God Wants you at the Party (Luke 15)

Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 31, 2019

            You love the punch.  It’s ginger ale and some kind of sherbert and something else.  You can’t quite place all flavors, but it is fantastic.  Does the wonderful conversation you’re having make the punch taste better, or is it good by itself?  You’re not sure, but you’re enjoying both, the tasty drink, and the conversation. 

You’re surprised that you are talking with the person you’re talking with.  It’s the mayor!  This surprises you because the mayor is not usually at your church, or any church.  When he was elected, he was very public about his atheism.  And just last week, he was involved in a public scandal of a sexual nature.  It wasn’t enough to have him removed from office.  But he was painted with embarrassment and shame.  It likely killed his political ambitions.  Would he ride out his term in seclusion?

No!  Here he is, the scandalized, atheist mayor in a delightful conversation with you here at your church’s reception.  You talk about how much you both love the town and how you both enjoy the spring weather.  Eventually he moves on to talk to other people.  As you contemplate why he might be there, a friend from church sidles up.

“Can you believe that scumbag has the nerve to show up here?”  She asks, her face joyless.  Her negative mood has thrown a wet blanket onto your warm feelings. You look into her eyes, peering out from her frown.  She looks down and grumbles, “This is too fruity.”  She throws out a full cup of the punch you’ve been enjoying. 

In Luke 15, Jesus has something for all the party poopers in the church.  God wants you at the party, whether you a scandalized mayor, a self-righteous church busybody, or whomever you might be.  God wants us to understand that church is a party with laughing, drinking, dancing, good food, and good conversation.

There are people outside who don’t realize the gathering of God’s people is supposed to be a celebration.  Worse, people inside the church don’t know that either.  In some churches, the people inside who don’t know are the ones who run the church.  They think church is for them.  It’s not.  Church is the body of Christ.  We in the church who have already put our trust in Jesus are to spend our lives getting to know Him.  To know Him, we have to be with Him.  To be with Him, we have to be where He is.  Luke 15 makes it clear that Jesus is out in the world, looking for people who don’t know Him so he can help them find their way to his party.

“Tax collectors and sinners were coming near” Luke writes.  The Pharisees and scribes - religious leaders, kind of like pastors, elders, and deacons - grumble.  “This fellow welcomes tax collectors and sinners, and eats with them.”  Tax collectors was a catch-all phrase for the immoral people decent individuals avoided.  When Jesus welcomed them and ate with them, he invited them into intimate circles of friendship.  When he heard religious leaders complain about his sinner-friends, he told parables of lost things, a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son.  

In these stories, we see three ways of being lost and three ways of seeking the lost.   Among the many lessons of Luke 15 are these certainties.  People are cut off, far from God, and in that condition, they’re in trouble.  God seeks the lost and expects His church to do so.  And finally, many of the lost are lost inside the church. 

Jesus begins with a lost sheep.  How does a sheep get lost?  It wanders off.  It is a stupid animal.  It’s not willfully ignoring the shepherd.  It just doesn’t pay attention to Him.  Due to the animal’s own carelessness and ignorance, it ends up lost.  It didn’t know where it was going. 

So many people within blocks of our church are in this exact condition.  Having grown up in the church or at least with a sense of who Jesus is, people don’t understand how important it is to be connected to Him.  Spiritually, they know they’re hungry, but unaware of how to be filled.  So they try this religion or that church; they try to be filled by wealth or status; maybe it’s an obsession with fitness or extreme sports; maybe drugs and partying.  How does God respond to us when we are oblivious and blindly wander away from Him?

The shepherd in Jesus’ parable leaves 99 sheep in the wilderness to go find the lost one.  That’s crazy!  Won’t they all get lost too?  Probably.  When they do, the shepherd will go into the wastelands to find them.  This shepherd is reckless and that’s Jesus’ point.  Being lost is so dangerous for the sheep, the shepherd will search recklessly because he is urgent to save the lost one.  When he does, he celebrates!

