Welcome Sinners, Tax Collectors, and Pharisees! -- Luke 15:1-10 (14th Sunday After Pentecost)

Scott Clark
2 days ago
11 min read

Photo Credit: Jans Thekkevetill, used with permission via Unsplash

To listen to the sermon, you can click here.

For the past couple weeks, we’ve been walking with Jesus through his ordinary days. Jesus is travelling dusty roads, village to village, with his disciples and a crowd – at times a very large crowd. Day in and day out, Jesus is teaching; he’s healing folks with aching bodies and broken spirits; he’s gathering and sharing meals with those he meets along the way.

These meals are central in the Gospel of Luke. One writer has said that in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is either going to a meal, sharing a meal, or coming from a meal. In Luke, gathering for a shared meal is one of the main ways that Jesus teaches and embodies the message that he brings. And he’s bringing big good news. Into a hurting world, Jesus is proclaiming that God is turning the world rightside up. The Reign of God is right here, right now. And every bit of this is provoking the powers – every day. Those in power don’t want to be turned rightside up.

As our Scripture reading this morning opens, Jesus is coming from a meal.^[1] He’s coming from a meal at the house of a Pharisee – one of the religious authorities. Jesus has noticed the power dynamics at the table, and he’s told some edgy stories about how the seats at that table might be rearranged – how folks outside the house should be invited in. And as Jesus comes from that meal, our Scripture tells us that “the sinners and tax collectors” are drawing near to Jesus, and the Pharisees are seething and grumbling: “This man... this man... why he even eats with sinners and tax collectors.” This ordinary moment is tense.

Jesus hears the grumbling, and tells three stories – three parables. We have two of them here before us this morning – the Parable of the Lost Sheep and of the Lost Coin. They lead into the Parable of the Lost Son – the Prodigal Son (which we talked about back in June).

Parables are everyday stories.^[2] They’re stories that rise up out of the world that the crowds would have known – day in and day out.

We receive them as stories within a story. There’s the story as it was told by Jesus to a 1^st century crowd. There’s the story as Luke then told it when they wrote down the gospel – the story becomes part of Luke’s particular telling of the Good News of Jesus. And then there’s the story as we hear it in our 21^st century world. Amy Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, says that to understand these stories, we have to think first of what these stories might have meant in the everyday, ordinary world of the 1^st century Jewish folks in the crowd – and then think of what they might mean in ours.^[3]

The Greek word that we translate as “parable” means to throw alongside.^[4] These stories are thrown alongside life to make a point. They are meant to challenge. I think of them as stories with a zing. They are intended to poke and to prod – to stir something up.^[5] Levine suggests that it’s better to think less of what they mean, and more of what they do.^[6]

· What is surprising in the parable?

· What is meant to rouse the listener out of their everyday assumptions?

Here, Jesus tells three stories about something or someone getting lost, and then getting found. Now to get a sense of what we mean when we say these are everyday stories – let’s think for a moment in our 21^st century experience. (Lisa and I talked about this in worship practice.)

· Who among you has lost your keys?

· Who among you has lost your cell phone?

· How did you go about looking for it... and how did it feel?

· How did it feel when you found it? OK, remember that?

Now, let’s put our 1^st century ears on, as Jesus tells these stories to this 1^st century crowd. These stories have a pattern: (1) Jesus asks a question – Who among you? (2) There is a losing. (3) There is a finding. (4) There is a celebration. (And then (5) Luke adds a moral or lesson.)^[7]

Jesus begins the first story with, “Who among you, having 100 sheep and losing one, does not leave the 99 and go after the lost one until it is found?” So, to 1^st century ears, what do you think the answer to that question would be? PAUSE No one. No one does that.^[8] If a shepherd leaves the 99, he puts the 99 at risk. By the time the shepherd gets back, there’s a significant chance that the 99 will be gone – wandered off, attacked by predators, stolen by thieves. That shepherd has one job – protect the flock. Livelihoods depend on that. This... is a different kind of shepherd – a shepherd who cares deeply about the one. Each and every one. Right off the bat, that’s the first zing.

