Hangng around with the "wrong" kind of people!

Luke 15:1-10

+ In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The problem with Jesus is that in the gospels he always tends to hang around with the wrong sort of people! This was abundantly clear to the scribes and the Pharisees who were grumbling and saying “this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”. And anyway let’s face it; he wasn’t exactly Mr Respectable himself! He himself was born of dodgy parentage to an unmarried mother. He ran away at the age of 12. He didn’t have a proper job or home. He just wandered about always going on about peace and love, telling people to give away their money and possessions to those more in need. It wasn’t just that he hung around with the wrong kind of people….as far as the scribes and Pharisees were concerned HE WAS one of the wrong kind of people!

So here we read of all the “tax-collectors and sinners” coming from far and wide to listen to Jesus. Jesus, again, was encouraging the riff-raff to come into town. You can almost picture it.

People followed Jesus wherever he went. The crowd following him here are unlikely to be following him to a service and sitting in nicely ordered rows to sing a few hymns and listen to a sermon. These are people who for many different reasons found themselves on the outside of polite society and who were kept on the outside by those who had the power to keep them there. They would probably have been noisy, scruffy and not the kind of people you would feel comfortable taking home to meet mum and dad…….yet they are the kind of people Jesus chose hang around with! They see in Jesus someone who is ready to accept them as they are, on whatever level they happen to be!

This whole chapter of Luke’s gospel is about rejoicing over those which were once lost but are now found. Something that is illustrated by three parables.  Today we focus on the one sheep who went missing and the joy that occurs when it is found and returned to the fold. Jesus speaks to the crowd and the scribes and Pharisees of leaving the rest of the flock in order to go in search of the one that was missing. As Jesus spoke these words though there were a few things which the Pharisees and teachers of the law conveniently forgot!

Firstly, in their complaining about Jesus hanging around with the wrong kind of people…..with sinners and tax-collectors, they had forgotten that ALL have sinned. Jesus summed up the law of God with two commandments - love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. All the other commandments actually fall within the scope of these two! If you fall short of these two commandments, you have sinned. I think we all qualify. And although they certainly wouldn’t have seen it that way at the time the Pharisees certainly qualified as well.

For them it really quite simple! They divided the world up very much into two camps - the good and the bad, the righteous and the sinners, the ones who were in and the ones who were out. If you made an honest attempt to live by the commandments, kept away from bad company and followed the Jewish ritual laws, you were ‘in’. If you didn’t, you were ‘out’. As far as the Pharisees and teachers of the law were concerned, they were ‘in’. They lived in a world where the lines were drawn very sharply and things were seen very much in terms of black and white…….no room for shades of grey here!

But in fact the situation is much more complicated than that. Some sins are obvious for all to see - murder, or adultery, or stealing cars. Other sins are not so obvious, but Jesus treated them just as seriously - the love of money and the things it can buy, lack of love for the poor and those in need, covetousness, self-righteousness, injustice and so on. In the eyes of Jesus these things were all just as important, and in fact very often go alongside the more obvious sins which the Pharisees liked to make such a big deal about! The Pharisees were so concerned about what they saw as the failings of others guilty of doing things that they certainly wouldn’t dream of doing themselves, and so full of their own self-importance that they completely failed to recognise that their own lack of love for others was in fact just as sinful in God’s eyes.

 So the first thing the Pharisees and teachers of the law forgot was that everyone is a sinner, there are no exceptions. The second thing they forgot was that every person is important to God. Not just as a part of the crowd, but as individuals. God loves each one of us, notices when we stray away, and goes out looking for us to bring us home. He would not do this if we weren’t important to him.

God’s priorities are rather different from ours! If we had gathered ninety-nine sheep together we would probably have weighed up the risks of leaving them and going out to search for the one that was lost, and decided “I’ll stick with the ninety-nine”. Or if we still had the nine coins we might be tempted to chalk up the loss of the tenth to bad luck and leave it at that. Not with Jesus. Every single person is significant to God. You’re not just a statistic that he can write off; you’re a person made in God’s image, a unique individual, loved and precious in his sight.

I’m sure there are times when all of us have felt that maybe we are the “wrong person, in the wrong place and at the wrong time”. We soak up other people’s attitudes and responses towards us and it can be so easy at times to believe it of ourselves. And if we are honest about it, for much of its history the church itself has been complicit in this. By excluding (whether deliberately or not) those who do not easily fit into a nice neat box the church has sometimes seemed to side with the Pharisees! Over the years, those excluded have included women, people of colour, lesbian and gay people……..and for some this can still sometimes be the reality which they continue to face.

How often do we have new faces here in church and we are not quite sure how to respond to them? They might not be wearing the right kind of clothes, or they just seem a bit too “different”…..not really “church people”. And so we keep our distance. Here at St George’s we like to think of ourselves as a welcoming church and in many ways we are, but there will be people who walk through the door sometimes who for one reason or another may not always feel that welcome which we so much want to give.

 In my role as baptism officer I’ve spoken with people who bring their children to be baptised and who are worried that maybe because they themselves or their guests are not particularly “church people” they may say or do the “wrong” thing. They don’t know when to stand up or sit down or are too pre-occupied that the kids are making a noise! It’s tempting sometimes for those for us who come here every week to expect others who are unfamiliar with church to behave in the “right” way…….to “fit in”! We might not always say it out loud, but people generally get a sense of whether they are welcome in a place or not!

Jesus welcomes ALL to his table. For him there are no “right or wrong” people, there are just people in need of God’s love and grace. The walls that we sometimes build to make us feel more secure, the boxes that we like to put ourselves and others in……to him these are nothing. He welcomes sinners and eats with them. As we come to receive him in the Eucharist today, whether we take the bread and wine or receive a blessing instead, remember that he invites each and every one of us to come to him. Nobody……NOBODY is excluded from the feast.

AMEN