Text: Luke 14:25-33 The Message (MSG)
The Story of the Lost Sheep
15 1-3 By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story.
4-7 “Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it? When found, you can be sure you would put it across your shoulders, rejoicing, and when you got home call in your friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’ Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.
The Story of the Lost Coin
8-10 “Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbors: ‘Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Count on it—that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen
What does the word “rally” mean? Here’s what the dictionary says:
ral·ly 1
(răl′ē)
- To call together for a common purpose; assemble
ral·lies
- A gathering, especially one intended to inspire enthusiasm for a cause
And just what is “Rally Sunday”? Rally Sunday is a long held tradition across the church as school year programs gear up and kick off each fall. On Rally Sunday, we specifically assemble as a church for a common purpose, and that purpose is to kick off a new year of Sunday School!
We are excited about this day, because it is the start of another year of growth for our children into the life of Christ. It is a gift that we all give to you, the children of our congregation – we are here today for you. We are here because we love you, because we care for you, because we want the best for you. We want to do all we can to make sure that you will grow up and lead lives that are blessed, and joyful and full. That’s why we’re here today. That’s why we celebrate. We adults here today accept once again, for another year, the mission to help you achieve your full potential as human beings – and following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ is a major way for you to do that.
It is a joyous and deeply rewarding mission.
As Abe Lincoln once said, “No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.” (You might recall the cartoon with that caption from this month’s Church Chatter.)
What is one of the key things we can teach our children? I think it’s summed up in one word: Fairness.
C.S. Lewis begins his classic Mere Christianity by listing phrases we’ve all heard or said: “How’d you like it if someone did the same to you” – “That’s my seat, I was here first” – “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm” – “Why should you shove in first.” He notes that a child’s first introduction to immorality is when someone cuts in front of him in the school lunch line. The response is instinctual: “That’s not fair.” All moral codes, Lewis says, begin with that one reaction: “That’s not fair.”
Today’s Gospel lesson might not seem to have much to say about fairness, at least not at first glance. It seems to focus solely on things and people that were lost and then found.
But the lesson also – at least in the background – has something to say about fairness, about the equality that God expects in the world. In fact, God doesn’t just expect it – God demands it. Going all the way back to the Old Testament, we read, time and time again, of God’s admonitions to his people, spoken through the prophets, of how they were to order and regulate their life together. One example, from Deuteronomy 10:18-19: “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Fairness in this context, then, could be summed up as “Be fair to those who are strangers, for you, too, were once strangers.”
And today, we read – again – about Jesus fraternizing with people “of doubtful reputation.” We trip over passages like this continually in the Gospels; this tells us that this was a big issue for both Jesus and those who recorded his deeds and words.
And those people from the wrong side of the tracks were the ones who were “listening intently,” while those who should have been paying the most attention, the Pharisees, the scribes, the teachers of religion, were instead doing what? As the text says, “they growled.”
They’re mad because Jesus is, once again, breaking the rules. In full view of the “bigwigs” of his day, there he is, big as life, carrying on with a bunch of lowlifes, “as if they were old friends.”
But even that begs the question, why? If Jesus is just some itinerant preacher from the sticks, why would that matter? What possible difference could that make?
The real reason is, as some scholars believe, that Jesus is one of them!
That is to say: Jesus is himself a Pharisee! That means he had the same upbringing that those people who are grumbling and growling did. He went to the same schools. He followed the same rituals. He travelled in the same groups. He is of that class.
But here he is, hanging around those people. No wonder their noses are out of joint! These…these…sinners…are getting more attention than they deserve!
Or are they?
Jesus tells them with his words and especially with his actions that God’s sense of fairness by far outweighs our own sense of propriety.
He tells us that we should not go around judging books by their covers. He tells them and us that, as Peter says much later, “God is no respecter of persons.” We are all in the same boat.
And just what made these people “sinners,” anyway? Maybe some of these “sinners” were just people who had fallen on hard times. Is the person standing with that hand-lettered sign at the intersection a sinner because he or she needs help? I don’t think so. Maybe one of these sinners the Pharisees were grumbling about had once had a vineyard, but some blight had killed off his crop of grapes, he’d lost everything, and now he was reduced to begging. Maybe one of the women had had the misfortune of losing her husband and had no other relatives to take care of her. So she had to take to the life of the streets to survive.
Things like that, things that happened to people, often through no fault of their own, made them sinners in the eyes of their society. It wasn’t fair, but that was the way it was.
But Jesus came and changed all that. He showed us a different, a better way to live. He demonstrated by his own actions what God’s vision of the world is.
So today, as we celebrate Rally Sunday, let us all take to heart that lesson Jesus teaches, and strive to teach our children, not the hard values of the Pharisees, but the lesson of Jesus, one that all of us know by heart: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
Living that way is the best possible example we can give our children!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.