June 16, 2013 Third Sunday After Trinity
With Hands Outstretched
Jeremiah 31:1-14, Psalm 145, 1 St. Peter 5:5b-11, St. Luke 15:1-10
When I was a lad, back in the days when pasta was called spaghetti, I did much of my growing up around people who were less than enlightened in their attitudes toward those of another color. To put the matter in a more straightforward way, they were racists.
I remember the four water fountains in the Weingarten’s Grocery, marked “white men” and “white women,” “colored men” and “colored women.” I remember separate bathrooms for “white” and “colored.” And, yes, I remember separate seating: the main floor of the Showboat movie theater reserved for whites and the balcony for blacks.
These attitudes gushed out in a vulgar vocabulary that, like all such crude inventions, sought to elevate the status of the speaker by degrading the targets of his slurs.
But that’s not all I remember. Our schools and colleges were still segregated in those days, and so their football teams were as well. We had a professional team, however, and nothing promotes meritocracy like the profit motive.
Our pro team had black players and even as a lad I could not miss the disconnect between white attitudes toward blacks in general and black athletes. It was as great as the chasm that separated the rich man from Lazarus.
The star halfback who scored the winning touchdown late in the fourth quarter might as well have won the Medal of Honor and cured cancer on the same day. And white folks venerated not only his exploits but his person.
Any who found themselves near him would fawn over him and ask for his autograph. And just to think, if he’d been a field hand or janitor instead of a football star he’d have been a “jungle bunny” – or worse.
And so, unlike some highly credentialed theologians, I have no trouble at all grasping the schizophrenic view the scribes and Pharisees of the first century took toward shepherds. Why love ‘em or hate ‘em when you can love ‘em and hate ‘em?
The 15th chapter of St. Luke’s gospel opens with an accusation. The tax collectors – called “publicans” in some translations -- and sinners have gathered round to attend Jesus’ words. The Pharisees and scribes bristle:
“This Man receives sinners and eats with them.”
Here is the refrain we find over and again in the gospels. This wildly popular itinerant preacher, believed by many to be a great prophet, prefers the company not of the rabbis but of the rabble.
“We name you for a fraud,” the Pharisees and scribes bellow. “You consort with outcasts and sinners.”
And the King of all creation answers, “Well, duh.”
Yes, He makes His point with a bit more eloquence. He spins out His reply in three parables that take up the remainder of ch 15. We have before us today the first two of those, the story of the lost sheep and then that of the lost coin, which drives home the same point. The third, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we will take up in a few weeks.
These stories make up the Lord Jesus’ response to the charge His adversaries level against Him, that He not only compromises but also contaminates Himself by the rude company He keeps. Would God do that?
Maybe so. Mark Twain said, “Having spent considerable time with good people, I can understand why Jesus liked to be with tax-collectors and sinners.”
To grasp the Lord’s answer we must understand the accusation in the fullness of its venom. We must not glide over this word “receives.”
To eat with sinners is bad enough. The “righteous” would have nothing to do with them because they would be tainted by their company. As we saw when we considered the Parable of the Great Banquet, table fellowship encompassed a great deal more than gulping down some rubber chicken.
To join others at table was to signal fraternity and community. To receive others into one’s home or company meant even more, warm approval and affection for them. One popular modern English translation goes a step further and translates the Greek word here as “welcomes.” Others stick with the more literal “receives.” Either way, it speaks volumes.
We still use it in much the same way. We receive into our homes our family and friends and neighbors, those whom we value. We do not normally receive those who would disturb the peace of our homes.
When I was a lad – way back when “stay-at-home moms” were known as “housewives” -- salesman hawked their wares door-to-door. As I recall, vacuum cleaners topped the list. Garbage disposals were the hot new thing. Encyclopedias were popular, too – but we were broke.
One day, my mother received a salesman and bought the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, about a thousand volumes it seemed to me. And when Dad got home, oh my, what a scene.
So this is the crux of the charge against Jesus. Taking His three parables together, we can summarize His reply as a counter-accusation. It begins with the story of the lost sheep.
“You accuse Me,” He tells the Pharisees and scribes, “of mingling with the lowly and despised, and in this you could not be more correct. Now, let me pose a question to you: Did God not appoint the leaders of Israel as the shepherds of His flock?
“How could God’s sheep grow in righteousness when you, the teachers, would not sit with them even to teach them the law? You hold yourselves above them in knowledge and virtue when you have kept them in ignorance and squalor. Hypocrites!
“I plead guilty. I came to seek and save the lost. How do you plead?”
