Sunday, September 15, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

The Relentless Seeking of God

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51:1–15
Luke 15:1–10

“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” Jesus’s critics grumbled. Who are these sinners?

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks the crowd, “If you love those who love you, why should you be commended? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, why should you be commended? Even sinners do that. If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, why should you be commended? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be paid back in full.” (Luke 6:32–34 Common English Bible)

Sinners, it would seem, are people who only do what benefits themselves. They don’t give if they’re not going to get something in return. They don’t love unless they’re going to be loved back. They don’t do a good deed unless they think they will get something back from it.

We ourselves can easily fall into this kind of attitude. If we do, our life becomes a series of transactions and exchanges. I give you this, if you give me that. Or, if that person’s not going to smile at me, I’m not going to smile at them. If they ignore me, I’m going to ignore them!

Life becomes a business transaction, or a series of calculated moves, trying to come out on top. But where is the love? Where is the generosity in that kind of life? Where is the joy?

“This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them,” his critics said. But who are these sinners? In another place in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus was giving a series of teachings to the crowds of people (Luke 13:1–5).

The narrator, Luke, says, “Some who were present on that occasion told Jesus about the Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were offering sacrifices. He replied, ‘Do you think the suffering of these Galileans proves that they were more sinful than all the other Galileans?’”

In other words, Jesus was asking, can you identify sinners by noticing who is suffering? He was asking if the crowds believed that suffering is a punishment for being sinful. He doesn’t let them answer, but presumably they are thinking that it is, or he wouldn’t have asked them.

Jesus answers his own question by saying, “No.” These Galileans suffered, but they’re no worse sinners than anybody else. They were killed, but they didn’t deserve that. “But,” he went on, “unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.”

Jesus uses this moment as an opportunity to call all the people in the crowd to make a change, to change their hearts and lives.

Jesus went on with his teaching: “What about those eighteen people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing than everyone else who lives in Jerusalem?”

Again, apparently people were thinking like that, or he wouldn’t ask the question. Even today we have a tendency to think that when misfortune falls on someone, they must have done something to deserve it. We might think it about our own lives too, asking God, Why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? We may say it to a trusted friend, or cry out to God in prayer, or we may just feel it wordlessly, or think it silently. What have I done to deserve this?

But Jesus says, “No,” that’s not how this works. Those people in Jerusalem who had a tower fall on them were not more guilty of wrongdoing. They didn’t deserve that tower to fall on them any more than any other person. Bad things happen, and it’s not fair.

Pilate killed those Galileans, but they didn’t deserve it. That tower of Siloam fell on some residents of Jerusalem, but they didn’t deserve it. So Jesus is telling us that when we look around and see some people suffering, we shouldn’t assume that they did something to deserve that. We shouldn’t use that to think that we are better than someone else.

And if we’re the ones suffering, if we’re the ones who’ve lost a loved one, or lost a job, or had a health incident, or diagnosis, or whatever challenge it is, we shouldn’t use that to think badly of ourselves either.

Death and suffering are not punishments. “No, I tell you,” Jesus says, “they are not worse sinners than any of you. Don’t think that they are the sinners,” he teaches, “and you are the righteous ones.”

So when the crowds ask him about the murdered Galileans and the people crushed under a fallen tower, Jesus says, you all, still, need to change your hearts and your lives, too.

This is what repentance is. To change our hearts and lives. In some translations of the Bible the English reads, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (New Revised Standard Version).

But in the new scholarly translation called the Common English Bible, the English reads, “No, I tell you, but unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.”

The Greek word these translations are dealing with is metanoia, and it means to have a new mind, a different mind, a changed mind that causes us to change our lives.

Repentance is metanoia; metanoia is repentance—it means to be changed. It’s related to the Hebrew word for repentance, which is teshuva—to turn again toward God.

Jesus uses this word repent to encourage people to turn toward God. He says repent, meaning change your hearts and lives.

It’s a beautiful word of healing and relationship building. It’s not a word of punishment or blame. Repentance, metanoia, is not a word meant to inspire fear or shame. It’s a word filled with hope and calling us all to a new kind of life, a life of wholeness, a life in community, a life in relationship with God.

