Scripture: Luke 15:1-10 Series: 2022
First in a Luke 15 ‘Lost & Found’ series, this sermon opens by asking why we read the Bible at all, locating its value not in textual trivia but in the living presence of Christ encountered in worship. Turning to the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin, the pastor invites hearers to find themselves in the story, especially the obedient rule-followers who resent the shepherd’s ‘inefficient’ pursuit of the one. Drawing on original sin (William Temple), the human reflex to judge (Liz Lemon, the speck in the neighbor’s eye), and Bonhoeffer’s claim that only Jesus’ call truly frees us from ourselves, it insists grace is not mere affirmation but the shepherd who finds, frees, and carries us home. It closes with Buechner: the Gospel is bad news before good news, that we are sinners loved and bled for, here and now.
Illustrations: gideon-bibles-airbnb, bart-ehrman-fundamentalist-atheist, genesis-2-hebrew-wall, bee-loved-chapel-songs, george-the-sheep-moral-hazard, william-temple-original-sin, liz-lemon-speed-dating, buechner-bad-news-good-news, bonhoeffer-alcoholic-rich-man
September 11
Lost & Found: Lost
All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. The Pharisees and legal experts were grumbling, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them. Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it? And when he finds it, he is thrilled and places it on his shoulders. When he arrives home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’ In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to change their hearts and lives.“Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won’t light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, joy breaks out in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who changes both heart and life.” Luke 15:1-10
There are a lot of different ways to read the Bible. There are a lot of different people who read the Bible in different ways. But even before that, before you even get to like the literal sense of the words, of just the letters themselves (that is what litteral means) or the different allegories or interpretations and contexts, before you can get to that, you have to start with a prior question of why: why does it matter? Why should I read it? The Bible does not have the same value for everyone. Most people in America encounter the Bible in hotel rooms than in their own home. One of the ironies of the rise of AirBNB and VRBOs is that the Gideons are no longer able to provide bibles to every place you stay. If you who grew up in the church, you may have a certain affinity for the Bible, or for portions of the Bible. Some grow up in communities where the Bible is used for condemnation more than anything else and so it becomes harder to seek God here. Some encounter Christ later in life and the strange new world of the Bible is this beautiful place. Bible means book. The Bible contains a number of books and letters and histories and poems, genealogies, and apocalyptic. It was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek through the Holy Spirit with the pens of different people. The Koran is a helpful comparison. The Koran has the same author and a similar syntax and vocabulary through out. The Bible does not. My Greek is much better than my Hebrew and when I studied in seminary, I got to the point where I could translate Genesis 1 fairly easily. But then I hit a wall at Genesis 2 because the vocabulary was almost completely different. Translations often soften those differences. I could give a bunch of other examples. Some people have a faith that is so weak that the moment you mention a curious textual issue in the Bible their faith falls apart. This is what happened to the Bible Scholar Bart Ehrman, who grew up in a fundamentalist background. Went to Moody Bible School, but then, in Graduate School, when he studied textual differences in the early New Testament manuscripts he lost his faith but kept his fundamentalism and became a fundamentalist atheist, publishing books about how Paul polluted the teachings of Jesus. This why question: why read the bible, does not start in our home or in a small group, but in worship. The Bible exists today because of Christians sharing gospels and letters across ancient cities and villages, and the bishops writing and sharing about which letters were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and which letters were not. So with this why question, since we are already in worship, we should start with an understanding of reading this book in worship, as Christians have done thousands of years. The Bible is not self-evident. There is this fancy word, perspicuity, that some have used to say that the Bible is obvious, but I think that is more a way of social control than encountering the living Lord, Jesus Christ, here. We can teach the stories of the Bible to our children. I think that this is super important. Chapel with Bee Loved just started back and it is one of my favorite things I do. I wrote a bunch of songs about the Bible to try and open up for the little and the Pre-Kinders the imagination, power and importance of God’s actions in Scripture, to give them a memory that they will be able to come back to when they’re older and connect with who God is. The stories are great. I can teach about the Bible to adults. I can go through the very dry and didactic way, the different textual discrepancies between certain manuscripts, the new Testament, the old Testament, the difference between the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic Text, looking at some of the passages in Jeremiah that exists in Greek, that don’t exist in Hebrew. And yet, teaching you tons of data in trivia does not give the Bible value. Memorizing whole books or being excellent at Bible sword does not reveal God on its own, and that, ultimately, is the why. The Bible is a gift of the presence of God to us. Jesus is here. The Holy Spirit moves through here. And we can read the same passage of scripture, the same passage in the gospels at one point in our life and get something out of it. Then, in a different season, we may have completely different interpretation, not a contradictory one, but a different one. God continues to speak through these words. Over the next two weeks, we are going to look at three famous parables from Luke 15, on the Lost and on the Found. This week, we are focusing on the lost. All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. The Pharisees and legal experts were grumbling, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them. Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it? And when he finds it, he is thrilled and places it on his shoulders. When he arrives home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’ In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to change their hearts and lives.“Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won’t light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, joy breaks out in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who changes both heart and life.” Luke 15:1-10
