How many of you grew up in a church? Not necessarily this church but a church? As you can see, that’s most of us… pretty close to all of us, actually. There are wonderful things about growing up in the faith. There are wonderful things about being surrounded by the things of God from an early age so that they become a large part of you. But there are dangers that come with it as well. One danger is that you sometimes begin to believe that the “church” things that you do are what make you a Christian, a follower of Christ. You have a part of yourself that is Christian and follows the faith because that is what your parents taught you to do. This can be dangerous because it causes us to forget that our journey of faith must be our own. We cannot believe because that’s what someone else wants us to do. We need to believe and follow because of our own relationship with God.
But that’s not really the issue that I want to talk about this morning. No, I want to talk about another danger that comes with growing up in the church and being immersed in the Christian culture. That is that we all have our own language we speak. We’ve heard the Bible stories ever since we were children and we know them so well and we know the theological terms so well that often we don’t communicate them terribly well with others, we assume they are speaking the same language we are, or sometimes we miss altogether the revolutionary nature of our faith. Because Jesus’ teachings are so familiar to us we don’t get how radical they really are.
Let me give you a couple examples of this to help you see what I’m talking about. In the church context, what do we mean when we talk about someone being saved? Think about it for a moment. We think of someone having their sins forgiven and receiving eternal life. But what does it mean to be saved in a non-church context? Something a bit different. Something a little more situational. Someone who was a slave or a captive would think of being saved as someone taking them away from their captivity. Someone in massive debt would think of being saved as being freed from their debt. Someone having a heart attack would think of CPR and medical procedures that could save them.
Here’s another one: If I said someone was a Samaritan, what would you think of them? You’d think that they were someone who helped out a stranger. You’d think that they were someone who went out of their way to do something positive for someone else. And yet this is not the original meaning of a Samaritan. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite. In Jesus’ day a Samaritan was someone to be reviled, to be avoided at all costs, to be hated. And so when a Samaritan does the right thing and is good to someone, people find this shocking. And when Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman his disciples don’t know what to do.
Jesus’ message was radical, more radical than we often give him credit for. And when we realize the context that his message was in it sometimes can have the awesome power of changing the way we see the world we are in and how we are supposed to interact with it.
I. Pharisee
Well, we’ve looked at being saved and being a Samaritan and we’ve seen how our Christian culture has influenced how we respond to those words. I want to look at two other words today even a bit more closely, two words that are found in today’s scripture. These are lost and Pharisee.
We’ll begin with Pharisee. Just like with Samaritan, we almost have a gut reaction when we hear the word Pharisee. At least I know I do. I automatically put the Pharisee in a box of being someone who isn’t good. I automatically feel negative thoughts about him. If I wanted to insult a person I might call them a Pharisee. And it’d be a pretty meaningful insult. If I called someone a Pharisee I’d be saying that they are just going through the motions. I’d be saying that they probably act like they’re better Christians than others and puff out their chests a bit too much when talking about the good things they do. I’d call someone a Pharisee that I thought was too legalistic, following the letter of the law and not getting to the meaning behind it. It would be a derogatory term.
This would be a fair understanding of Pharisee based on the gospels that we have. But I don’t think it’s a fair understanding of Pharisee at all when we look at them in the context of the world they were in. You see, the gospels, and the message of Jesus that they contain were about turning things upside down. Jesus elevates the hated Samaritans to a place of honor and he lowers the honored Pharisees to a place of scorn.
To understand what the Pharisees were about we need to see that they weren’t all haughty and lording it over the “sinners”. Rather, they were the religious people in Jesus’ day. They weren’t the bad guys, they were the good guys. They were the ones who had grown up in the church. They were the ones who didn’t drink or smoke or go with girls who did. Basically, they were us. Why is it important to spend time on this? Because I think that we spend too much time looking at the Pharisees with disdain instead of recognizing ourselves in them. Jesus didn’t dismiss the Pharisees. No, they are the ones who dismissed him. You will see that throughout his ministry he tried to connect with them and teach them and save them, but they would not listen to what he had to say because they were too busy trying to be good.