This broadside is even more damning than it sounds to modern ears. “What man of you,” Jesus begins, and He goes on to describe a shepherd seeking a sheep that strayed. Shepherds were among those for whom the high and mighty reserved their greatest bile. They were as lowly as any of the tax collectors and sinners who thronged around Jesus.
Crude men who tended filthy animals, they had a reputation for putting their sheep out to graze on land that belonged to others. To call a Pharisee a shepherd was as good as spitting in his face.
But here the Lord leaves them flummoxed once again, as conflicted as the rednecks at the football game. The Pharisees and scribes know the law and the prophets, and they know the high esteem in which the Scriptures hold shepherds. Moses their greatest prophet and David their greatest king had been shepherds.
Through His prophet Ezekiel, God refers to the leaders of Israel of an earlier day as shepherds, condemning them for their failure in tending and guiding their flock. In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, we heard the Father Himself referred to as the Shepherd of Israel His flock.
And how could the Pharisees forget Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd”?
We must understand the vocabulary as our Lord’s first-century listeners did. A “sinner” was not necessarily one who had suffered a moral lapse but one the rulers held in contempt. Tax collectors worked for the hated Roman overlords and extorted as much as they could for themselves. They were not allowed to give testimony in court.
The ceremonially unclean, and any the privileged considered so, were lumped into this class also. The shepherds fit into this group. The “righteous” – the word used to describe the 99 sheep the shepherd left to search for the lost one – might or might not have been morally upright. They were righteous in a legal sense. In other words, they were Pharisees.
If we listen to the text closely we will discern another condemnation the Lord leveled against the rulers of the Jews. St. Luke closes chapter 14 quoting the Lord saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
In the first verse of chapter 15, the apostle reports that the sinners “drew near to (Jesus) to hear Him.”
These lowly ones in desperate need of the more abundant life Jesus holds out have come, some traveling great distances, to hear the One whose words are life. The high and mighty cannot hear Him over the noise of their grumbling and accusations. It is the poor in spirit who will receive the true treasures of the kingdom.
The Pharisees would not so much as fulfill their assigned role under the covenant of law. They would not teach the people who dwelt in their midst the statutes that could not save them but pointed to the life of sacrifice and obedience that would make them clean in God’s eyes.
Jesus who is the Christ has come to confer the riches of the covenant of grace on His sheep, and not merely the ones who flock to Him. He walks the rocky paths from Galilee to Jerusalem and back to seek and save the lost. The law wheezes while grace takes flight.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep tells us a good deal more about the shepherd than the sheep. Going to seek the one member of the flock who wandered off into a gully or collapsed with fatigue, the shepherd finds him and lays him gently across his shoulders.
He does not punish or even rebuke him but treats him tenderly, so jubilant is he to have found the one who strayed. He carries him back to the village and calls out to one and all, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.”
The sheep was under the shepherd’s care but was not necessarily his property. One or more shepherds tended the sheep of many owners in the village. The tribal life is a communal life. When one suffers loss, others lose; when one regains what was lost, others profit.
Should this not be the way of our church? Should not our deepest yearnings be for the good of every member, and especially for those who have strayed?
Jesus likens the recovered sheep to a sinner who repents. But the sheep does not repent as soon as he is found. The shepherd’s hard work is still to come. When the shepherd lovingly bears him home, the sheep comes home to his faith. The shepherd seeks him out before he repents -- but the sinner must repent.
When he does, the heavens rejoice. St. Bernard said the tears of repentance are the wine of angels.
The sheep across his shoulders is the shepherd’s burden; the restoration of the lost one is his joy. Our Lord is making His way toward Golgotha, where He will bear His cross on His shoulders, carrying many sinners to salvation. We are the burden that is His joy.
I can take the story of the racism I observed as a youngster one more step.
When I was a lad, way back when “sexual addiction” was called “lust,” my father served in the Navy and we moved from base to base, living in the enlisted men’s housing projects. Whites and blacks lived cheek-by-jowl, sometimes separated by no more than a hallway.
We kids all played together, never giving a thought to our difference of color. I don’t recall any parents making an issue of it. But when we went home to redneck country, we observed a different code. If we did not go so far as to put on the attitude of our family and friends, we made sure to hold our tongues. We were Pharisees.
Some in our crowd would say, “I got nothing against ‘em but I’m not gonna have one in my home.” They would not receive those who were different – unless they scored touchdowns.
The Pharisees of the gospels accord the highest esteem to Moses and David and – oh, yes – God. It is shepherds, who are poor in spirit, they revile.