A helpful tool to sometimes use with Bible stories is to see ourselves in the Story. Who are you in this story? There are a number of possible characters. There is the passive audience in the temple. There are the Pharisees grumbling to Jesus about how he eats with sinners. There are the disciples of Jesus. There is Jesus himself. So we have an opportunity to relate ourselves to all of these people. Then we have the parable itself. With the first one, we have the shepherd, we have the sheep that come home, and then we have the sheep that was lost. We’ll hold here for moment I’ve had moments in my life of being lost both in a metaphorical and a literal sense: metaphorical in being lost in a way that I felt directionless with my life, literal in the sense of being in the woods and not knowing where I was,. Think about who you are in this story. With any of the characters, one thing that is striking is incredible inefficiency of the people involved. The shepherd is super inefficient. He leaves the vast majority of his sheep to go find that one. There might’ve been some sheep that wandered off after he left them, as well. Most of us would be ecstatic with a return of 99 out of 100
This matters concerning where we see ourselves in this story. If we see ourselves as one of the sheep who came home when our master told us to, the shepherd heading off to find George the Sheep may not seem fair. Why is the shepherd spending so much time with George over there? He stuck his head in the brambles by the Creek. That’s only going to teach him a bad lesson and he is going to do it again to get more attention from the shepherd. Economists might call that moral hazard. If someone thinks that they can get away with bad behavior, they’re going to do it again. And again. I think one of the ways, folks like me, who, more often than not, identify with the sheep who listened, who follow orders, follow the rules, we read a passage like this, and we may like the sentiment, “the lost will be found,” but we don’t really want to dig too deeply into it. We don’t want to look into what God is really doing here. When the verses before say that Jesus ate with sinners. We want to make sure that the sinners Jesus ate with are the good kind of sinners. We want to separate that out. You know, there are good sinners and there are bad sinners. Like there are sinners who are doing it for good reason. There are bad sinners who sin for bad reasons. Jesus, though, doesn’t qualify different kinds of being lost or different kinds of sinners. Sin is pretty much a binary category. There is one exception about the sin against the holy spirit, but other than that, sinning is kind of like pregnancy: you’re either pregnant or your not. It is either sin or it is not.
In fact, he’s a lot more binary and being lost. There’s different levels of being lost. I think Jesus would admit to, we have a sense of being lost and not knowing the precise direction home as well as the sense of being lost and only having a general direction. There’s a theological concept called original sin, which isn’t the most popular thing nowadays we don’t want to talk about sins is probably the most. You’ve heard the word sin on a sermon while it’s not a fun topic. Original sin seems really complicated and it’s rude. Original sin is the tendency of our hearts to distort God’s good creation and to turn our own hearts towards ourselves. It’s depressing to think about mistakes and sin. I don’t want to think about my mistakes. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during world war II, said that original sin is the only empirically proven doctrine. We see it in the hearts of people around us. We see it in our hearts. We see it institutions. We can’t create an institution that does not tend towards pride and idolatry and self-destruction. There is no organization or nation or gathering of humans of any size which the human heart cannot distort for nefarious ends.
Again and again, humans try to save themselves apart from God. We create Babels. We create kingdoms. We seek to efficiently disperse God’s mercy ourselves. We just others before we judge ourselves. The speck in my neighbor’s eye is so obvious.
There is a scene in the old sitcom 30 Rock where the lead character, Liz Lemon, is going on a set of speed dates and she ruins all of them because she keeps on correcting her dates for most of the thirty seconds they have with each other. Her friend asks her why she feels the need to correct them, and her response is, “I can’t just let them be WRONG!”
It is easy to judge. And the same capacity to judge can be turned and distorted by sin just as easily. In our pride and in our judgment, we need to hear the voice of Jesus calling us back home.
If we don’t hear the call, we are stuck with ourselves where ever we go. If we don’t hear the call and try to follow Jesus, we are still lost.
God has extravagantly and inefficiently sought and called you to leave your sin and follow him. “Those called must get out of their situations, in which they cannot believe, into a situation in which faith can believe.” The call of Jesus dissolved all ties for the sake of the unique committment of Jesus Christ.
Mercy is not just affirmation. It’s good to feel affirmed by others, but that is not grace. Grace is the shepherd coming to us while we are lost and trapped, calling to us, setting us free, and then guiding us home. Jesus doesn’t save the lost sheep from the bush and then forget about him. Jesus brings him home.
As Frederick Buechner wrote, “The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror in a lather when he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for.”
Jesus is not just a coach or teacher who says, “I’ve been there before, I know what it is like.” Jesus is there, bleeding for you. Now. Here and now.
Let us pray.
“The alcoholic who gives up alcohol or the rich man who gives away his money are truly freed from alcohol and money, but not from themselves.”1
“The point is to get into such a situation, so that faith is true faith and not self-deception.”2