There are a lot of reasons and causes for celebrating in the texts for today.
The psalm ends exuberantly with a call to celebrate: “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, / and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.”
In the reading from Joshua, the wilderness diet of manna ends, and the people start to eat the produce of the land. The Epistle speaks about desptie of what we have done that we made right — reconciled —with God and one another that we become God’s righteousness. The Psalm begins “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven” with Luke’s parable of the son who once was lost but then is found.
But we have to set the context of what triggers Jesus to tell the story in the gospel lesson: Grumbling! The crowd around Jesus—the “in” crowd, that is—was grumbling. Grumbling because Jesus welcomed those who were of less than respectable status namely the likes of tax collectors and sinners.
Who are those who cause us to grumble? Whose seemingly undeserved handout, less-than-desirable traits, and unearned status change filled our hearts with resentment and pain this week?
Jesus speaks to us because we often see life as a game with winners and losers, points and playbooks, offense and defense. And how are our hearts and minds open to hear the humbling good news? God’s love is freely shared with all: we cannot earn it, we cannot deserve it. When we attend worship, we do so out of thanksgiving and praise for God’s glory, hunger, and thirst for God’s word and sacrament. We do not attend worship to achieve some status within God’s kingdom. When we help a neighbor, share with a stranger, assist the afflicted, or acknowledge the overlooked we do so because Christ first did the same for us. We respond to God’s grace and mercy with our feeble attempts to emulate God’s perfect love. It is challenging, exhausting, never-ending, perspective-altering, radically humbling, and freeing work. It’s work that is impossible to do without the inspiration of Jesus, the nourishment of wine and bread, and the strength of the saints who have gone before us and with whom we walk Christ’s path today.
We can see ourselves and our neighbors in everyone in the text. So many of us know intimately the feeling of being lost. Lost like all of these characters. We have been lost in giving everything away, in being extravagant in our love and our trust only to face the disappointment of someone we love squandering all we have given away in dissolute living. Or we have woken up one day only to find ourselves living among the pigs, so far gone that we don’t know what happened to the grand lives we had planned, filled with shame that we are beyond help, beyond love, beyond repair. And, so many of us have all been standing outside the door, watching the feast and celebration wondering if there really was a place for us, or if the party is always going to be about someone else. We have seen joy somewhere off in the distance but it has felt like the wrong time, not right given the circumstances, not deserved. Coming into joy has been lost to us.
We know what is like to see ourselves and each other lost amid this world, and, yet when we are quiet, we also so often know what it means to be found and captured by grace and mercy. It can quickly become overwhelming by how much is lost in this world, how many people walk around like the living dead, and how vulnerable and helpless many of us are. Overwhelmed by how often we are so sure that we have gotten where we are all on our own, and the idea of helping one another, of trying to offer a hand to someone in need seems like it somehow throws off the balance of the world, it is just too unfair. Or overwhelmed that the father keeps on running down the road, keeps on sharing his inheritance, keeps on giving us the means to try it all on our own, knowing full well that the deepest life is always at home, in a relationship with him and with one another.
When we open our eyes to see God’s word living among us, it makes it even harder to remember the beginning of this story. Because our text for today begins as the answer to a question. Jesus is welcoming and eating with some sinners, and so the gathered crowd of religious leaders starts to grumble. And so he tells them three parables- one about a lost sheep, that the shepherd cares so deeply for he is willing to leave all the other 99 sheep out in the pasture to find this one because the 99 are incomplete if one is missing. Then he tells the parable of a lost coin, one woman’s tiny coin when she already has nine others, a little coin that she turns her entire household upside down to find. And finally, he tells this story, our parable for today, about three people, and I think more than just one brother who is lost.
And, I wonder, if Jesus sat among us now, what other stories he might tell. About the young person who is facing the possibility of a conviction for murder how to relate with the sibling who keeps medicating their mental pain with meth or about the grandparent who keeps losing names, faces, and more memories. But it doesn’t end with just the lostness of this life, in our biblical parables or the world around us.
Each one of these stories ends with a celebration, a shepherd who rejoices when he finds his sheep, a woman who throws a party for all her neighbors when she shakes out the cushions and finds her coin, a father who kills the fatted calf, invites his hired hands and his friends to celebrate because life has come out of death, what was lost has been found.
We don’t know how this story ends, the best parables never tell us. We don’t know if that older brother waits outside with a scowl on his face and envy in his heart. We don’t know if that younger son becomes a different man because he has been wrapped in this kind of lavish love. I don’t know what will happen at the trial or a family who has lost a son. I don’t know if they will be surprised when even if there is grief, even if there is shame, there is also the possibility that they will know laughter again. But I do know that God is a God who searches diligently for us, who will find us no matter how far away we have gone, who will find us even when we believe all we are is dead so that we might have life. Someone reminded me this past week that from the cross, Jesus doesn’t say to the thief, “You are going to be forgiven or see you at dinner but rather, you will be with me in paradise.” God keeps on throwing parties, keeps on running down the road even when we are far off and keeps on inviting us home because there is always room, there is always a place, and there is always abundant grace and mercy to be shared. We had to celebrate, he says, because the one who once was dead is alive, the one who was lost, has been found. Amen, and thanks be to God.