But there’s more than one happy ending to this story of the divine love that sought and saved the lost. The early church knows no ambiguity about the position of the shepherd.
At the birth of our Savior, an angel appears to declare His coming not to kings and magistrates but to shepherds. No one will ever again despise the guardians of the flock.
The Good Shepherd knows His sheep and He will not allow any who stray to disappear into the void. The True Shepherd will poach on Satan’s turf and He will lift those who belong to Him onto His shoulders and bear them home. He will receive with jubilation the filth of their sin that rubs off on Him, never to contaminate them again.
He will even mingle His blood with theirs. He will wear their grime and blood like a glistening robe.
The art of the early church carries on this theme. A scene on a sarcophagus of the first or second century shows a bearded shepherd carrying a lamb on his back. He has wrapped the little animal in his cloak and knotted it at his breast.
An ivory casket from the fourth century portrays a group of sheep in a walled enclosure with an arched gateway with Corinthian pillars. Any who would reach the sheep must pass through this portal – but Christ stands in it holding back with His hand the raging wolf that is trying to ravage the flock. A hired man with a staff in his hand is taking flight.
Artists introduced a pail of milk into the scene to depict the loving generosity of the shepherd. Ste Perpetua, who would be martyred for her confession of Jesus as the Christ, reported a vision she had while lying in prison awaiting her execution. She is in heaven. Her vision helps us understand the pictures.
“I beheld a vast garden and in the center the venerable figure of an old man dressed as a shepherd, engaged in milking the sheep. He raised his head, and seeing me, said, ‘It is good of thee, my child, that thou hast come.’
“And he called me to him and gave me some curds of the milk that he had milked. I received it from him with joined hands and ate it. And all those standing round cried, Amen! At the sound of my own voice I awoke and I had the taste still of I know not what sweetness in my mouth.”
In her vision of paradise, she holds her hands out just as we do today to receive the Holy Communion, to taste the sweetness of the bread of life. O taste and see that the Lord is good!
No one reviles the Shepherd now. He has ascended to glory and He will return in glory. He is our guide, and without Him we would be sheep forever lost. He is the bread of life, and without Him we would be sinners eternally starved. Blessed be the name of the Shepherd. Amen.
.
.
.
With Hands Outstretched
Jeremiah 31:1-14, Psalm 145, 1 St. Peter 5:5b-11, St. Luke 15:1-10
When I was a lad, back in the days when pasta was called spaghetti, I did much of my growing up around people who were less than enlightened in their attitudes toward those of another color. To put the matter in a more straightforward way, they were racists.
I remember the four water fountains in the Weingarten’s Grocery, marked “white men” and “white women,” “colored men” and “colored women.” I remember separate bathrooms for “white” and “colored.” And, yes, I remember separate seating: the main floor of the Showboat movie theater reserved for whites and the balcony for blacks.
These attitudes gushed out in a vulgar vocabulary that, like all such crude inventions, sought to elevate the status of the speaker by degrading the targets of his slurs.
But that’s not all I remember. Our schools and colleges were still segregated in those days, and so their football teams were as well. We had a professional team, however, and nothing promotes meritocracy like the profit motive.
Our pro team had black players and even as a lad I could not miss the disconnect between white attitudes toward blacks in general and black athletes. It was as great as the chasm that separated the rich man from Lazarus.
The star halfback who scored the winning touchdown late in the fourth quarter might as well have won the Medal of Honor and cured cancer on the same day. And white folks venerated not only his exploits but his person.
Any who found themselves near him would fawn over him and ask for his autograph. And just to think, if he’d been a field hand or janitor instead of a football star he’d have been a “jungle bunny” – or worse.
And so, unlike some highly credentialed theologians, I have no trouble at all grasping the schizophrenic view the scribes and Pharisees of the first century took toward shepherds. Why love ‘em or hate ‘em when you can love ‘em and hate ‘em?
The 15th chapter of St. Luke’s gospel opens with an accusation. The tax collectors – called “publicans” in some translations -- and sinners have gathered round to attend Jesus’ words. The Pharisees and scribes bristle:
“This Man receives sinners and eats with them.”
Here is the refrain we find over and again in the gospels. This wildly popular itinerant preacher, believed by many to be a great prophet, prefers the company not of the rabbis but of the rabble.
“We name you for a fraud,” the Pharisees and scribes bellow. “You consort with outcasts and sinners.”
And the King of all creation answers, “Well, duh.”
