munch our own grass?  Or are we joining in the rescue party?  More daring, are we ready to read ourselves into the story as shepherds?  For what sheep would a good shepherd leave behind?

An EasyBake Ovenless Life

You know you’ve had a privileged childhood when you’re biggest beef with your parents is that you never

got that EasyBake Oven you drooled over as a girl.

That’s right – an EasyBake Oven.

Even now when I see the modern equivalent, I find I am jealous, feeling somehow bereft, that I never had the chance as a girl child to cook real, albeit tiny, cakes to the heat of a light bulb.

How does that work, anyway?

And the really silly thing about this (well, several silly things, actually)?

1. I learned to cook from the women of my family on real stoves – way better any day than EasyBake.

2. If I really, really, really want an EasyBake Oven, I could certainly get one for myself now (of course, that wouldn’t be the same, but still).

3. The cakes were crap.  We all know it.  No matter how cool the pictures were on television, when all was said and done, what you were left with was really not much.

4. None of my friends (that I can remember) ever had an EasyBake Oven.  So wherever the source of my childhood obsession resides, it isn’t in jealousy.  What is it?  I truly don’t know.  The fact is, I just hate to admit that 50+ years later, I can still be swayed into a morass of emotions just by seeing a picture of, of all things, an EasyBake Oven (sigh).  And I hate even more the very real possibility that it’s as simple as the power of advertising having planted this ridiculous desire in my heart.

What is an EasyBake Ovenless girl to do?

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NOTE:  After another post on our church's FB page about our upcoming Sunday's Chocolate Communion service, I went to the FB page of Baraka Presbyterian Church (in Bethlehem) because they had 'liked' the Chocolate Communion post.  And what did I see?  In far away Bethlehem, where there is so much suffering, violence and trauma, the children in the nursery at the church there enjoy -- yes -- their very own EasyBake (well, maybe not the same brand) Oven.  What a blessing!  Thank you, Lord, that these children have space in which to laugh and play, live and love, worship and praise.  Amen.

So Much Better than Fair

[Sermon excerpt on Matthew 20.1-16, the parable of the day laborers all paid the same no matter how long they worked]

A day laborer is someone who works one day at a time, with no guarantee of a job or work from day-to-day.

When the trucks come, I imagine it’s a very desperate kind of beauty-pageant atmosphere . . . Standing straight and tall, trying to look bigger, stronger, tougher, more able, than you really are, hoping and praying . . . pick me, pick me, please, oh please, oh please, pick me!

Real people . . . tens of thousands, if not millions, live this life every day. It’s hard. It’s desperate. It’s ugly. And it’s very competitive. . . literally, if you are picked it means that I am not. If your family eats tonight, mine will not.

How very sad Jesus must have been when he saw that his own followers, after all they had seen, after all they had been through together, still imagined the Kingdom of Heaven as an agribusiness and still saw themselves as competing against others to get in.

But . . . Jesus is not chastising the disciples for being jealous . . . he is pleading with them to understand. . . the Kingdom of Heaven . . . God . . . is the landowner who pays more not less . . . the landowner who seeks more workers, not less . . . who ‘upsizes’ rather than downsizes . . . who fills rather than empties . . . who brings all to the table . . .

We are all but day laborers in the Kingdom of God. . . but we are day laborers invited to a party . . .

When it’s a party, we aren’t sorry that some come late . . . we’re just glad they could make it . . . glad to see them . . . enjoying the good fun with everyone else . . .

But when it’s ‘work’, suddenly we’re all certified accountants, counting, measuring, making sure it’s all ‘fair’ . . . to us . . .

How could the first workers have missed that the last workers were the ones no one wanted? That they were not ‘hired’ because they were deemed somehow ‘not good enough’? That unless the owner of the fields went and found them, they would have had no work at all?

Expectations are the problem - they know what they’re getting, but suddenly, it isn’t ‘enough’. Is it that they want themselves to get more or their compatriots to get less? Either, I suspect, would do, so long as it was ‘fair’.

But would they, would we, really argue to take money away from the poor day laborers at the end? Would we really urge the landowner to give them so little that they couldn’t feed themselves, let alone their families, just so it would be fair?

What do you suppose the landowner God in Jesus’ parable would have to say about that? I’m guessing that God would say “come on in” to everyone, no matter how late they got to the party.

But, but, but, we sputter . . .it wouldn’t be fair for me to devote my life to Christ and have someone who never even gave Christ a thought to inhabit the same cloud as me, now would it?

How can that be?

Where is my better cloud?

Fair requires hell. . . on earth as in heaven . . .

Fair requires hell.

But the question is, does God?

Here’s the thing . . . what God offers . . . what God provides . . . is so much better than fair . . . for you . . . for me . . . for us all . . .