God expects us to be just as urgent in our concern for people who don’t know Jesus.  If we truly want to follow Jesus and love others, we have be driven to help others find their way to the salvation Jesus offers.  When we do that we are truly sharing hope.  We are called to recklessly seek out the lost as Jesus does. 

In the second parable a coin is lost.  The sheep got itself lost by ignoring the shepherd.  Nothing the coin did led to it being lost.  Someone else lost that coin.  We know so many people who have been raised in families that have no connection to Christianity at all.  Or, we see people raised in abusive church situations.  In church, they don’t experience love.  They don’t meet Jesus.  Church is a place of judgment and guilt.  They end up driven from the church. These poor souls, these lost coins, are far from God because people have driven them from Him.

Note that Jesus compares God to a woman who will stop at nothing until she finds her coin.  The shepherd recklessly sought the lost.  The woman relentlessly searches.  She is determined to find the lost coin, and God is determined that your non-Christian neighbor will come to faith in Jesus and be saved.  Furthermore, just as God wants us to care about lost people the way the reckless shepherd did, God also wants us to evangelize with relentless determination like the woman.

We are to seek out the lost that they might meet Jesus and be saved!

The third story in the Luke 15 trilogy is the most familiar, the lost son or the prodigal son.  The sheep got itself lost by being careless.  The coin was lost by someone else.  Both needed to be found.  The lost son willfully turned away from the father.  He knew who the father was, what the father was like, and still he turned away.  He knowingly chose to reject the father in favor of a life partying and sexual promiscuity.  His was open, honest defiance. 

How does God react to this overt rejection?  Differently.  Unlike the shepherd and the woman, we do not see the father go out to the far country to seek out the lost son.  The son made a choice and the father honors that choice.  That doesn’t mean the father has given up on this wayward one. 

The son’s life falls apart as our lives always do when we reject God.  He finally realizes his only hope is to go back to his father.  While he is still far off, the father runs to him.  The father could only do that if he had been watching for him.  The father could not have known which day the son would come if he ever came home.  So, the father spent time every day watching instead of doing his work.  He should have been managing all his holdings, overseeing his business, but to him, watching for his son mattered more. 

The shepherd sought the lost sheep recklessly.  The woman sought the lost coin relentlessly.  This father watched for his lost son restlessly.  He couldn’t go on with life.  He harbored a foolish hope that his son was alive out there and would one day come home.  When we turn from God and reject Jesus, God keeps an eye on us longing for that day when we will choose to turn back to Him.

The body of Christ, us, God’s church in the world today, needs to live with that same watchfulness.  We never know if today will be the Sunday God has led a lost soul through our doors.  So every Sunday, we have to be ready to heap the love of God on everyone who comes through our doors.  Through prayer and worship, we have to present our hearts to God that we may be transformed, moved from the competition and destructiveness of our society to the grace of God.  We need to be a community of grace ready to receive and love and encourage the lost when they find their way to us.  That’s our work as a church, helping the lost meet Jesus and be saved.

Church is supposed to be a party, a gathering of people who are joined together in Christ.  He didn’t just tell tax collectors and sinners how to be saved.  He welcomed them into the deepest levels of friendship, sharing the table with them and doing so with loud laughter and deep draughts of joy.  

God wants church to be a party when we gather.  Furthermore, God wants us to know we’re at a party and experience the happiness of not just any party, but the best of parties.  The older brother in the prodigal son story missed the joy of the father.  He spent all his life in the father’s house and never entered that joy.  He didn’t leave, but he was as lost as his younger brother.

Many churches are full of older brothers like that, complainers.  Many who have spent their lives in church are like the member I mentioned in the opening story, the one who complained that the scandalized atheist mayor would dare show up at church, at my church; when they are done griping about the sinfulness of lost people, they mutter about the way punch is too fruity.  They’ve spent a lifetime lost at church. 

It’s not their church or mine.  It’s not our church.  It’s God’s.  We are guests at God’s party, invited to stay forever.  We only enjoy it when we realize we are at a party. 

