Have you ever found yourself standing on the edge of a circle of people wanting to be included but feeling very much excluded? The stand-apart isolation you felt may well have come from within you—some inner doubt as to your worthiness, some fear, some failure that made you hesitate to seek to be included. Or it may have come from some within the circle itself who, for whatever reason, did not want you or your “kind” included.. But then someone reached out to you, befriended you and drew you in, and you felt not only that you belonged but that you mattered. That’s what Jesus did. Tax collectors and sinners, who lived beyond the circle of acceptable society, were drawn to him and his teaching. They found something in him that they had not known in other rabbis. Not only did he speak to the very depths of their need, but he also made them feel welcome. He made them feel as though they mattered in spite of their failures and their flaws. Not all in the circle, though, found that commendable. Luke tells us that the Pharisees and the scribes, who also listened to his teaching and with whom he also broke bread, complained: “this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” To break bread with someone was a sign of acceptance, of friendship, and that’s what the Pharisees and scribes found so objectionable. If Jesus had said to the tax collectors and sinners, “there is a place for you here among God’s people, but first go get your act together, prove yourself, and then come back,” even the Pharisees and scribes may have opened their arms and hearts to welcome them. But Jesus did not do that. He welcomed them as they were. To explain, Jesus told two parables—one about a shepherd and a lost sheep, and another about a woman and a lost coin. “Which of you,” he asks, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” In truth, none of them would do that. To leave the ninety-nine alone in the wilderness would imperil the whole flock. Others might well wander away. Predators might attack and scatter and kill among the flock. From a purely pragmatic point of view, going in search of the one was a totally foolish thing to do, but from the perspective of God’s love it is the one thing to do. The shepherd does not call from a distance in hopes that the lost one will hear the sound of his voice and find his way back to the flock. The shepherd goes in search of the sheep, just as the woman in the other parable lights a lamp and takes a broom in her hand to search for the lost coin. Neither hesitates. Neither flags nor gives up the search, but each perseveres until the lost one is found. So, Jesus tells us, God searches for those lost to his love. Each is valuable; each is wanted. When everyone else might give up on the lost sheep and count its loss as a part of doing business or chalk up the lost coin to bad luck, God continues to search till the lost one is found and is restored to the circle of the kingdom of God, and then calls those within the circle to rejoice with him for the lost one has been found! That’s how much you matter to God. That’s how much every human being matters to God. St. Paul points to his own life as an example of that searching love of God. “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Paul, in his encounter with God, discovered not only the paucity of his own merit before God but the extravagant abundance of God’s grace towards him that he “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” might not only find acceptance but be used by God in the work of redemption. Another who experienced the searching love of God wrote: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” John Newton, the author of that hymn, was a sea captain whose vessel transported human cargo—Africans ripped from the homes and villages—to slave auction blocks in this country. In 1748 Newton was caught in an horrendous storm at sea and experienced a spiritual awakening or a conversion experience, and eventually became a priest in the Church of England. He summed up his life in these words which he wrote as the epitaph for his gravestone: “John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ preserved, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.” Both St. Paul and Fr. Newton recognized that it was not their effort that made them the men they were, but God’s abundant grace in Jesus Christ reaching down to rescue them. Both had been lost, though neither fully recognized it; both were sought out and found by the living God; and both were used in God’s service in ways that reached far beyond their wildest imaginations. Some among us may well have had encounters with God on our own roads to Damascus or storms at sea. Indeed, the love of God in Jesus Christ sometimes reaches us in the most surprising times and places—at the bottom of a bottle, in the clearing following a drug induced haze, on your back in the hospital, in the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage, or the demise of a dream. In the birth of a child, the gift of new love, in an inexplicable surge of joy for the very gift of life, in the kindness of another human being, in a sanctuary such as this while the preacher’s voice droned on and on or maybe even in some word from the preacher’s mouth. Most likely, though, it was not in any one time or experience but a multitude of times and experiences in which God entered into your life to call you, to claim you, and to await your response. A 19th century hymn text that I have long appreciated confesses: I
sought the Lord and afterward I knew Thou
did’st reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold; I
find, I walk, I love, but O the whole of love God’s love, though, is more than a warm fuzzy. To be claimed by God’s love and to acknowledge that claim through faith is a dangerous thing to do, for, you see, while God loves us a we are, God also loves us enough not to leave us as we are. C. S. Lewis uses the analogy of a house under renovation to describe God’s re-creating work in our lives. At first, he says, we can understand what God is doing. We know that there are things about us that need to be changed, but then God begins to bang around in our lives in ways that hurt abominably—throwing up towers, tearing down walls—till the old place is hardly recognizable anymore. We thought God was going to turn us into a “decent little cottage,” says Lewis, but he is building a palace, a palace he intends to come and live in himself. Henri Nouwen writes: “only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature” (p. 17, The Way of the Heart). In Jesus Christ, God draws us into the circle of life shared with God and God’s people, and in so doing gives us that place of healing grace in which we can begin to change and be changed. Here we find companions in the journey towards wholeness, for here each of us is still a saint in the making, on the way but still not there. Everyone has a place in this circle, which is the church, and it is God’s desire that each should take it. Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” It is not up to us to set parameters on the grace of God. God will be gracious to whom God chooses. But of all the paths that men and women travel in their search for God, this, the Scripture tells us, is the path that God has chosen to travel in order to find us and to reclaim us as his own. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but should have eternal life.” Or as 1 Timothy puts it: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” We do not save anyone; only God has that power. But we, the church, are called to make the introduction. The church’s mission, the very reason for our existence is to proclaim the good new of God’s saving love in Jesus Christ and to invite others—all others—to join in the circle of life in the Kingdom of God through faith in him. Look around you this morning. Who is missing? Who do you know who needs to be here and is not? Have you invited them? Will you invite them? J. Dudley Weaver |