Who to Supper With

It’s a long road, the road from Galilee to Jerusalem.

Long to walk.

Long in distance.

Long and full of experience, of sights to see and people to meet.

It is a hard road to tread, especially if we are to be followers of Jesus willing to give up all our possessions and expose ourselves to hatred and exclusion as we heard last week.

And yet that road must not be all that hard, all that impossible to walk, there must be more than promises offered as reasons for those disciples to give up their everything to their Lord on this plain of existence; on this side of Heaven’s gates.

There must have been camaraderie, a sense of beginning, of building and belonging.

There must have been excitement in those sermons, tantalizing talks beside a fire, sparks of ideas and embers floated into the air.

These were not the upper-crust, the most well to do, they did not move from their palaces, they did not drop their rings of gold and jewels were not removed from their necks so they could join Jesus.

They gave up far more than material wealth to join Jesus, they gave up family and relationships; businesses and livelihoods.

They gave up so much to take on the journey of traveling with an itinerant preacher and the promise of salvation for all of God’s people.

And they gave up so much to take on the risk of doing so, for some of Jesus’ words and actions would go against what some in authority perceived were the correct ones to speak to and the ones deserving of God’s largesse.

And here we are.

I imagine the disciples are interspersed in the crowd; they are listening to Jesus speak and they are joined by growing crowds.

In those crowds are the Pharisees and scribes, the very authorities questioning the reasoning behind Jesus’s words.

They come nearer to where his is speaking.

They mumble and grumble and stew.

To each other and all who can hear, they say, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

This fellow welcomes and eats with sinners.

This fellow welcomes sinners.

This fellow associates with sinners.

He reaches out for them, he brings them into the fold.

They are unclean.

They should be shunned not blessed.

Their bad behavior is unclean.

They work actively against YHWH.

He lies down with pigs; he takes supper in their sties.

He is unclean.

He welcomes sinners and eats with them.

Jesus hears the crowd.

He hears the Pharisees and the scribes in the crowd.

He turns to them.

Which one of you would look for the lost?

Which one of you would seek out the hungry amongst us and bring them bread?

And what Jesus is saying is nothing new.

For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

That’s from Ezekiel written 600 years before Jesus’ interactions with the authorities.

And the Pharisees and scribes would have known the same.

They would have read this passage many times for the Pharisees and the scribes studied their scriptures, they knew the scriptures.

They also knew community.

And they knew their history as well.

They knew Ezekiel was written not just long ago, but around the period of the Babylonian captivity.

They remembered that they were once exiled.

They remembered they were once foreigners in a strange land and how important it was that they retained their identity as Jews in Babylon.

They knew too they were now occupied by a cruel occupier, the Romans wanted their conquered to become a part of empire.

The Jews were struggling to retain their identity just as they did in Babylon.

And here is this fellow, eating with sinners; tax collectors and the like.

People who work with and for Rome.

They were the lost, they were irredeemable.

Better to let the sinners go to ensure the community remains whole.

Better to eat separately than risk associating with those who would tear down community and build up empire; helping to sate the thirst for riches of the destructive occupier.

And fundamentally, it becomes clear that the Pharisees and Scribes speak from a place of concern.

They are worried that their faith might be swallowed whole by or integrated into the occupier’s religion.

The empire promises Baal, animism, and mythology.

The Pharisees are protecting religion, yes, and by extension their livelihoods, but they too are trying to keep an entire community together, a whole identity that could be subsumed by evil.

So, yes, the Pharisees rumble and grumble but they do so because they see their community potentially weakened by those who would commune with Empire.

And Jesus, Jesus is prescribing that those sinners should be welcomed into the community.

In fact those sinners and tax collectors should be sought after, even chased back into the fold.

Jesus highlights the fact that we are all God’s people and we are all products of God’s love.

The Pharisees, concerned about division and maintaining a status quo that is manageable and close knit, would rather those sinners remain separate as they are unclean, impure, and threatening to a peaceful coexistence.

Both Jesus and the Pharisees are concerned for God’s people, they do see things differently though.

They, the Pharisees, being the authorities, have a lot to say about Jesus’ ministry.

And Jesus has much to say about them.

That then is the nature of the conflict.

Yes, it is about who one should associate with, but it is more about keeping community whole in the face of destruction.

Just as they had to maintain strict rules in their time of captivity in Babylon, the Pharisees now see themselves in similar circumstances and the necessity to maintain that rigidity to keep their community intact is just as important as it was six hundred years prior.

We cannot look to the Pharisees in this story as just being angry or contrarian or pitted against Jesus for no reason.

There are reasons and they are good reasons.

Jesus isn’t calling out the authorities for being unnecessarily cruel, he just fundamentally disagrees with their point of view.

He sees the sinners and tax collectors as who they are and in them, perhaps he sees all of us.

For we are all sinners.

We are all lost in one sense or another and we all wish to be found, perhaps even to be sought after.

And yet, we too can be exclusionary.

How easy it is to send someone away for some crime they committed and never visit the prisoner.

It is far harder for an ex-convict to find work after incarceration, after they have served their time, than it is for someone who has not been convicted of a crime.

And we feel as if we have good reason for doing so, that hiring on a rehabilitated felon might disrupt the business and can they be trusted with the cash register anyways?

Yet, Jesus urges us to find that lost coin; to seek out the sheep that has strayed from the flock.

This is one of those readings where we can read into it ourselves and it is not clear whether we are a Pharisee or we are truly seeking out the sinner and welcoming them into the fold.

This is a story about who to associate with and it is clear what Jesus is urging us to do.

I would caution however the assumption that because the story is easy to understand, it is easy to follow its lessons.

It is not easy.

This is in contrast to last week where the message about family member hating family member was a truly difficult thing to digest.

This week’s story is easy to get, it’s just hard to implement.

We need to be understanding of the Pharisees to avoid that holier than thou self-serving attitude that I could never be a Pharisee.

I could absolutely fall into the role the Pharisee plays for I love my community just as the Pharisees loved their community and I want to keep it whole just as they did too.

And yet the hard part is reaching out to those who are not similar to us, those we don’t necessarily want to associate with.

The hard part is seeking out the sinner as Jesus did and bring them back, yes, back into a community built on love.

We are to offer those different from us a home.

A home into which they are born and from which they were never excluded from by God.

We are to welcome them into this place and into this faith and say, “Welcome home, again.”

I would contend that God has not lost one single sheep of God’s flock, it is just that those who wander have not always been sought after by a community duty bound to love them.

And we are to love and search for all sinners, tax collectors or otherwise.

We are to be wondered about, thought about, and always known for loving those hardest to love and giving a place to the placeless.

Yes, this story is about who to associate with and who we should supper with, and it is also a story about who we are as a people, sinful and exclusionary at times, and how it is Jesus who calls us away from those very human inclinations towards being children of God.

Friends, search for those people hardest to love and love them.

Seek out your neighbor as you would that shiny silver coin and invite them into this place.

And love always, no matter how imperfectly, always love.

Amen.