Tax collectors and sinners were coming near [to Jesus] to listen to him.  God wants us to be near Jesus and, with the Holy Spirit, to go out to lost people and help them draw near to Jesus.  Because God wants them at the party too.

AMEN

Broken Hearted Evangelism

Sunday, January 13, 2013

 

            How does Jesus identify about people who are (A) outside the religious establishment and (B) who are far from God?  In Luke chapter 5 we find the story of Jesus calling Levi the tax collector.  “Follow me,” Jesus says.  Tax collectors and sinners is a formula Luke uses to indicate he is describing disreputable people; bad guys.  These are those who do not go to worship; those who are widely known to live out immoral behaviors.  The ones popular society identified as righteous, the Pharisees and scribes, complain.  They are grumbling in the story in Luke 5.  They say to Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”  To and eat and drink, to share the table – that was intimacy; that act gave legitimacy to the humanity of the other.  Why are you, Jesus, who would be a rabbi, eating with such lowlifes and riffraff?

            Jesus responded, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31).

            A similar scenario arises in Luke 15.  Again, Luke tells us that the corrupt and the immoral – the degenerates of society – are gathering.  “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]” (v.1).  The dutiful religious leaders had to have their say.  Grumbling, the Pharisees and scribes muttered through red faces and clenched teeth, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  Jesus responds with three parables, one about a lost sheep, a second about a lost coin, and the third, his most famous, about a lost son.

            We have our metaphors.  I began asking, how does Jesus identify those who are outside the religious establishment and how does he identify those who are far from God.  He compares them to those who are sick and in need of a doctor.  And he compares them to those who are lost.  There are different ways one is lost.  The lost sheep mindlessly wandered off.  The lost coin did nothing to be lost.  The woman lost it.  The prodigal son chose his hedonistic way.  He would not have said he intentionally got himself lost, but his state of being lost resulted from his own choices. 

In modern evangelical language, often the world is divided up into categories, the saved and the lost.  But we say that without thinking.  Jesus used different metaphors to describe those cut off from God by sin.  And when he did say lost, the word contained more than one meaning.  What is clear is that there was in the Gospel and there are today people who are not walking in faith.  They do not have relationship with God and do not worship Him.  In the Gospel, those inside the religious establishment despised those they called sinners.  Other texts from Luke show these same Pharisees were blind to their own sins.

How did Jesus feel about sinners?  He wanted to be with them, to eat with them and spend time with them.  He loved them.  The ultimate example he gives is the Father, representing God, in the Prodigal story.  The Father ran to meet the son who had walked out and all but declared the father dead.  This son brought shame on the family and ruin on himself, but this father ran to him, embraced him, and loved him.  Throughout Luke 15, Jesus demonstrates that in God there is overwhelming joy when someone is saved from sin, saved from death, saved from Hell, and most importantly, saved from life apart from God.  In fact, scholar Fred Craddock says this joy that bursts out from God when a lost person is saved, when a sick person is healed of the worst of diseases, godlessness; this joy is at the heart of the Gospel.[i]

How did Jesus feel about sinners?  He repeatedly butted heads with the Pharisees because he felt the Pharisees were merciless and actually did things to grind hurting people into the ground.  In 18 Jesus tells a parable in which a self-righteous Pharisee is condemned but a repentant tax collector is forgiven.  In Matthew 23, Jesus unleashes a furious sermon of condemnation against Pharisees.  What did they do to draw such ire from Jesus?  They failed to love and help sinners.  In Luke 19, riding into Jerusalem, knowing his crucifixion is coming, Jesus weeps openly.  He’s crying because the state of spiritual brokenness fills him with deep sadness. 

If someone displayed this open anger and emotion over another’s pain and if he did it publically, today someone might derisively call him a bleeding-heart liberal.  I have, in conversations, expressed concern and even sadness over issues like hunger and poverty and lack of clean drinking water.  Conversation partners who thought of themselves as devout, conservative Christians suggested I was aligning myself with bleeding heart liberals.  Their tone implied an accusation. 

Because this is so-weighed and terms like liberal raise tempers and needless red flags, I decided against suggesting we should approach evangelism as bleeding heart evangelicals.  But there is no denying that people who are not Christ-followers, people we might call “lost,” bring sadness to God’s heart.  He loves them so much, he sent his only begotten son that whichever of those outside his family would believe in Jesus would not experience eternal death, but being born again would have everlasting life with God in God’s loving presence.  Did you note my wordy paraphrase of John 3:16?  The popular song that is out now gets it right.  We absolutely need to pray that what breaks God’s heart would break our hearts. 

One of the things that breaks God’s heart is when the sick, the sinners of the world, come looking for salvation or wander aimlessly in need of salvation, and God’s church ignores them or even worse scorns them and judges them.  We’ve talked about equipping ourselves to do evangelism, to share Jesus with the world.  In this series, I have proposed that we listen before we speak.  We listen to unbelievers so that they know we will not judge them.  Secondly, I have said we need to know ourselves.  We need to know what a Christian is and we need to spend our entire lives growing that knowledge.  We need to be able to speak fluently and seamlessly about our faith and about who Jesus is. 

A third way we are equipped is by loving those outside the church and outside the faith with the irrational mad love of Jesus that we see in Luke 15.  We have to have a posture of love and that love has to come from deep within us.  It can’t be faked.  But it can be developed.  And when we develop within us a real love for people far from Jesus, the lost sheep of the world, it will have a dramatic evangelistic affect because Christianity has not done such a great job of projecting love in the age of mass media.  As I mentioned in the last couple of weeks, Christianity has shown the watching a world a lot of things other than love: judgment; exclusion; prejudice; elitism. 

To get a sense of this, I want to share a snippet from a book that was wildly popular a few years ago, Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.

In this section, he’s on campus at his college, Reid College in Oregon.  He has already established that Reid is a party school without much of a Christian presence.  But, he and his friend are in fact Christ-followers at Reid.  Here’s what he writes about representing Christ in this secular and possibly even hostile environment.

Each year at Reid they have a festival called Ren Fayre.  They shut down the campus so students can party.  Security keeps the authorities away and everyone gets drunk and high, and some people get naked.  … The school brings in White Bird, a medical unit that specializes in treating bad drug trips.  The students create special lounges with black lights and television screens to enhance kids’ mushroom trips.

 

Some of the Christians in our little group decided this was a pretty good place to come out of the closet, letting everybody know there were a few Christians on campus.  Tony the Beat Poet and I were sitting around in my room one afternoon talking about what to do, how to explain who we were to a group of students who, in the past had expressed hostility toward Christians.  Like our friends, we felt like Ren Fayre was the time to do this.  I said we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said, “Confess your sins.”  I said this because I knew a lot of people would be sinning, and Christian spirituality begins by confessing your sins and repenting.  I also said it as a joke.  But Tony thought it was brilliant.  He sat there on my couch with his mind in the clouds, and he was [scaring me senseless] because there for a second, then for a minute, I actually believed he wanted to do it. 

 

“Tony,” I said very gently.  “We are not going to do this.”  He moved his gaze down the wall and directly into my eyes.  A smile came across his face.

 

“Oh, we are, Don.  We certainly are.  We are going to build a confession booth.

 

We met in the commons – Penny, Nadine, Mitch, Iven, Tony and I.  Tony said I had an idea.  They looked at me.  I told them Tony was lying and that I didn’t have an idea at all.  They looked at Tony.  Tony gave me a dirty look and told me to tell them the idea.  I told them I had a stupid idea that we couldn’t do without getting attacked.  They leaned in.  I told them we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said, “Confess your sins.”  Penny put her hands over her mouth.  Nadine smiled.  Iven laughed.  Mitch started drawing designs for the booth on a napkin.  Tony nodded his head.  I wet my pants. 

 

“They may well burn it down,” Nadine said.

 

“I will build a trapdoor,” Mitch said with his finger in the air. 

 

“I like it, Don,” Iven patted me on the back.

 

“I don’t want anything to do with it,” Penny said. 

 

“Neither do I,” I told her. 

 

“OK you guys,” Tony gathered everyone’s attention.  “Here’s the catch.  We are not actually going to accept confession.”  We looked at him confusion.  “We are going to confess to them.  We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry.  We will apologize for the crusades.  We will apologize for televangelists.  We will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely.  We will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus.  We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.”[ii]

 

 

            Silly idea, right?  Don Miller thought so too.  Of his friends, he was elected to sit in the booth first.  He sat there in the dark waiting, thinking there was no way the intoxicated, high revelers would stop their insane partying to step into a confession booth.  But they built it and set it in the middle of campus, in the middle of the craziness.  At one point during the construction of their booth, 100 people wearing nothing – and I do mean nothing – but body paint streaked by waving.  They waved back.  Then he sat there thinking of the ridiculous stupidity of it all.  He was about to quit when someone came in. 

            I am sure that visitor half-intended to make a mockery of it all.  But when Don told the young student, “No, you don’t confess to me, I, the Christian, have to apologize on behalf of Jesus for the crusades and the trail of tears and slavery in the south other things Christians have done,” when he said that, something changed.  This agnostic ended up talking to him for a long time.  He shared the gospel with this kid.  Over the course of many hours, Don Miller and his friends “confessed” to over 30 people.  They did it because they were convicted.  They believed Christians had failed to show love and they wanted to, in some small way, in their little corner of the world, right that wrong.

            I don’t think their method would work if it was repeated elsewhere, at least not in our context.  But I do wonder. Are we are worried about loving those outside the family of God, those who have not given themselves to Jesus?  Do our hearts break for the son who has wandered off to a far country?  Do we, with the shepherd’s desperation, leave 99 to go find one lost sheep?  Do the things that brought tears to Jesus’ eyes make us cry?  Are we brokenhearted evangelicals?

              One of the best ideas to come out of the book Evangelism without Additives is the author Jim Henderson’s designation of non-Christians.  He refuses to call them “lost.”  Rather, he calls them the people “Jesus misses most.”[iii]  I don’t know about you, but I think differently about someone when I think of them that way.  To say someone is “lost,” the way I think the term is understood by Christians today is to categorize that person in a negative and judgmental way.  I don’t feel positively about a person who is defined as lost or nonbeliever or unbeliever. 

            But to identify a person as someone Jesus misses most is another thing altogether.  Henderson writes, “I want Christians to want to be with the people Jesus misses most, not out of a sense of duty, but of adventure and partnership with God.  I want Christians to love people who don’t know Jesus, not be mad at them for not believing the right things” (p. 20).  It is fine that Henderson says he wants Christians to be with non-Christians out of love and not out of duty.  More importantly Luke 15 clearly shows, and this is seen in all four gospels, that Jesus expects his followers to have a heart love for people who are not his followers. 

            So, do we?  Do we love the lost, the people He misses most?  For me this take works.  My inclination is to stick with church folks.  I am not proud of that and I am working on it.  I have friends who as far as I know don’t attend church.  I am making space in my life to spend time with them and get to know them more.  I would love it if they would meet Jesus and give their lives to Him.  If they ask, I am ready to talk all about the salvation He gives.

            But it doesn’t come immediately.  The shepherd had to go out and search.  The Father had to wait for his lost son.  For now, I am setting aside time for my unchurched friends.  I plan to listen to them attentively and compassionately.  I am asking God to fill me with love because I know, from the stories Jesus told, that Heaven will be filled with joy when these friends of mine turn to Jesus.  And it will happen when you friends, those Jesus misses, come to Him.

            I close by asking God to come and break our hearts.  O God, help us see the world around.  Help us notice the people in our lives who are not following after Jesus, who do not worship, those who do not know you.  Help us see them and notice them.  And Lord God, our Master and Savior and Friend, fill us with love for these you miss.  Fill us with Love and send us to them.

AMEN

---

[i] Interpretation Commentary: Luke, p.186.

[ii] Blue Like Jazz, p.116-127.

[iii] Evangelism without Additives, ch. 2.