14 March, 2010

Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Several weeks ago, I accepted an invitation to come on a Monday afternoon to visit the program that provides meals for hundreds of people each week in the lower level of this building.  What I remember most that day was the comment that unlike some of the meal programs in this area, there are no “gate-keepers” at the doors of St. Paul.  In some places providing meals, individuals are turned away for any number of reasons that make them unwelcome.  Here, I was told, no one is turned away and no one is asked to leave, unless their behavior becomes disruptive or potentially harmful to others.

I thought about that earlier this week when I read the opening two verses of today’s Gospel Lesson.  The Pharisees and scribes are overheard grumbling with displeasure because Jesus share meals with people they would not touch with a ten-foot pole.  The grumblers were gate-keepers; they had a long list of undesirables who would never make it through the door to one of their lunches, and because Jesus seemed to either have a different social filter or worse yet, none at all, they took issue with him.

I have often described that as “circle-drawing.”  We seem to have a natural tendency to draw circles that include in those with whom we want to associate and exclude out those who don’t “fit.”  And when we start to believe we have God’s command and blessing for excluding people from our circles, they become very difficult to erase.

When we draw our circles, we don’t see that as being mean spirited.    Sometimes we honestly believe that’s the way God wants it to be and any one who questions our circles or who tries to get us to widen them is just plain wrong.  That’s what’s going on in the Gospel Lesson this morning.  “Tax collectors and sinners” have been coming to listen to Jesus.  That’s bad enough, but when he takes the next step and dares to sit down and have table fellowship with them that’s going too far.

In his book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg explains that these “grumblers” sincerely believed that for them to be holy in God’s sight, they had to stay away from anything they believed God considered unclean.  In some cases that meant avoiding certain foods.  But it also meant avoiding certain people because of their ethnicity, or because of certain behaviors and occupations, or one the basis of their social status.  For starters, Jews saw themselves as being separate from unclean Gentiles.  Tax-collectors were also suspect, for even though they might be Jews by birth, they collaborators who sold-out to the hated Romans, taking from their countrymen money to support the empire that was occupying their land.  And even if you were Jewish by birth, you could be judged to be “outside the circle” of holiness for other reasons: for example, being physically maimed, being poor, suffering from Leprosy, being poor, being a prostitute or working as a shepherd.  Those who saw themselves as being inside the circle kept those defined as outsiders at arms-length, for even casual contact would render you “unclean” and therefore unfit to come into God’s presence until you had performed proper purity rites.

When Jesus allowed contact and table fellowship with those the Pharisees excluded from their “circle,” it is not surprising they would grumble about it. But instead of arguing with them, he tells three stories, all of which make the same point:     beware of thinking that God favors and blesses only your group to the exclusion of all other groups: God has a way of drawing wider circles of inclusiveness than you can imagine.

I doubt that the grumblers liked these stories any better than they liked the people with whom Jesus associated.  In the first one (which was not included in passage from Luke we just read) Jesus compares God to a shepherd (one of those groups of they considered “unclean”) who goes looking for one lost after 99 of them are safely tucked in for the night. When he finds it and brings it home, he immediately twitters all his friends and neighbors telling them: “Rejoice with me; I found the sheep I thought was lost.”  In the second story (also not included in today’s lesson) God is compared to a woman who tears her house apart looking for a lost coin.  And like the shepherd, she immediately goes on Face Book to ask all her friends: “rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that was lost.”  Jesus is saying in these stories that God’s circle of forgiveness, my grumbling critics, is larger than you can imagine.  It includes in many of those who by your gate-keeping standards don’t seem deserving of God’s concern or grace in any way, shape, or form.