The shepherd leaves the 99, goes and finds the one, and then carries the sheep back on his shoulders – and gathers all his friends and neighbors for a feast – “Rejoice with me!”

And there’s the woman who loses one of her 10 coins – her 10 drachmas. Look at what she does. She likely lives in an ordinary house of the time – one door, no windows, a dirt floor. She lights the lamp so that she can see; she sweeps that dirt floor, until she finds the coin. And then she calls all her friends and neighbors – all the women she knows – “Come rejoice with me!” And they all celebrate. Over one lost coin that was found.

Those are quite mighty celebrations for one lost sheep and for one lost coin. What we have here in these stories from ordinary life is an extra-ordinary, fervent search for the one who is lost, and much bigger welcome and celebration than one might expect.

Now with parables we have to resist the move to lock this in as an allegory – where everything in the story stands for one particular thing: Aha! The shepherd must be God. The woman must be God. God goes after the one who is lost. I’m not saying that’s wrong. Yes, we can hold that as part of the meaning, but we don’t have to lock the meaning in there. We don’t have to stop there.

We can think some of where we see ourselves in the story. What if we are the sheep or the coin – someone will come searching for us – promise. Or, what if we are the shepherd or the woman? What if these stories come to Jesus, and he tells them, to say – “Look out for each other, like this.” What if we’re among the neighbors who are called to celebrate?

Could all that be part of the meaning as Jesus tells these stories in response to the Pharisees, when they grumble and say, “Why this man – he even eats with sinners and tax collectors.”

You see, Luke has an even bigger point to make with these stories. Luke has undertaken – in an ordered way – to write down the Good News of how God in Jesus Christ is turning the world rightside up. Mary sings it at the beginning: God is bringing down the powers, and lifting up those who have been held low. Jesus proclaims it at the start: The Spirit is upon me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captive, freedom to all who are oppressed.

When Luke writes down these stories, he brings front and center the sinners and the tax collectors. Now to our 21^st century American ears, we here “sinners” and we might think that means “those who have done wrong.” But to 1^st century ears, to the Pharisees, it would have been more those who stand outside the proper bounds of community – yes, those who have transgressed the law, but also those who violate what have come to be called the “purity codes.”^[9] Those who are unclean and not us – those whose bodies are broken, or who have skin sores, or who are hurt and bleeding. Samaritans. Any foreigner really. Those who are not in their right mind. Those who transgress rules of appropriate intimacy. And the tax collectors, well, they are the ones who have gone over to the other side – they are tools of the Empire. All those “sinners and tax collectors” – they are the type of people one should never invite to dinner. To put it a bit more broadly, they’re the folks we don’t like. To sit with them and share a meal is to upset the order of things.

Luke is telling these stories-within-a-story – the Parables of the Lost Coin and Sheep – embedded in this story of the Pharisees, a crowd, Jesus, and “the sinners and tax collectors” – to contrast two very different value systems – (1) the world as it is, and (2) the world as Jesus is proclaiming it and embodying it – when he sits down for a meal with just about anyone.^[10]

What is operative in Luke’s world-as-it-is is what Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim describe as a “politics of disgust.”^[11] Power-over maintains its power by pushing many people down so that a controlling few might stay on top. A “politics of disgust” is one of the tools that power uses. “A politics of disgust encourages... hatred toward a people or persons based on false, unfair, and constructed stereotypes. A politics of disgust preserves the power and dominance of the stereotype, silencing the voices of those objectified by the stereotype and destroying any possibility of political solidarity between the majority and the oppressed or the one it seeks to oppress.”^[12]

Luke is naming what that looks like in his world of power-over. We know what that looks like in ours.