Yes, He makes His point with a bit more eloquence. He spins out His reply in three parables that take up the remainder of ch 15. We have before us today the first two of those, the story of the lost sheep and then that of the lost coin, which drives home the same point. The third, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we will take up in a few weeks.
These stories make up the Lord Jesus’ response to the charge His adversaries level against Him, that He not only compromises but also contaminates Himself by the rude company He keeps. Would God do that?
Maybe so. Mark Twain said, “Having spent considerable time with good people, I can understand why Jesus liked to be with tax-collectors and sinners.”
To grasp the Lord’s answer we must understand the accusation in the fullness of its venom. We must not glide over this word “receives.”
To eat with sinners is bad enough. The “righteous” would have nothing to do with them because they would be tainted by their company. As we saw when we considered the Parable of the Great Banquet, table fellowship encompassed a great deal more than gulping down some rubber chicken.
To join others at table was to signal fraternity and community. To receive others into one’s home or company meant even more, warm approval and affection for them. One popular modern English translation goes a step further and translates the Greek word here as “welcomes.” Others stick with the more literal “receives.” Either way, it speaks volumes.
We still use it in much the same way. We receive into our homes our family and friends and neighbors, those whom we value. We do not normally receive those who would disturb the peace of our homes.
When I was a lad – way back when “stay-at-home moms” were known as “housewives” -- salesman hawked their wares door-to-door. As I recall, vacuum cleaners topped the list. Garbage disposals were the hot new thing. Encyclopedias were popular, too – but we were broke.
One day, my mother received a salesman and bought the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, about a thousand volumes it seemed to me. And when Dad got home, oh my, what a scene.
So this is the crux of the charge against Jesus. Taking His three parables together, we can summarize His reply as a counter-accusation. It begins with the story of the lost sheep.
“You accuse Me,” He tells the Pharisees and scribes, “of mingling with the lowly and despised, and in this you could not be more correct. Now, let me pose a question to you: Did God not appoint the leaders of Israel as the shepherds of His flock?
“How could God’s sheep grow in righteousness when you, the teachers, would not sit with them even to teach them the law? You hold yourselves above them in knowledge and virtue when you have kept them in ignorance and squalor. Hypocrites!
“I plead guilty. I came to seek and save the lost. How do you plead?”
This broadside is even more damning than it sounds to modern ears. “What man of you,” Jesus begins, and He goes on to describe a shepherd seeking a sheep that strayed. Shepherds were among those for whom the high and mighty reserved their greatest bile. They were as lowly as any of the tax collectors and sinners who thronged around Jesus.
Crude men who tended filthy animals, they had a reputation for putting their sheep out to graze on land that belonged to others. To call a Pharisee a shepherd was as good as spitting in his face.
But here the Lord leaves them flummoxed once again, as conflicted as the rednecks at the football game. The Pharisees and scribes know the law and the prophets, and they know the high esteem in which the Scriptures hold shepherds. Moses their greatest prophet and David their greatest king had been shepherds.
Through His prophet Ezekiel, God refers to the leaders of Israel of an earlier day as shepherds, condemning them for their failure in tending and guiding their flock. In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, we heard the Father Himself referred to as the Shepherd of Israel His flock.
And how could the Pharisees forget Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd”?
We must understand the vocabulary as our Lord’s first-century listeners did. A “sinner” was not necessarily one who had suffered a moral lapse but one the rulers held in contempt. Tax collectors worked for the hated Roman overlords and extorted as much as they could for themselves. They were not allowed to give testimony in court.
The ceremonially unclean, and any the privileged considered so, were lumped into this class also. The shepherds fit into this group. The “righteous” – the word used to describe the 99 sheep the shepherd left to search for the lost one – might or might not have been morally upright. They were righteous in a legal sense. In other words, they were Pharisees.
If we listen to the text closely we will discern another condemnation the Lord leveled against the rulers of the Jews. St. Luke closes chapter 14 quoting the Lord saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
In the first verse of chapter 15, the apostle reports that the sinners “drew near to (Jesus) to hear Him.”
These lowly ones in desperate need of the more abundant life Jesus holds out have come, some traveling great distances, to hear the One whose words are life. The high and mighty cannot hear Him over the noise of their grumbling and accusations. It is the poor in spirit who will receive the true treasures of the kingdom.
The Pharisees would not so much as fulfill their assigned role under the covenant of law. They would not teach the people who dwelt in their midst the statutes that could not save them but pointed to the life of sacrifice and obedience that would make them clean in God’s eyes.
