“This Man Welcomes Sinners and Eats with Them”

Luke 15:1-10; I Timothy 1:12-17

I Timothy 1:12-17

¹I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, ¹³even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, ¹⁴and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. ¹⁶But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. ¹⁷ To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Luke 15:1-10
¹Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

³So he told them this parable: ⁴ “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? ⁵When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices.

⁶ And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ ⁷Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

⁸“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? ⁹When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ ¹⁰Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The Sermon

What was in the water in Germany in the 1880’s?

All the most profoundly influential theological minds of the early 20th century seem to have emerged from Germany in a span of just a couple of years. Rudolf Bultmann was born in 1884 in Wiefelstede. Karl Barth, who taught in Germany until he was dismissed for denouncing the Nazis, was born in Switzerland in 1886. Three months later, Paul Tillich was born in Starzeddel.

Within eight years of Tillich, both Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr were born—and nevermind they were born in Wright City, Missouri; they were as German as Oktoberfest.

Tillich, Barth, Bultmann and the Niebuhrs began shaping Protestant theology in the 1920s for the rest of the century. All of them and other great German theologians including Bonhoeffer spent time in the United States, at places like Union Seminary in New York, or Princeton, or the University of Chicago.

For half a century, whenever any of these people lectured, preached, or simply held court at academic parties or roundtable discussions, Protestant thinkers held their tongues and listened—clergy, philosophers, professors, statespeople, students. When one of these guys spoke, it was an event.

In the early 1990s, when I was in seminary, we used to sit in a dimly lit bar called Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap—strictly for the food, of course—where Tillich, in the last couple of years before his passing in 1965, used to stroll in after his evening lectures at the University of Chicago to talk theology and shoot the breeze.

To have heard any of them in conversation must have felt like an epiphany for Protestant thinkers, and in fact they were so powerful that for decades afterward, anybody with a German accent was assumed to be a great theologian. [A couple of them—Dorothee Soelle, Jurgen Moltmann—actually were.]

So it must have been an amazing event when an audience in the late 1940s heard Tillich deliver a sermon that impacted almost everything Protestants understood about God’s grace, by articulating human sin in terms of separation and estrangement. The sermon was called You Are Accepted.

“Who has not, at some time,” he asked, “been lonely in the midst of a social event? The feeling of our separation from the rest of life is most acute when we are surrounded by it in noise and talk. We realize then much more than in moments of solitude how strange we are to each other, how estranged life is from life. Each one of us draws back into himself. We cannot penetrate the hidden centre of another individual; nor can that individual pass beyond the shroud that covers our own being…”

And, he said, “The most irrevocable expression of the separation of life from life today is the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other, and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened. The madness of the German Nazis and the cruelty of the lynching mobs in the South provide too easy an excuse for us to turn our thoughts from our own selves. But let us just consider ourselves and what we feel, when we read, this morning and tonight, that in some sections of Europe all children under the age of three are sick and dying, or that in some sections of Asia millions without homes are freezing and starving to death. The strangeness of life to life is evident in the strange fact that we can know all this, and yet can live today, this morning, tonight, as though we were completely ignorant. And I refer to the most sensitive people amongst us. In both humankind and nature, life is separated from life. Estrangement prevails among all things that live. Sin abounds.”

And “We are not merely separated from each other. For we are also separated from ourselves… How often we commit certain acts in perfect consciousness, yet with the shocking sense that we are being controlled by an alien power. That is the experience of the separation of ourselves from ourselves, which is to say ‘sin,’ whether or not we like to use that word.

“Thus, the state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life. And we do not know where we have come from, or where we are going. We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence. We hear the voice of that depth; but our ears are closed. We feel that something radical, total, and unconditioned is demanded of us; but we rebel against it, try to escape its urgency, and will not accept its promise.”

We’re in a section in Luke’s gospel where Jesus is going from place to place, always teaching. In a crowd of thousands; in the synagogue; traveling “through one town and village after another” (13:22); eating at the home of a leader of the Pharisees, then setting out again with a large crowd following him;

and every step of the way, teaching, telling parables, healing, instructing; always drawing a crowd, and always sharing with them the reality of who God is and what God demands of us, namely:

a kind of love that is not content to say, “there, there, it’ll all work out somehow;” but a love that works—sacrifices if necessary—to make human lives richer, fuller, healthier, better; to overcome the estrangement between us and ourselves, between us and God, between us and each other.

Can you imagine the disgust of the Pharisees and scribes, when they look at him surrounded by the human detritus of the Middle East, and they say, “This fellow welcomes sinners…and eats with them.”

It makes them wonder… Did I shake his hand, after he had maybe touched the clothing of some streetwalker? Or laid hands on the eyes of some poor, blind beggar? Or shared food with some foreigner, some non-Presbyterian heathen, some sinner?

If I touched him, and he touched them…does that make me dirty, too?

And sometimes it’s not the scribes and the Pharisees saying that. Sometimes it’s the face in the mirror. Sometimes, it’s the terrible voice of the first-person narrator, re-telling for the thousandth time the stories of your failures, your embarrassments, your misdoings; all the things that if you could erase the tapes you would, but you haven’t found a way to do it yet.

Let me tell you that it is not as bad as it seems. The face in the mirror is wrong when it tells you that you are not beautiful enough. The voice in your head is wrong when it insists that all those old stories are still relevant, still important to everyone else, still the overwhelming and immediate evidence of your own condemnation.

You are not too ugly to love. And your past is not too sullied to be redeemed and forgiven—no matter who you are, or what you have done or failed to do, or what your worst inclinations are.

You are not too ugly to love. And your past is not too sullied to be redeemed and forgiven.

Which is why, like a shepherd who has found and rescued one sheep who has gone astray, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

You know what I always used to say about this parable? “What about the other 99 who never went astray?”

What other 99? Do you think that for every sinner in this room, there are 99 people who are perfectly righteous? Are you kidding?

It’s about the one.

It’s the same reason why, like a woman at home who lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully until she finds one lost coin even though she has nine more just like it, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

It’s down to the one. It’s down to you, personally, individually. In this man, Jesus—who is the revelation, in human terms, of the God of the universe—in this man is forgiveness, and hope, and renewal, and the promise of eternity.

We don’t earn it; we don’t deserve it; we don’t control it. But we can choose to accept it.

“And,” Paul Tillich said, “in the light of this grace, we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we.

“If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life. We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself or herself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say ‘yes’ to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.”

Or, as the Pharisees and scribes said it correctly and much more succinctly: this man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

September 16, 2007