Rejoice With Me

Luke 15:1-10

Imagine, if you will, this scene:

Someone walks up to the door of a church, knocks, and says “Rejoice with me! I have found your lost friend!” and a crowd peering out from behind a door opened only a crack responds “oh no. they don’t belong here. We kicked them out.”

 

Can you imagine any of the dinner guests of Jesus, or the Pharisees and scribes around him in today’s story, responding like that when Jesus brings in someone new?

Can you imagine the possibility of yourself responding like that?

 

That’s certainly not how we want to think of ourselves here at Trinity. Many of us are here, after all, because we felt like we didn’t belong in some other community, and found a welcome here.

 

But it might be exactly what the Pharisees and the scribes are thinking, as they watch Jesus seek out and eat with the ritually unclean and the folks whose profession or “lifestyle” does not – cannot – fit into the traditions and requirements of the holy community. The pharisees and scribes were probably genuinely convinced that those folks were excluded from the holy community for good reason.

 

And I’ve known congregations and church communities that would respond just that way to the return of individuals that don’t fit their boundaries of the holy.

 

In fact, that scenario is so much a possibility, sometimes probability, in churches and communities in our own time and culture that cartoonist David Hayward has not one, but several often-quoted sketches of a crowd of sheep rejecting the sheep that Jesus has carried to them on his shoulders – the rainbow-colored queer sheep, the trans sheep, the non-binary sheep, the ordinary white sheep.

“That one wasn’t lost! We kicked that one out!”

 

That might even be how ninety-nine well-behaved, committed-to-community sheep could want to respond to a shepherd actually abandoning them – in the wilderness! – to chase down one trouble-making wandering sheep.

 

And I suspect that while Jesus is looking for the lost in our time and place, there are some “sheep” that one or another, or many, of us would prefer not to have to welcome in our own communities – people who feel dangerous to our community. People who advocate or celebrate what you or I experience as evil. People who make being church too much work. People who seem uncomfortably “political”.

 

And Jesus would not be surprised at resistance, or resentment, being a natural reaction to his lost-sheep story. In fact, he includes the resentment of the stay-at-home, the hardworking “good son”, in his very next story – right after the part we read today – of the “lost” misbehaving son and over the top welcoming father. He understands how hard it can be to see the problem child, the “squeaky wheel” get all the attention, get celebrated just for being “found”.

Hard even if, in fact, you or I have also, at another time in our lives, been the one who desperately needed to be found, to be rescued and brought “home”.

 

Jesus knows this isn’t a comfortable story. (He almost never tells comfortable stories, after all.)

But he wants us to know it’s a good story.

That it’s about joy.

 

The bottom line of this sheep story, and of the story of the woman searching for a lost coin, is “Rejoice with me!”

And that there is joy in heaven.

 

These are joyful stories, because the finding of the lost restores wholeness to the flock of sheep, the set of coins, the community of the righteous – or the community of restored sinners.

A joy that needs to be shared with others. A joy that Jesus tells us is bigger than we would first guess it is.

 

(I’ll admit that Jesus’ declaration that there’s more rejoicing over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous that need no repentance…itches at me. I’m pretty sure that’s there as a pointed nudge to Pharisees and scribes – people who work very hard at maintaining a strictly defined holy righteousness – that their way is not the only, or even the most joyful, way to God’s heart.

But I don’t think Jesus minds if it nudges or itches any later hearers convinced of their own righteousness. Or the part of those of us who know our own need for repentance which still feels that seeing someone who has been dangerous to us brought back into the fold and changing their ways is less satisfying than seeing that person get a well-deserved helping of consequences.

Then again, maybe it’s even meant to be a joke. Because, as someone pointed out when we read this story in a Vestry meeting, how often do you actually find ninety-nine people who genuinely need no repentance?)

 

But the fundamental point of these stories is not actually about those who “need no repentance” – or the ninety-nine sheep, or the never-lost coins.

These stories are not even, I suspect, about the one lost and found sheep, or coin, or sinner.

Not primarily about us in any of these roles.

These stories are about God’s joy, and the invitation to us to share that joy.

 

“Rejoice with me!” the finder says, in both of the stories we hear Jesus tell today.

They summon their whole community to share their joy, their delight in the finding and restoration.

 

And I suspect Jesus, telling these stories, is inviting the Pharisees and scribes to the radical act of forgetting the rules of righteousness, forgetting all measures of merit or fault, to join in God’s joy in the reconciliation of all humanity.
That Jesus is inviting us, down the centuries, to share in God’s joy in the restoration of the wholeness of all creation – not matter how much we have invested ourselves in God’s work, or withheld ourselves from God’s work.

 

What a compliment, to be the ones with whom God wants to, needs to, share God’s joy. To be so important to God that we are those God turns to to celebrate.

 

Think for a moment about who you turn to to share your joys.

 

Sometimes we want everyone to see the baby pictures that melt our hearts. Sometimes we need specific individuals to rejoice with us in a hard-won success, or an unexpected blessing.

But think for a moment about who you need to have share in your joy. The people without whose joy your own joy isn’t as complete, or as full, as you want it to be.

 

And imagine being the people whose sharing in joy is important, even essential to God.

 

In that case, can you really withhold your shared joy when even the most troublesome sheep is found?

 

It’s a spiritual discipline – a practice that strengthens our spirits and our hearts – to pay attention to God’s joy. To share in God’s joy, whether we never actually knew the person restored to community, or whether we, well, hated that person. Or felt any level of resentment or indifference in between.