Later on in the Gospel of Luke, when Luke was recounting the story of Zacchaeus, another tax collector, presumably a sinner according to his neighbors, Jesus told his followers that he came to seek out and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). So here he is, doing that. Seeking out the lost and calling them into new life.

Jesus tells them to change their hearts and minds, but he does much more than that. He doesn’t just teach them with his words; he embraces them with his actions. He eats with them. He invites them to his table, and he goes to their homes and eats at their tables too, as he did in the case of Zacchaeus.

When Jesus told Zacchaeus he wanted to go to his house, the people watching grumbled and said, “He’s gone to be the guest of a sinner” (Luke 19:7). That’s the kind of thing that Jesus often did. He didn’t let Zacchaeus remain an outsider, and he doesn’t let one sheep of the flock wander off and stay lost. He brings them all back into community.

A friend of mine told me a story recently of her experience one day when she was having lunch with a friend of hers who is living without a home right now. They were having lunch and talking and laughing, and a stranger nearby heard them laughing and started talking to them. He ended up joining them for lunch.

When the stranger, who was now more of a friend than a stranger, left, the woman said to my friend, “He treated me like I was a human being.”

That’s what Jesus did, too. He treated every person like they were a human being, because they are. We are. We are not “those people over there in Galilee who were killed by Pilate” and “those people over there in Jerusalem who had a tower fall on them” and “us.”

There are just People of God, sinners and saints, all of us.

And wouldn’t a shepherd who had a hundred sheep leave ninety-nine of them to go and find the one that was lost and bring it back into the fold? That’s the question that Jesus asks the crowd of sinners and saints. The shepherd searches and searches until he finds the one that was lost. And when he finally does find it, what does he do? He calls together all his friends and neighbors to celebrate. He brings in the lost, he brings in the neighbors, he brings together a community of celebration.

And the woman who loses a coin does the same thing. She doesn’t give up until she finds that thing of value, the lost one, the lost coin. She values it, and she won’t let it stay lost. Then she calls together all her friends and neighbors to celebrate.

God is like her, never giving up on any of us, valuing us, like she valued that one coin. God is like the shepherd, looking and looking and eventually finding each one of us. When the community comes together and all are valued and all are invited in, it’s as though the angels are saying “Yes, yes, yes! This is how it should be.” They clap their hands and have a party!

Jesus is like that woman, and Jesus is like that shepherd. Jesus invites himself to Zacchaeus’s house, and he invites sinners to his own table. That’s how Jesus deals with sinners. He loves them. He feeds them. He loves us. He feeds us.

He does invite us to change our hearts and minds, but it’s interesting to think about that lost coin and that lost sheep. I don’t think that coin repented! I don’t think that sheep repented either. But still the woman searched and searched, and still the shepherd searched and searched.

That tells us something about God, too. God loves us and longs for us, even when we are lost and stuck in our same old ways. God is looking for us and not giving up on us, even when we can’t change our hearts and our lives. God is gonna find us. And God is gonna love us. And there will be a day when God and all the angels are celebrating and having a big party because God did get us and God did pull us into our own healing and wholeness.

We don’t have to earn God’s love, because God already loves us. We don’t have to repent in order to win God’s gift of healing. When Jesus sat at table with sinners, he didn’t give them an ultimatum or tell them that he would eat with them and visit with them after they cleaned up their act.

He loved them first, and ate with them first. And then they changed their hearts and their lives. His love changed their hearts and their lives.

And that’s how God’s love is for us. God loves us now, exactly as we are right now. Sometimes changing our hearts and lives begins by believing that the Resurrected Christ loves us, by realizing that God loves us. Boy, that sure changes a person’s heart, doesn’t it? When we know that we are loved?

Just let that sink in. Let that heal you. You are already loved more deeply than you can possibly imagine. And the more you can hold that belief in your heart and your mind, the more your life will change. Because God first loved us. And God loves us still. Amen.