Discipleship in Grace

Psalm 23
Luke 15:8-10


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

September 16, 2007

Now The Ten Commandments were not Jesus’ idea. They came before him. Jesus’ emphasis was on what might be called the preamble to the 10, for him the greatest commandment, was to love God – heart, mind, and soul – and the second, to love neighbor as self. Jesus ends his ministry with the great last supper command, love each other as, and like, I have loved you. That was a very personal thing to say and really nothing you could put a number on.

Now when it comes to commandments and Holy teachings, Jesus doesn’t talk in a very numerical way. Numbered “to do lists,” power points, graphs and charts, spread sheets and statistical analysis, these are, of course, not the “windows” on the world as Jesus sees the world. This was an intention, a choice. For even his pre-modern, less scientific world was full of numbers. In the Hebrew Temple there were numbers of rules and laws. There’s even a book called “Numbers” in the Hebrew Bible. In the Roman Empire engineered roads and military cohorts were well numbered. After all, Roman numerals came from that empire. (And let us thank the Arabs and the Mayas for the zero!)

So it’s interesting, it’s revealing, it’s instructive, that Jesus uses numbers in this teaching: 100 sheep. 10 coins. Numerology was important to Hebrew Scriptures. 40 meant complete, full, a long time – 40 days and 40 nights, 40 years in the wilderness. 12 tribes. But for Jesus, his numbers are all over the place. 12 disciples. 70 missionaries. Forgiveness should be 7 times 70. Feed 5,000, feed 3,000.

In other words, to get the point of Jesus’ teaching, and Jesus as a person, there is something else going on, some view of life different from either his Roman Empire culture or his Hebrew Torah Temple culture. Numbers are just not a very “Jesusy” way for Jesus to be talking. But since numbers would be important to his irritating, grumbling, lawyery, adversaries, the Pharisees, I interpret Jesus this way: It’s as if he is saying, “O.K. guys, you want to understand why I welcome and eat with people who are sinners. Well let me break it down for you in terms you can understand. Let me picture this for you in your language, numbers, “deci-numbers,” Empire numbers, Roman numerals. So Jesus frames his homey little story about love and compassion and who belongs to God, in the secular numerology of the empire and the legalistic terms of religious leaders who seem only to enumerate, but not to feel, the laws of God.

But, of course, inside this hard right angle frame of numbers, 100 sheep, 10 coins, Jesus’ real and heart-felt world is featured. Lost sheep and coins that belong to women! This is very revealing. These coins do not belong to the rich young ruler! Jesus puts them in the hands of women. Jesus will make these Pharisees reframe their world. He gives them a cognitive frame-work they can understand, a square in black and white, numbers, and then inside that he pictures women, lighting lamps, sweeping floors anxiously, eagerly, looking for even a little coin lost and then rejoicing with her friends when she finds it. In a religious temple hierarchy that looked down on women, are these Pharisees going to be comfortable seeing Jesus’ mental picture of happy, rejoicing women?! I don’t think so. Nor would sheep please their eyes. Sheep were dirty, cleaned up for sacrifice, and shepherds were very blue collar. And besides, it’s hard to imagine a real shepherd counting out precisely 100 sheep. Roman soldiers were called Centurions because they belonged in a “century” of 100 soldiers. But Centurion sheep?! Not likely. More likely a loose flock.

So I think Jesus is really trying to irritate these irritating Pharisees to get them to see their world differently, saying “let me talk your language, let me “clean this up” for you with a decimal frame. But, now, look at that lost sheep and maybe you will feel why I do what I do by eating with and welcoming sinners!”

I offer you that view of those Bible words. I offer you that exegesis of scripture, as a model, a gospel model, for us and how the word of God and the language of our culture are two different things.” Jesus is making a counter-cultural point to these Pharisees. So can we, as disciples, see a different world than the one our culture gives us. We can live in that different vision of life in a better, and a happier way, counter-culturally.

There is something terribly wrong with the secular world and Jesus knows this. Jesus desires sinners to repent. The religious leaders of his day, instead, were imitating the empire that controlled them, and so they desire to control and exclude sinners. Jesus practiced a discipleship of grace. He condemned his own religion for its discipline of exclusion.
For Jesus it is spiritual to welcome. To his empire-tainted religious leaders it is bad to welcome the wrong.

How can we, then, practice a discipleship of grace, especially since we are so captured by our own secular world? And what most captures us in this world is not so much numbers, it’s that we want to be right and to do good works, and there is no grace in being only right and just doing good works.

The reason Jesus did not succeed as a religious leader – but has been worshipped and remembered even since his “crash” with his world – is that Jesus lived for love and grace. He died at the hands of law and works. The resurrection of Jesus is our doorway into a different world, a better world, a Godly world, where to be a disciple of grace is a happy thing. And, my friends, to follow a discipline of being right (all the time) and working for goodness (all the time) is a hard thing and not a happy thing. Nothing separates our political, and cultural, and religious worlds more than those two words: “Hard.” Or “Happy.”

Is life a hard thing or a happy thing? Should life be hard or happy? Should we be hard or happy? There are political thinkers who will say that Republicans are for a hard life with controlling fathers and that Democrats are for a soft life with giving mothers.

Jesus, it seems to me, had a hard life. And yet the gospel message of his life – as it was molded within God – was nothing less than the happiest of lives. So when the Buddhists and/or the Republicans say that life is hard, it seems to me that Jesus’ own life would testify to that truth. Yes, it is hard. And when those called “liberal” say that life is about love and happiness, Jesus’ own life reveals that truth, as well. Yes, life is about love and happiness.

Where you and I get in trouble is when we try to make a life of love and happiness out of an ethic and law of hard good works. We can make the mistake of making a legal commandment out of looking for the one lost sheep. The one lost coin. A lot of us really do that. We are so captured and controlled by our secular world, that we make a law out of love rather than put love in our laws. But since Jesus ends his talking with the Pharisees with words like “rejoice,” “come home,” “more joy,” “angles in joy,” you wonder how can we expect to get from our hard “good” life to Jesus’ joyful home.

So this is a sermon that has been done in the language of our secular culture. This sermon is – for me, uncharacteristically – a sermon as a pointed argument. I have advanced an argument here and made a point which is: In these two Bible stories, Jesus makes visual a counter-cultural view of God in Life – lost sheep, lost coins looked for and joyously found. He does it using the heartless language of his dominant culture.

For me, by the way, sermons that dance in images change our lives more than sermons that march with ideas.

Nevertheless, a life of discipleship in grace does require of us a cognitive shift, a visual reframe of our world. To follow in grace we must see the world differently, almost counter-intuitively, certainly with vision, not just sight.

I don’t know if just saying this makes any difference, but grace is not a free lunch way of looking at the world. Grace is lunch, and a reason to eat. Grace is not some soft anti-justice way of seeing the world. Grace is a reason for justice because it is a love for life. Grace is proprioception – it’s our total body sense of where we are, what is up and down, and how we, unthinkingly, keep our balance. Grace is not easy living, it’s heroic and hard like childbirth. It’s beautiful like a little leaguer’s first home run – running so joyfully he missed the bases. Grace is hard work and working so hard and full that it looks, it feels, easy, easy as an archer’s arrow released as if he himself was arrow and bow, target and flight, as if all was God, because for the joy of it all, it is all God. Amen.