Think about our government’s assault on immigrants and refugees, its assault on folks who have fled their homeland to find a better life here. From its inception, the current regime has vilified and dehumanized immigrants to prop up the regime’s inhumane policies.^[13] It’s so consistent and has become so tragically ordinary that maybe we forget. For years now, the president has described immigrants broadly as criminals, gang members, and rapists. He’s said, “They’re not human. They are animals.”^[14] Remember when he accused Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating dogs?^[15] By using this rhetoric of disgust, suggesting that some humans are somehow less than human – the regime has hoped to numb a nation’s compassion to a broad swath of humanity. They do that so that the regime, with impunity, can separate families – send people to prisons in countries they’ve never set foot in, with little hope of ever getting out – so that they can try to deport children on midnight flights with no due process, so that they can terrorize whole communities with masked agents of the regime. The regime has made their politics of disgust part of our ordinary days to desensitize a nation to the regime’s extraordinary cruelty.

Think of the regime’s assault on our transgender siblings – so many ways the regime dehumanizes them – the latest to suggest in one massive lie that transgender folks are somehow broadly responsible for mass shootings.

Or, think of the dehumanizing rhetoric of white supremacy that kept Black Americans in slavery – that propped up Jim Crow laws, that maintains New Jim Crow to this day.

This politics of disgust is right out of power-over’s playbook. Used again and again down through the centuries, it as has become all too ordinary in our day.

In our scripture this morning, Jesus upends the systems of their day that are powered by a politics of disgust, by sitting down at table – again and again – ordinary moment after ordinary moment – with sinners and tax collectors – with those the powers despise. Now, I want to say this clearly: Jesus rejects the “politics of disgust” everywhere and in every day.

Who is this man? And here, he upends their world – with two little everyday stories. Who among you wouldn’t value the one? That’s good news for the one sheep, for the one coin, for the one sinner, for the one tax collector, for every one listening to that story, for every one who has been pushed down or held back, for every one.

Notice that there is even a word here for the Pharisees too. Yes, Jesus is eating with the sinners and tax collectors, but did you notice that he’s also eating with the Pharisees. When he tells these stories, he’s coming from dinner at the house of a Pharisee.

For everyone who is listening, implicit in these stories is the promise that the one who seeks out and welcomes home the one sheep, the one coin, will seek out and welcome you too. These celebrations at the end of these stories are for everyone. The shepherd, the woman, the father of the son who was lost – they call together all their neighbors – “Rejoice with me!” Everyone is invited – even the Pharisees. But do notice that coming to the table means that you have to be willing to sit down... with the sinners and the tax collectors.^[16]We’ve got to be willing to see each other as fully human – and then to pull up a seat – for ourselves and for them.

So what might it mean to read these stories on Homecoming Sunday, when we gather again, as we do in the ordinary order of things, after a summer of coming and going, to welcome each other home, back into the life of this community. Well, first, it is to say in ALL CAPS, in bold and italics, underlined, with exclamation marks! and some celebratory emoji: Whoever you are, wherever you are on your journey, there is a place for you here.

And then, it is to affirm together that we gather in this place, again and again, to commit our ordinary days to the values for which Jesus gave his life –

· welcoming those who need shelter in a world that would turn them away,

· welcoming those who come to get food, here because they fear going to public agencies,

· welcoming children, here in worship and in our preschool, so that we can say to them again and again, you are valued and loved. And so on.

Reading these stories on Homecoming Sunday, reminds us that welcoming each other and all people, like that, always, always calls for a celebration. You might even want to call in a jazz band.

The world right now is a scary place – but in God’s world turned rightside up – there is a place for you and for all people. Making that so is the work that is ours to do.

Come, rejoice, and welcome home.

^[1] For general background on this passage and on the Gospel of Luke, see R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” New Interpreters’ Bible Commentary, vol. ix (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995); Justo L. González, Luke (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010); Sharon Ringe, Luke (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995); Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim, “Gospel of Luke,” Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018).