Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time 2025

Luke 15:1-10

Acceptance in community is one of the most powerful driving forces in human nature. We all have a deep, unrelenting desire to find our tribe, our people, to be received by them without judgment, and at our healthiest, to all be able to grow and learn together, to be able to help each other along the way. This explains the success of so many 12 step programs, as people who enter them are doing so expressly to overcome addictions and the destructive behavior that followed. In a 12 step, a person essentially is able to confess their sins in front of others, and receive only compassion and acceptance in return. I think this drive also fuels the joining of many other groups, from the military, where a common goal and the communal training to achieve it gives mutual purpose to all involved (brothers in arms! Side by side!), to political or social groups of all kinds. This is a good and natural thing, but it also has a dark side.

Consider the scribes and Pharisees. Theirs is, of course, the most vital of in-groups, the chosen people of God. They are the most practiced and diligent at keeping the rules of this group, and acted like the lawyers, adjudicating who is in, and who is out. Ritual purity, that is, the belief that one could become spiritually unclean, was a key part of this self-perception. Certain people were simply not to be associated with, lest one make oneself unclean before God. Here in Luke chapter 15, we see Jesus turn this expectation on its head, and instead reveal that the will of God is to pursue those who are in most need of help, and to do so relentlessly out of his everlasting love.

In just the chapter before, Jesus spoke of a great feast, where all the rich friends were invited, but all had an excuse not to come. So, the man in the parable invites instead all the poor, the sick, the dispossessed on the streets, and together they had a marvelous feast. Here that theme continues, this time in response to Jesus actually doing what he was teaching: He was eating with “sinners” (a catch all term for people socially considered unclean or particularly sinful), and “tax collectors” (who were Jews who worked for the Romans, think turncoats, traitors, collaborators). 

The scribes and Pharisees see this and “grumble,” a word that in Greek connotes not just private complaints but ones directed at Jesus. And so Jesus replies, speaking two parables that will be capped with the third (the Prodigal Son) which really drives the point home. Here, the two short parables are quite simple. When a sheep wanders off, you leave the herd to retrieve it, and celebrate its return; when one coin of many is lost, you look for it, and rejoice at its discovery. At the end of each, Jesus makes clear his meaning: There are many who are supposedly not in need of repentance, but God and the angels rejoice in heaven at the repentance of the one downbeaten sinner, the person deemed hopeless, who leaves that behind and follows Jesus.

Now, a couple things need to be explained here: first, those who “do not need repentance” could mean those who are already in God’s fold, those who believe the promises and follow Jesus. Or, in the context of Luke, it could also mean those like the Pharisees and scribes that were so very confident that God loves them because of how rigorously they follow the rules, but are in fact hypocrites, not seeing their own true need for salvation. Either way, the focus here is on the lost one, the person in their time and place who would not and could not fit into the established community.

Kids, I know you have experienced this, either yourselves or you have seen it. Maybe you have done it. I remember when I tried playing little league baseball, and how I was treated by the other kids. See, I was homeschooled, and pretty awkward. I could hit alright, but was crummy at throwing and only okay at catching. I was an outsider and wasn’t good enough at the game for them to overlook my weirdness. So, they made fun of me. I got mocked and picked on. They wouldn’t accept me. Maybe you know what that’s like, or what it looks like. Now, I can’t make other kids accept you. What I can tell you, is that to follow Jesus means that you are to be the person who accepts and welcomes others. You are the one who needs to accept people, and try to include them, even if they are a little weird or a little awkward. But I’m not telling you this because if you don’t God will be mad; no, the reason we are supposed to live this way is because That is What God Has Done For Us! When we were lost, and needed help; when we sin, and feel shame, and don’t know what to do about it; that’s where Jesus can be found, just waiting to open his arms and hug us, and since he does that, we can do it too.

Friends, we all have our own built-in prejudices, our “purity laws,” the things we struggle to overcome to truly welcome any and all who Jesus Christ would have us welcome in his name. But Jesus welcomes us all: the failures and wannabes, the stoners, junkies, and freaks, the weirdos and insecure, the shy and the anxious babbler, the intellectual and the person who can’t even read. All he needs is our belief that he died and rose for us, all he wants is our trust, and our repentance, and we are then welcomed into his family, his Body, the Church. When we repent, that is, literally turn away from our sin, no matter who we are, and turn to Jesus, then there he is, always waiting, always following us, ready to catch us when we turn, and when we fall down. What a Gospel, that Jesus comes for sinners, and what a privilege, to welcome others, all others, in his name, when they too are found, and returned to the great flock of God’s people. Let us be people who rejoice that God has welcomed us, and let us be people that welcome in return, rejoicing that God in his love will not let one be lost whom he does not pursue. Amen.