SSSSIIIIINNNNNNNEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

Yes you are.  And stop trying to deny it.  No really stop.  Right now.  Don’t do it.  You are.

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

Every so often the lectionary, the selection of lessons we follow for our scripture readings, hands in a really creative and interesting combination of lessons.  Last week, if you recall, we looked at sin, and how even though we know we are forgiven, sin is still a very real danger to us.  This week, however, instead of the typically Lenten repentance from sin, we get a chance to celebrate how God deals with sin – and instead rejoice at his forgiveness.

If you remember back to advent, the 3^rd Sunday was called Gaudete Sunday.  Rejoice! Sunday.  Lent has something similar, it even still means Rejoice, but its Laetare Sunday.  That comes from the Latin translation of the last verse of the Psalm for today, “Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord; shout for joy, all who are true of heart.”  And so, on this Sunday, our lessons reflect the joy that we have because God has forgiven us through Jesus Christ.

Let’s take a look at our Gospel first.  Jesus overhears the religious establishment muttering about who he is spending time with, namely “tax collectors and sinners”.  Now, given recent events in the news, it seems tax collectors still don’t have the greatest rap.  But we don’t really get who these “tax collectors and sinners” are.  The people designated as “sinners” were those who didn’t follow the Mosaic Law as interpreted by the religious establishment.  So, to make this a little more understandable, just be thinking of what groups of people the religious establishment (ie, Christians) tend to ignore at best and hate at worst.  I’ll leave figuring that out to you, I’m not going to name any names, mostly because there’s too many to name.

So, Jesus is hanging out with the last people anyone expected him to, and in response he tells three parables:  The Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the Parable of the Lost Son.  Now, the first two are fairly tame, feel free to check them out after service to see what I mean.  The parable of the lost son on the other hand, packs one serious punch.  It’s like Jesus feinted left twice before hitting the Pharisees with a vicious right hook.

It starts out common enough: son wants money; son asks dad for money; dad gives son money; son goes and parties; son loses money; son feeds pigs (Can you think of anything much more degrading for a Jew than to feed pigs?); son decides to go home and be a servant; son goes home; father surprises son with a welcome home party.  End of parable right?

If Jesus had stopped there, this parable would have had the same message as the Lost Coin or Lost Sheep: God seeks out sinners.  That’s happy talk, everybody loves it.  But here’s where Jesus starts to poke the Pharisees.  “Meanwhile… back at the ranch.”  It seems there’s an older brother.  Now this older brother did everything right.  He stuck by his father, following the rules, doing what he was told – he was the good son counterpart to the bad son.  And he wasn’t happy that the father was paying so much attention to his reject brother.

Now, if you look at the way the parable plays out, which son is really lost?  The younger brother turned away from his father and rejected him, but that brother came back.  The older brother never seemed to turn away from his father, but when it counted he was as far away from the father than his younger brother.

I really think that both sons are lost, but still only one came back.  The Pharisees spent a lot of time doing what God said, but they did a lot worse job of really knowing God.  The “tax collectors and sinners” may not have done the best job of going what God said in the past, but they were all gathering together to know God in Jesus Christ.

And that’s where our lesson from 2 Corinthians comes in – God doesn’t care about who people, you and I included, were.  Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”  If this is true, then it’s just like the parable of the lost son – it doesn’t matter what we’ve done in the past, what matters is that through Jesus’ blood we are reconciled to God.

In the parable the father didn’t care about the son’s past, only that the son had come home.  The only person who cared about the lost son’s past was his older brother, and that hurt his relationship to the father.

Too often as Christians we find ourselves in the position of the older son, and we have a hard time accepting folk who we think Jesus shouldn’t accept.  But Christ didn’t just die for Christians.  Christ died for everyone, and part of our job as Christians is to be, as Paul puts it, “Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”  To put it in terms of the parable, instead of looking down on our younger brothers when they come home, we should be searching them out and telling them that the father loves them, no matter what they’ve done.

It doesn’t help anyone if we just keep our faith to ourselves.  It just makes us more and more like the Pharisees and less like Christ.  And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be like Christ.