Year C

Luke 15:1-10 – Year C

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

The God of Radical Hospitality

“Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’” Don’t you just love it! Jesus seems to make a habit of eating with all the “wrong” people. I think Jesus thrived on creating tension between him-self and the religious authorities because he always seems to be pulling someone’s chain, challenging the pious and the powerful. Throughout history, it has always been significant with whom one ate with, because the very act of eating with someone can create, a oneness, a solidarity, a communion, if you please, with that person. It is in and through these parties or dinners that we get a wide open picture of who Jesus is and what he was doing as we hear him challenge the hearers to consider what it means to be a community. To consider, who is in, who is out, who is lost and who is found, and what boundaries, if any, the community has. Like, what does it mean to be saved? The hearers, then and now are being challenged to consider what God is like and what it is to welcome sinners and who these sinners might be.

The crowds pressing in around Jesus to hear his teachings are made up of all types of people. There are the disciples who gather around him to receive instruction; the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious authorities who want to keep tabs on him and his radical teachings; and the people who flock to him to hear him and be touched by him these are the ones who are being described as the tax collectors and sinners. Those whom no one else wanted to hang around with for fear their reputation would rub off on them, those of “good” reputations. These are the people who have been eating with Jesus and this has offended the religious authorities and thrown this community into a panic because of the company he is keeping. He welcomed outcasts into table fellowship with himself in the name of the kingdom of God, in the name of the one true God of Israel.

We can just hear the murmurs and questions, doesn’t he realize who they are, what they do for a living? He talks of God and godly things yet, eats, communes with the ungodly. Jesus already perceiving their questions responds with two stories, or parables, about lost things, and the search to find them, and the utter joy of recovering what was lost. As we read these stories, we hear a description of God! We hear Jesus saying let me tell you what God is like. God is like the Shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep until it is found. Laying it on his shoulders, he returns home rejoicing and calls his neighbors together to celebrate the one who was lost. God is like the woman, who having lost one of her treasured silver coins, lights a lamp, and sweeps her house until the coin is found. When she finds the lost coin she is overjoyed and calls her friends to celebrate. And between the lines we hear Jesus say, do you want to know how God feels toward those you would call “outcasts?”  God searches with relentless determination for that which is lost. God seeks out the outcasts, the sinners and says this is the basis of justice in my kingdom, and it will be the basis for salvation.

What these parables tell us is that God sees each one of us, each human as valuable; valuable enough to seek us out, even though God knows our sinful condition. Because at the very heart of the Good News is God’s love; a love that looks like one who goes out tirelessly searching, because the one who is lost is so lost that she or he cannot find their way back home. We become lost, and separated from God’s care, guidance and grace, when our life is out of touch with and contrary to God’s will. We are lost to God as we turn away from God’s purposes and pursue our own agendas and goals that are not in relation to God’s. But God cares for us in our sinfulness, in our lost-ness and even though we may turn away from God, God never stops seeking us out. No wonder tax collectors and sinners gathered around and listened to Jesus. These outcasts in Jesus’ audience had been led to believe they had wandered away from God’s concern or were not worthy of it at all.

Yet, from Jesus they heard words of love and acceptance because God rescues us from lost-ness, our lives are transformed from lives of sin to repentant sinners, with a new relationship to God and God’s people, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, there is much to rejoice about, as we all are invited to the dinner table. Those who decide to join this celebration, reveals whether one’s relationship to God and neighbor is based on merit-am I eating with the right people, or on mercy, and love. A love that invites the community to biblical hospitality by opening wide its doors and rejoicing at those who return home because God rejoices when even one lost soul is found. When we embrace the least of these, we embrace Jesus who was least of all. This servant Jesus, who emptied himself and embraced everyone, gives us the example for our lives and our community.

In these stories today, we clearly see the searching, joyful love of God. I believe this description of God as relentlessly searching for the lost and exuberantly joyful when it is found is so important today. There are those who would limit God’s love, for example, to those who hold to the right beliefs or the correct life-styles. Jesus’ stories challenge us when we presume to fix God’s approval on certain standards or disapproval on certain persons. Throughout Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells us about the demands, risks, and sacrifices of those who follow him. Yet, also in these stories Jesus is telling us how and why those demands, risks, and sacrifices are not only possible but worth it. It is worth the giving of our lives to God because of God’s extravagant grace, and extreme mercy.

With an awesome love God reaches out from the cross of Christ to those who have wandered away, or are presumed unacceptable. Having found and embraced those lost ones that same God declares to all who would listen: “Friends and neighbors come share my joy.” Come eat at the table, and then go from this table to witness to the world the difference faith makes in your lives by reaching out to the ‘lost coins’ and ‘lost sheep’ inviting each and all to join us with all the other tax collectors and redeemed sinners in the celebration that has no end in this life and in the next.