There’s
nothing that concentrates the mind more than impending disaster. This morning
at All Age Worship, we thought a bit about what we would take with us if we had
to leave our house with a few minutes notice, like the people of Whaley Bridge
earlier this summer, or those made homeless by Hurricane Dorian.
Some
opted for useful things. The front door key. A phone and phone charger to let
people know you were safe. Others thought first of things of sentimental value.
The family photos which were now the only reminder of family members who had
died, things that were irreplaceable. Of course, it went without saying that
people were the most precious of all.
These
were the things we valued the most.
When
Jesus tells his stories of the lost sheep and lost coin, he is tapping into
that instinctive sense we have of what matters to us and how desperate we
are to preserve it. It’s not actually very sensible to leave 99 perfectly good
sheep in the wilderness in order to find one which is lost, but the shepherd couldn’t bear to think of it being vulnerable and alone. The woman who
used up good lamp oil to find her lost coin and then probably spent its
equivalent on rejoicing with her friends also seems to have got things a bit
out of proportion. The woman’s
coin wasn’t worth a huge amount, but it was probably part of her dowry, the
only thing which truly belonged to her and which she would keep if her husband
divorced her. It was a symbol of her independence.
The
amount of effort both characters put into their search may seem
disproportionate, but that’s the point. People behave like this. We all do.
People will even put their own lives in danger in order to save what is
precious to them – spending those extra minutes gathering their precious
possessions up, in the knowledge that every moment they delay is actually a
moment they are risking their lives when disaster threatens. Disaster movies
often play heavily on that – the wall of water is advancing, the asteroid is
approaching but, no, the protagonists decide that they just have to go back for
this thing, that person, the dog or cat they can’t bear to leave behind. We
want to shout “no, leave it – just go!”, but it doesn’t work like that.
And,
Jesus says, if people behave like this, how much more so will God?
The
difference between us and God is in what, or who, we think is valuable enough
to merit this “do or die” treatment.
The
Pharisees and Scribes are clear about it. The valuable people are people like
them, people who are at least trying to keep the rules, respectable people.
They are aghast at Jesus’ apparent insistence on spending his time – wasting his
time as they see it – on tax-collectors and sinners. Tax collectors collected
taxes for the Romans; they were collaborators. ‘Sinners’ was a vague term that
covered anyone whose behaviour, or simple misfortune, put them beyond the pale.
This was an age in which illness, disability and poverty were thought to be
punishments from God, so “sinners” covered many, many people who had just found
that the wheels had come off their lives, so to speak, and that they were
floundering in some way. What’s the point in trying to help them? If Jesus is
God’s Messiah, surely he should be more careful, wiser, in choosing his
associates!
That’s
why Jesus tells them these stories. He gets his audience to think of what they
value and how far they go to rescue and safeguard these things. But then he challenges them to imagine that God might feel exactly the same when he looks at
the people they have written off.
"What
if God felt about a tax collector the way you felt about a sheep that was lost
and found, a coin which you had treasured as a symbol of your independence, a
safety net if life went wrong for you? What if each of these people whom you
have written off as a waste of space were actually worth so much that God would
be prepared to give all he had, even his own life, for them." And that is exactly what Christians believe that he did in sending his son, who refused to turn
back from his commitment to those who needed him.
The
letter to Timothy, from which our first reading came, probably wasn’t written by
Paul – it was probably written after he died - but it is meant to read as if it was. It was the kind of thing he would have said; we know from other letters that were written by him that he regarded it as
astonishing that he, someone who had persecuted Christians, would ever be
accepted by them, and by God, forgiven, loved, regarded as part of the family.
But that was what had happened, and it transformed him completely. Love has a
way of doing that. He was the “foremost of sinners”, and yet the grace of God
overflowed for him.
Tonight
we may be feeling like the lost sheep – “Can God really love me?” Or we may be
feeling like one of those 99 who thought they had it all sorted out – “Can God
really love him or her, the one who has wandered off?” But either way, the
answer is “Yes!Yes!Yes!” and all the angels in heaven rejoice when we start to
hear that answer and believe it.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment