Pastor, educator, and theologian Rodger Nishioka tells a story about studying the Parable of the Lost Sheep while participating in an ecumenical dialogue with members of the Russian Orthodox Church. He made reference to the parable by that name with his conversation partners and it derailed things for a little bit as the group tried to figure out which of Jesus’ stories Rodger was talking about. After he described it a bit and fleshed out the details a little more, one of the priests said, “Ohhhhhh! You mean the Parable of the Incomplete Flock!”
They knew this foundational story, of course. They just knew it with a different focus. Instead of a reading that emphasis individualistic redemption, they considered it from a different angle and read about community that is not whole.
We don’t have to be satisfied with one fixed moral of these stories Jesus tells. No matter how many times we hear the parables of Jesus there are always new messages for us, new ways to examine them, new truths about God and God’s kin-dom for us to learn from them. So this morning I’d like us to go on a little exploration of this story together and see if there might be some new insights we can add to our familiar readings.
The opening verses tell us that it’s the tax collectors and sinners who were coming near to listen to Jesus. The Pharisees were standing nearby, grumbling Luke says, about the kind of company Jesus was keeping. I have to imagine they are at the very least a secondary audience. Luke says Jesus told “them” this parable, but he doesn’t say which them. I tend to imagine he was telling the story to the tax collectors and sinners who purposely came to hear him, but he told it loud enough that the Pharisees around the edges could hear (and learn too).
But who are these tax collectors and sinners? Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar who also happens to be Jewish, tells us about them in her book, Short Stories by Jesus. In traditional readings we are often told that tax collectors are Jewish people who have abandoned the covenant by doing ungodly work. Similarly we are told the sinners are people who have behaved so badly they’ve been thrown out of the synagogue. Speaking as an expert in both Jewish history and the theology of the Christian gospels, Levine writes this, however:
“The problem with “tax collectors” is not that they denied the covenant; it is that they work for Rome and so would be seen by many within the Jewish community as traitors to their own people. Sinners are not “outcasts”; they are not cast out of synagogues or out of the Jerusalem Temple. To the contrary, they are welcome in such places, since such places encourage repentance. The Gospels generally present sinners as wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. That is a dandy definition of the term. Thus, in a first-century context, sinners, like tax collectors, are individuals who have removed themselves from the common welfare, who look to themselves rather than the community.”
These are the people Jesus is talking to about repentance. These are the people who are receiving this story about what is lost, what is searched for, and what is rejoiced over. They are the ones who hear that there is “much rejoicing over one sinner who repents….”
Which begs the next question – Who in the parable repents?
Well, if you’re looking for someone who drops to their knees in confession, wears sackcloth and ashes, and beats their breast in guilt… no one. No one does that kind of repenting of sin in this story.
But if you consider that the word repent is much more simply defined as “turning around” or “changing direction,” well, now we’re on to something
Who changes direction? Who is the rejoicing all about?
Usually when we read this story it’s the sheep who wandered off we think of as the one who God is rejoicing over. But… well…
Did the sheep do anything wrong? Can a sheep do anything wrong? Can a sheep repent? That seems to give a lot more credit to sheep than I think they deserve in my limited sheep experience.
But there is a person in this story – a person we usually allegorize as God in this parable, it’s God who goes out to find the wandering and lost – but what if, bear with me here, what if the shepherd is not necessarily a godly figure here, but a character representing the human condition and situation. A person who don’t always get things right. A person who sometimes loses track of important things – like 1 sheep out of 100. A person who sometimes lets what is valuable to God slip through their fingers. A tax collector who has turned on his community. A sinner who hoards wealth and resists community.
We people have a history of doing that, don’t we?
Last night a number of us from First Presbyterian Church attended the annual Family Promise Homecoming Dinner and fundraiser. One of the families that has been touched by the work of Family Promise told their story of the help they received when they were at risk of losing the first home they had ever owned. It turns out that during the process of refinancing their loan somehow just the home itself was included and not the land on which mobile home sat, something this family of first time homeowners didn’t understand. The family faced eviction and the very real prospect losing their home because we as a society don’t always do a particularly great job of keeping our eye out for vulnerable people. Had it not been for a compassionate judge who listened before they ruled, who connected the family with Family Promise and stepped between them and their landowner, these valuable children of God may have slipped through the fingers of the community.
