Pentecost 17

Pentecost 17 (Luke 15:1-10)

“Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.”

Jesus welcomes sinners.

Jesus not only welcomes sinners he listens to them, feeds them, heals them and offers himself to them as the Salvation of God. In that offer, Jesus defines the underlying problem that defines our species. And, he offers the solution.

If you don’t properly identify the problem you can’t find the solution.

Some forms of religion teach that the problem is not enough law. People do bad things because they lack guidance. The solution is more law. The solution involves rewards and punishments to enforce the law.

The Pharisees and the scribes held this form of religion. St. Paul grew up in this form of religion. After St. Paul met Jesus he realized that while the Law is holy and good it cannot effect our salvation.

The Law functions to restrain evil and to convict us of our need for a savior. The lessons of the Bible teach that most (and possibly all) people do not know what they need to be saved from. Certainly none of the disciples (with the possible exception of John as he stood with Mary at the foot of the cross) understood the salvation Jesus brought until the resurrection.

Religious people then tended to understand salvation in exclusive categories of law and politics. For the Pharisees, the Messiah would confirm and secure their position of wealth and power. He would destroy their enemies, enslave the unrighteous and give the righteous the power to rule the world.

For the Messiah to associate with the unrighteous challenged the basic assumptions of law based religion. Those assumptions taught that God gave the Law to make men righteous. People can choose to obey the Law, People can just say no to sin.

The righteous can  be identified by their beliefs, their actions and their position in society. The assumption is that the Law determines who God will reward with wealth and power and who God will punish with poverty and tribulation.

Law based religion tends to define God as absolute rigid inflexible and uncompromising perfection. In this model God is so transcendent that all human language about God is inadequate and misleading.

The Deity of Law based religion will not and cannot relate to the imperfections and struggles of sinful men. That Deity uses angels to communicate with select prophets to write down the Laws that people must follow. If you follow the Laws you succeed in life. If you violate the Laws you fail. The successful people are the righteous elite who hold the wealth and power in society. The Messiah, the anointed man of God, is a kind of super prophet who has the power to impose Divine Law, reward the righteous and punish the unrighteous.

This of course is not what Moses and the Prophets taught.  Embedded in the Law is the sacrificial system. Moses declares: these are the Laws and when (not if) you break these Laws these are the sacrifices you must offer.

Jesus raised the religious standard by declaring that the standard of the Law is perfection. Of course, no one is or can be perfect. Jesus is the perfect mirror to the human soul that reveals to us that we cannot just say no to sin.

Jesus is very clear. All people are lost in separation from God. The religious are lost in religion. The rich are lost in their riches. Intellectuals are lost in the pride of intellect.

Jesus reveals that God is not just absolute transcendence. God is not just the unknown and unknowable Absolute. To the skeptic Jesus reveals that God is real. To the religious Jesus reveals that God is both transcendent and personal. To all people Jesus reveals that God is love.

The problem confronting our species is that we have chosen to separate from God. In that separation we are not only lost we are willfully and spitefully lost.

Human intellect, emotion or will cannot reunite us to God. All aspects of our being are distorted by separation. The evidence of that distortion is sin. And the evidence of separation is death.

The solution is reunification. That reunification is personal. God Himself effects the reunification by permanently and irrevocably uniting His divinity with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Salvation is organic.

The incarnation makes the sacrifice on the cross possible. As a man, Jesus can die on the cross as the final sacrifice for sin. As the co-eternal Son of God, Jesus can take away the sin of all people, experience the death of all people and transform sin back into holiness and death back into life. What makes this possible is that the Messiah is the co-eternal Beloved of God.

This is the Messiah that God the Holy Spirit revealed to Moses, the prophets and Holy Mother Mary. This is the Messiah that God the Father sent into the world. This is the Messiah who reveals  that all human beings are willfully and spitefully lost in separation. And this is the Messiah who announces that he is the good shepherd who has come into the world to seek the lost, to find the lost, to restore the lost and to transform the lost.

This is why Jesus met with gangsters and criminals. This is why Jesus reached out to the immoral and the unethical. This is even why Jesus  opened his arms wide to embrace the rigid inflexible and uncompromising religious elites.

Jesus is the savior who finds us where we are. He accepts us where we are. He reunites us to God the Father just as we are because he has already paid the price for our sins and transformed death back into life. He also sends the Holy Spirit to initiate a life long process of personal transformation in love and holiness.

Jesus does not take sides.

Jesus endorses no political party, no economic system, no human philosophy and no nation. He accepts us all where we are and then invites us to enter into union with Divine Love and compassion to experience personal transformation.

The Pharisees had created a religious institution from the place of separation to maintain separation. Jesus came to overcome separation.

For some Pharisees, this reality of God was liberating . For many others it was terrifying. For Jesus and the loyal angels it was a cause for great joy as Jesus declares to Heaven and Earth:

Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.