Jesus who is the Christ has come to confer the riches of the covenant of grace on His sheep, and not merely the ones who flock to Him. He walks the rocky paths from Galilee to Jerusalem and back to seek and save the lost. The law wheezes while grace takes flight.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep tells us a good deal more about the shepherd than the sheep. Going to seek the one member of the flock who wandered off into a gully or collapsed with fatigue, the shepherd finds him and lays him gently across his shoulders.
He does not punish or even rebuke him but treats him tenderly, so jubilant is he to have found the one who strayed. He carries him back to the village and calls out to one and all, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.”
The sheep was under the shepherd’s care but was not necessarily his property. One or more shepherds tended the sheep of many owners in the village. The tribal life is a communal life. When one suffers loss, others lose; when one regains what was lost, others profit.
Should this not be the way of our church? Should not our deepest yearnings be for the good of every member, and especially for those who have strayed?
Jesus likens the recovered sheep to a sinner who repents. But the sheep does not repent as soon as he is found. The shepherd’s hard work is still to come. When the shepherd lovingly bears him home, the sheep comes home to his faith. The shepherd seeks him out before he repents -- but the sinner must repent.
When he does, the heavens rejoice. St. Bernard said the tears of repentance are the wine of angels.
The sheep across his shoulders is the shepherd’s burden; the restoration of the lost one is his joy. Our Lord is making His way toward Golgotha, where He will bear His cross on His shoulders, carrying many sinners to salvation. We are the burden that is His joy.
I can take the story of the racism I observed as a youngster one more step.
When I was a lad, way back when “sexual addiction” was called “lust,” my father served in the Navy and we moved from base to base, living in the enlisted men’s housing projects. Whites and blacks lived cheek-by-jowl, sometimes separated by no more than a hallway.
We kids all played together, never giving a thought to our difference of color. I don’t recall any parents making an issue of it. But when we went home to redneck country, we observed a different code. If we did not go so far as to put on the attitude of our family and friends, we made sure to hold our tongues. We were Pharisees.
Some in our crowd would say, “I got nothing against ‘em but I’m not gonna have one in my home.” They would not receive those who were different – unless they scored touchdowns.
The Pharisees of the gospels accord the highest esteem to Moses and David and – oh, yes – God. It is shepherds, who are poor in spirit, they revile.
But there’s more than one happy ending to this story of the divine love that sought and saved the lost. The early church knows no ambiguity about the position of the shepherd.
At the birth of our Savior, an angel appears to declare His coming not to kings and magistrates but to shepherds. No one will ever again despise the guardians of the flock.
The Good Shepherd knows His sheep and He will not allow any who stray to disappear into the void. The True Shepherd will poach on Satan’s turf and He will lift those who belong to Him onto His shoulders and bear them home. He will receive with jubilation the filth of their sin that rubs off on Him, never to contaminate them again.
He will even mingle His blood with theirs. He will wear their grime and blood like a glistening robe.
The art of the early church carries on this theme. A scene on a sarcophagus of the first or second century shows a bearded shepherd carrying a lamb on his back. He has wrapped the little animal in his cloak and knotted it at his breast.
An ivory casket from the fourth century portrays a group of sheep in a walled enclosure with an arched gateway with Corinthian pillars. Any who would reach the sheep must pass through this portal – but Christ stands in it holding back with His hand the raging wolf that is trying to ravage the flock. A hired man with a staff in his hand is taking flight.
Artists introduced a pail of milk into the scene to depict the loving generosity of the shepherd. Ste Perpetua, who would be martyred for her confession of Jesus as the Christ, reported a vision she had while lying in prison awaiting her execution. She is in heaven. Her vision helps us understand the pictures.
“I beheld a vast garden and in the center the venerable figure of an old man dressed as a shepherd, engaged in milking the sheep. He raised his head, and seeing me, said, ‘It is good of thee, my child, that thou hast come.’
“And he called me to him and gave me some curds of the milk that he had milked. I received it from him with joined hands and ate it. And all those standing round cried, Amen! At the sound of my own voice I awoke and I had the taste still of I know not what sweetness in my mouth.”
In her vision of paradise, she holds her hands out just as we do today to receive the Holy Communion, to taste the sweetness of the bread of life. O taste and see that the Lord is good!
No one reviles the Shepherd now. He has ascended to glory and He will return in glory. He is our guide, and without Him we would be sheep forever lost. He is the bread of life, and without Him we would be sinners eternally starved. Blessed be the name of the Shepherd. Amen.
.
.
.