Crazy Love (Luke 15:1-10)

16th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:1-10
September 12, 2010

Crazy Love

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It has been a strange week. While our national economy continues to stumble along, gaining ground not nearly quickly enough, and national unemployment hovers just under ten percent (not counting the underemployed and those so discouraged they have stopped looking for work), the national media focused its attention on—wait for it—a Christian lunatic named Terry Jones who called for burning of copies of the Qur’an yesterday. First he was going to burn the Qur’an. Then he suspended the Qur’an burning, claiming to have worked out a deal with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the organization that plans to build an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, to build it further way from the site of the World Trade Center. Then he cancelled all plans to burn the Qur’an.

I have this to say about Mr. Jones. He is a little man with little ideas and a little heart. He is unable to distinguish between the Voice of God and any hateful notion that pops into his head. His fifteen minutes have expired.

But what shall we say about a world in which his ravings are taken seriously, a world in which the media give him an international pulpit, a world in which his words spur civil unrest, a world in which some—including the President of the United States—feel they must publicly condemn his plans, while others—who have been vocally anti-Islamic—distance themselves lest they their anti-Islamic statements be viewed in the bad light cast by Mr. Jones?

But this is the same world as it was back in June before the world became aware of Mr. Jones’s babblings. This is the same world in which religious tolerance, to say nothing of religious acceptance or even appreciation, is the exception to the rule. There are many ways of approving of what we do and disapproving what others do. Some of those ways are obvious and ugly, like Mr. Jones’s. Others are sophisticated and elegant, like mine.

This is not a new problem.

Jesus, as you may remember from last week, had warned his listeners about the high cost of being a follower of his and urged them to consider carefully before committing themselves. He finished with a common phrase of his: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

Our text picks up with the words, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus].” It was precisely what Jesus had asked for, but that didn’t make everyone happy. It didn’t make the Pharisees and scribes happy. These were people like me whose ways of disapproving of others were sophisticated and elegant and they were grumbling about the company that Jesus was keeping. If he was welcoming “sinners” and sharing meals with them, what kind of authority could he possibly have?

So Jesus told three stories that are unique to Luke’s gospel, stories we call parables. Parables are sketches of ordinary characters, situations or events. But they are sketches which when held up against ordinary life cause us to ask that deeply theological question, “Huh?” In these three cases the parables achieve their effect by sketching pictures that are illogical to the point of absurdity.

Unfortunately, our reading for today only contains two of the three stories, probably because if it included all three it would be too long. I’m not going to try to fix that. Instead we’ll look at the first two stories and you’ll get the idea and I’ll leave the story of the Prodigal Son to you to work out as an exercise.

The first story then is about a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them wandered off as sheep do. So, the story says, the man left the ninety-nine sheep and went in search of the one who had wandered off. “Which one of you,” Jesus asked, “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?” And the answer, of course, is, “No one!” No one would abandon ninety-nine sheep and go looking for the imbecile that had gotten lost. No one would do that. It wouldn’t make any economic sense at all. Retrieving sheep is what you have dogs for. If a sheep has wandered away, the shepherd needs better dogs. You can’t fix that problem by leaving incompetent dogs in charge of the sheep while you go in search of one lost sheep.

Nevertheless the story that Jesus tells is of a shepherd who throws financial wisdom to the winds in a foolish effort to find a lost sheep. Jesus tells an entirely implausible tale and then compares the joy of this foolish shepherd to the joy in heaven over the repentance of one sinner.

Then Jesus tells another story, a less familiar story, about a woman who had ten silver coins, lost one of them, and swept her house looking for the coin until she found it. This seems less unlikely until we look at the story more closely. The coins in question were drachmas. The drachma was a silver coin in circulation in the eastern part of the Roman Empire that was worth enough for three people to subsist on for about two days. The woman’s ten drachma stash was worth about a thousand or perhaps twelve hundred dollars.

A woman with a thousand dollars cash was not, repeat not, the sort of woman who knew how to use a broom. She would have been a wealthy woman. She would have had slaves to do her sweeping for her. Upon discovering that a drachma was missing she would have begun interrogating her slaves to find out who had stolen it!

Nevertheless, the story that Jesus tells is of an upper class woman who tosses aside her social standing, humiliating herself in front of her household, in order to find a lost coin. Jesus tells an entirely implausible tale and then compares the joy of this self-abasing woman to the joy in the presence of the angels of God over the repentance of one sinner.

We would not behave as the people in these stories did. We would cut our losses or start investigations, but this is not how things are done in heaven. We aren’t told this directly, but we are left to assume that God does things differently. God, faced with the choice of tending to the ninety-nine who are where they belong and are doing what they are supposed to be doing, foolishly abandons them and goes searching for the one lost sheep. God does not stop until the lost sheep is found. God will then rejoice over the one found sheep. God, faced with a lost coin grabs a broom and begin sweeping. God will not stop until the drachma is found. God will then rejoice over the one found coin. God is crazy. And God’s love is crazy, too.

The tax collectors and sinners who heard Jesus’ message heard him say to them something like this: It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter how lost you are. God will hunt you down. God will never give up on you. God will find you. God will bring you home. This is God’s greatest joy. God’s love for you is crazy love.

That’s pretty good news, isn’t it? Especially if we had thought that God wouldn’t love us until we had gotten ourselves fixed up, patched up, and cleaned up. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

Of course, it wasn’t just the tax collectors and sinners who were there to hear Jesus. The text says “So Jesus told them this parable,” but it doesn’t tell us who “them” are. It could mean just the tax collectors and sinners, but the sentence about the grumbling Pharisees and scribes is closer, so I’m thinking that maybe Jesus’ primary audience wasn’t the tax collectors and sinners, though they are welcome to over-hear what he is saying. No, he’s talking first of all to the Pharisees and scribes, those sophisticated and elegant folks (you know, the people like me) who looked down their noses at others whose religion was not so genteel.

This is where I start to squirm. This is where I begin to realize that Jesus has been talking to me. I have my ways of judging other people’s religion, but I have to admit the possibility that my ways are not God’s ways. In fact God doesn’t seem to be much like me at all. God loves the unlovable with crazy love. Me not so much. God’s love is foolish and uncalculating. Mine is not. God’s love is self-humiliating. Mine is not. God’s love is prodigal (there’s your hint for the third story!). Mine is not.

It doesn’t matter to God who someone is, where they’ve been, what they’ve done. All those things matter to me, but not to God. God isn’t like me. I’m not like God.

But as I live into these crazy stories about a God who loves with crazy love, there is every reason to expect that this crazy love won’t seem so crazy after all. As I live into these stories about God’s crazy love, there is every reason to expect that I’ll go a little crazy, too, and more and more I’ll love with God’s crazy love. I might even find it possible to love Terry Jones, instead of despising him the way I do. And then there will be joy in the presence of the angels of God over one more sinner who repents.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.