 

To practice sharing God’s joy in restoring sinners, in finding the lost, in making God’s people whole, will strengthen the muscles of our hearts and spirits. Will make it easier to pray for people we don’t like, make it easier to see the holy in the midst of chaos or despair. Muscles we need, day by day, to meet the challenges in the world around us, and in our own personal lives.

 

And practice in sharing God’s joy at the restoration of others will open our spirits and hearts to God’s loving pursuit of each of us in our failings or self-righteousness. To God’s joy in finding us, God’s delight in making us – and all humanity, all creation – whole.

Counting the Costs

Luke 14:25-33

There are certainly days when I long to do what Jesus is talking about today. 

To drop everything, walk away from possessions, family, all the stuff I have and am; leave it all behind and go off and be a hermit with Jesus.

I don’t know if any of you have ever felt that way, but for me, well, there are definitely days….

And then I remember that if I do that, I’ll miss my cat. And my favorite pillow.
And you all. 

And my washer and dryer after a few days.

And my family, even when I’m frustrated with them.

And I remember that Jesus isn’t inviting us to chuck it all up to retreat to a nice calm mountain cave with no internet, but rather to join him in a very active lifestyle: healing, teaching, and arguing with authority.

And, well, I haven’t actually seized a cross and walked away from it all, yet.

Because this is in fact something very difficult that Jesus is proposing you and I and everyone else do. 

It’s very hard to actively cut ourselves off from possessions, identity, security, and control over our own destiny. 

Jesus is deliberately using strong language – maybe offensively strong language – about “hating” family and life itself, in order to make sure we don’t miss the point that he’s not asking for a temporary shift in our priorities, but a complete, powerful, shocking reorientation in our priorities and perspective. Demanding not that we be “good people”, but that we become completely God’s people. Jesus’ people, rather than our own person.

Jesus very definitely wants to save and heal all the people of God, regardless of who is lifting a heavy cross to greet him, and who is tightly connected with their whole family.

And today, he’s asking us not just to receive his healing care, but to join him in it. To be an active, completely committed, part of his work to bring the world and all people into the unprecedented peace and wholeness and justice and self-giving love of God.

And he doesn’t want us to jump on the wagon and then fall back off in shock and dismay, but to “count the cost” and know how profound a commitment this is going to be. So that we can join him in disrupting and rebuilding the world wholeheartedly, not tied up in half-forgotten obligations, self-preservation, and anxious fear.

Phew.

It’s a big ask.

But it might be that Jesus is asking us to do what many of us actually long to do. 

We might in fact long to become part of making extraordinary miracles, saving those already counted as lost, and transforming the world.

Or maybe you long to cut loose of anxious obligations, of the fear of loss, of the need to preserve the world as we know it because the flaws we know seem less terrifying than tearing things down and starting over. 

Or maybe we long to follow a leader who is truly right. Truly good, and who will keep us from accidentally collaborating with evil, who will put virtuous, generous, healing choices in front of us, instead of a messy mix of bad choices.

Anyone else felt some longing for one of those things?

Those things we long for are rarely easy to find and grasp in the world you and I live in, and so it is difficult – just as difficult as Jesus says – to commit ourselves to a whole life of doing what Jesus would do. To a whole life of putting ourselves, our social standing, our working relationships, our sense of security on the line in order to profoundly heal and save and transform the world, and the lives of the neighbors and family and friends we love.

But when all the costs are added up, the cost of discipleship, of choosing always, over and over again, to take the risk of healing and reconciling, of disrupting everyday evil and making new space for God’s transformative love, might not truly be as high as the cost of going along in the world as it is. 

And I’m convinced that Jesus is asking us, today, to count the costs of staying comfortable in the world as it is, as well as the costs of joining him in transformation.

Inviting us, challenging us, to consider what it costs us to “go along to get along” with a co-worker, or an in-law – or our own children or parents, sometimes – and compare it to the cost of calling out a casual support of injustice, or some malice in tasty gossip, or leaving someone else to suffer what won’t kill them.

Challenging us to count the costs of reading the news in horror, and feeling our own helplessness grow. And comparing that to the risks of publicly demanding change, the hard work of seeking out others who want to heal that particular horror, and the heavy lift of figuring out some new way to act when all the ordinary ways we’re used to trying don’t work.

Counting the costs to the healing of the earth and the health of our neighbors in the way we invest and use our possessions, along with counting the costs to our daily convenience and our future security of sharing our possessions, or divesting from things that might harm others.

Counting the costs of loving our neighbors, even our enemies, with compassion and hope and generosity, and comparing the costs of cutting ourselves off from our neighbors, or the costs of nurturing hatred in our hearts.

I’ve counted some of those costs myself. I imagine many of you have counted some of them, too. They’re all expensive. 

And none of them look good on the living room wall, or in my bank balance.

But wholehearted trust in God – committing to “take up the cross” and giving up anxious control of my own destiny to be led by the direction and example of the one most profoundly worthy of trust – is still appealing, expensive as it may become.

I’ve been finding, all along, that saving the world is far too expensive for me. Even saving just myself is beyond my budget. And finding, also, that declining to help Jesus heal the world, declining to try to help Jesus defeat the powerful and petty evils that try to cling to us, is even more expensive. 

I can’t afford to say “no” to Jesus’ call to live, and do, and be like him. I need that vision beyond my own vision, that strength and courage and love beyond my own. So, even though the accounting is complicated, day by day, I can only afford to say “yes”, to try to let Jesus choose my costs. Can only choose to try to let God spend all I have on healing, and hope, compassion and love, and - in the spending - discover the richness and joy of being part of God’s impossibly generous love. 

What about you?