And the message in today’s scripture is the one that eventually got Jesus killed. It is the message that God doesn’t just care for the good people. Rather God cares for all people. And God is willing to put effort and energy and love and as many resources as he can into reaching out to those who the good people probably want nothing to do with.
II. Lost
Today’s scripture comes at the beginning of three parables that Jesus tells about finding lost things. First we have this one, the parable of the lost sheep. I’m not going to spend much time on the parable itself. Its message, to me, seems pretty self explanatory. A shepherd has 100 sheep and loses one of them. His response is to hunt after that one and save it. And when he does he celebrates. The second parable is much the same. A woman loses a coin and searches after it. And she eventually finds it and again celebrates. The third story is even more powerful when we see it in this context. It is often referred to as the parable of the prodigal son, but in this context it is much better to see it as the parable of the lost son. The father in the parable loses his son, and waits for him and when he returns the father rejoices and celebrates because he was found.
All of these parables talk about something being lost and then being found. Now, again, I believe that our Christian culture does us a disservice, because we have a theological understanding of what it means to be lost. We automatically think that it means to not have that relationship with Jesus yet. And we believe that God seeks after the lost and eventually some are found and we rejoice when we hear of that happening. But I wonder if we’re selling God short a bit when we allow our understanding of lost to be so narrowly defined. Perhaps being lost doesn’t only refer to “the lost” but it might refer to all of us who have lost our way at one time or another. Perhaps it may refer to those who have already found Christ but are not walking with him completely yet, or, to use the language of our church’s mission statement, they may be believers but not yet disciples. Whatever it means to be lost, though, we do realize when we look at Jesus and his ministry that Jesus is focused on the lost even more so than he is on the “good” people.
III. Outcasts
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law didn’t like the fact that Jesus was spending so much time with tax collectors and “sinners”. They talked among themselves about this. They complained about it. They eventually killed him because of it. They wanted God to be focused on them, not on the sinners. They wanted God to reward them for all the ways that they had been faithful to him throughout their lives. They had worked hard at this faith thing and now this Messiah guy was ignoring them and going out and hanging out with the undesirables, the outcasts, the losers, the failures. This didn’t seem right to them. It didn’t seem fair or just. In fact it was downright shameful. How dare someone who claims to speak for God show more interest in those horrible people than he shows in me?
I believe that this is a common refrain in our churches today? We’re the ones who have been faithful to God. We’re the ones who have lived righteously while the culture around us has gone to pot. So how about a little destruction and wrath for all those sinful people, while we can sit back and enjoy the barbeque. But that’s not the message that Jesus had and it’s not the way that he lived. Jesus reached out to the outcast. He showed love to the unlovable. Today it wouldn’t be tax collectors that Jesus was hanging out with, it’d be homosexuals. Those Goth kids that so many are scared of? Jesus would be right there with them, sharing God’s love. Jesus was about breaking down the barriers that humans are so much into building up. He was about reaching out to those we wouldn’t want anything to do with. And you know what? Jesus would want to see the same from us, his body.
Jesus didn’t despise the Pharisees. He just believed that his time was better spent with those who didn’t have a relationship with God. They were being told by the Pharisees, by the church of their day that they were too sinful to have a relationship with God. Jesus proved this wrong. Let us make sure that we aren’t giving the “sinners” around us the same message that the Pharisees gave them. Rather let us share with them the message that Jesus shared. That God loves them and wants relationship with them.
This is what Bringing my World to Christ is about. It is an opportunity for us to think of those in our lives, those who we know, who need to know Jesus. Perhaps they’re loved ones that we care about very much. Perhaps they’re people who we dismiss with nary a thought. Either way they need our prayers. Not that God will fix them or make them good, but that they can experience the power that comes from knowing Jesus; that they can be found by Christ; that Jesus can save them, not just from eternal damnation, but from the problems in this world that assail them.
So I encourage you to take time today to write down the names of those who you are willing to pray for. Write two copies, one to leave on the altar and one to take home with you. And pray for these people. Believe that God can work in their lives; that Jesus can connect with them like he did with the tax collectors. But also look for ways that you can reach out and share with them as well.
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