The risk of losing track of what’s valuable – all of those who are valuable – is more than just one story about one family and one home. It’s what happens when we say with our words that we want a home for everyone, but then with our actions we oppose zoning changes that would make affordable multi-family properties be built near our own. Or we don’t challenge predatory lending practices, or we resist paying a living wage to all who work because it will cost us more of our own resources.
We have one job to do – to hold onto what is important to God, to hold with love and justice, and compassion the neighbors and strangers God has put in our midst – just as the shepherd had one job, to hold onto what is important, his flock, the whole flock, but he couldn’t quite follow through with the task. He let something very value slip his mind, slip through his fingers. He didn’t keep careful watch over the whole flock.
Well, that feels familiar – losing sight of what it important to God. (11:00: So familiar we acknowledge our tendency to do the very same thing every single week in worship together when we offer our prayer of confession.) So familiar Jesus includes the need to seek forgiveness for not holding up our end of the covenant with God in the most basic prayer he taught us. Forgetting what is important to God, not holding all that God values together, letting them slip through our fingers, that’s pretty familiar for all of us together and each of us on our own. It’s part of the human problem.
It’s what the tax collectors and sinners to whom Jesus is talking directly do. It’s also what the Pharisees are doing as they grumble and forget that God is a god of redemption. It’s what we do when we hold onto the idea that the needs and interests of people of wealth and means are more important to address than the needs of those who struggle to make ends meet.
We do this very thing all the time – forgetting what God thinks is important, what God wants us to focus on, what God has declared our purposes to be while substituting our own comfort, our own stability, our own priorities, our own measures of success. Letting down God’s hopes for us and how we can build God’s kin-dom is sort of a human specialty, and so what happens in the parable that causes joy in heaven in the presence of the angels of God is something we should probably pay attention to!
The shepherd changes direction. He realizes that he has lost one who counts, who matters, and he goes out to find her. He changes his behavior by seeking the one he let slip away. He repents. The shepherd is the one who repents.
“There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nice righteous person who need no repentance,” Jesus says. This isn’t “woe is me,” self-flagellation, or even quiet prayerful repentance. It isn’t even limited to individual repentance, because with this kind of repentance whole communities can participate together. Alone and together, we can make a change in our minds, hearts, and behavior; we can go back to find and pick up what we let go of that is valuable to God. We can acknowledge that our actions and inactions, our history and our present don’t always align with what is important to God, and we can commit to changing directions and moving toward what God has told us is good and right and faithful.
Jesus wants his listeners – all his listeners, the tax collectors and sinner who have turned away from their community to focus on their own needs, the Pharisees and scribes who are eager to decide who is in and who is out, those of us here today who get too busy looking after our own lives to see who is missing, institutions that resist facing the truth about the ways they have excluded others – Jesus wants his listeners to know that not only is it OK to change directions. It’s desirable, worthy of celebration, to do something different, to fix our mistakes, to repent, to turn around and acknowledge that those we have ignored actually count.
I know that’s not easy because it requires admitting that we lost track of what is important to God for a while. We might want to just cut our losses, save face, and be happy with holding onto 99% of what God considers valuable. Or maybe we could just very quietly, incrementally, with baby steps that won’t draw attention, make small shifts towards putting God’s priorities at the center of our life. But that’s not what the shepherd does. And that’s not what gets celebrated in the parable.
God celebrates radical transformation. God celebrates when people live into kin-dom values. God celebrates a humanity that is not afraid to stop in our tracks when we recognize that we’re missing someone important, that we can make a change that more directly align our lives and purposes with God’s will. God hopes that we can change directions and hopes that we will even throw a party when we do! Not to puff ourselves up, but to rejoice with the whole community that is restored.
We can do better. We can be better. As individuals who seek to follow Jesus in our day to day living – as members of a community that makes decisions that impact the ability for all people to thrive – as a church that strives to live God’s love in the world – acknowledging we are and have been imperfect before God and one another, and turning in a new direction because of what we have learned.
It doesn’t need to be shameful to admit to ourselves and others when we have been wrong because we can celebrate in community on earth and in heaven when we learn and do right.
Our forgetfulness, our spiritual and material missteps, even our willful disobedience when it comes to that, do not have the final say, because God delights in our repentance and God rejoices in showing us mercy and forgiveness.
Thanks be to God!
