Exodus 32:7-14 Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10
Lectionary Link
The definition of "sinner" can be conveniently redefined to mean one's opponents or the people who are not in one's regular crowd. Religiously, a sinner can be one who does not conform to the ritual requirements of one's own religious group even if such outsiders do not even care or if their life situation makes such ritual requirements difficult to fulfill.
How do we go from calling other people sinners, to calling ourselves sinners?
This is what happened in the life of Saul of Tarsus.
For him as a ritually adherent Jew, he had come to define the followers of Jesus as being so sinful, that they were worthy, like Jesus of death. He pursued persons like Stephen to their deaths, and he was on a mission to Damascus to hunt down such sinners.
On the road to Damascus Paul was to have his life turned around. His previous devout life of defining himself as a non-sinner while seeking the death of those "sinners" following Jesus, was interdicted with an an incredible interior experience which caused him to have a perhaps "psychotic" snap.
What was the prelude to the mental and spiritual snap of Saul of Tarsus? Saul, a Pharisee, believed himself to be a Torah originalist and when he discovered that he was not so "original" he snapped. The original Torah enjoins us not to kill, and yet here Saul of Tarsus was going on the road to imprison and kill followers of Jesus. He made himself into a religious police who decided that it was necessary to punish those religious persons who were outside his definition of orthodoxy.
Who was really outside of Judaic orthodoxy? Well, the Roman Gentiles who were followers of the Emperor cult and many other divinities in the Roman Pantheon. Was Saul trying to persecute them? No, he couldn't get away with that. But in the battles within Judaism, Saul was able to promote the deaths of those who followed the rabbinical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Saul of Tarsus was trying to kill religious family members over rabbinical interpretations of the identity of the Messiah.
I believe that this religious permission that Saul gave himself to commit murder in the name of the Torah, is what eventually made him vulnerable to a major snap; it made him vulnerable to be found by the heavenly Christ.
With his conversion, Saul went from the one pursuing Christian sinners, to become a Christian who considered himself to be the foremost sinner because he had persecuted the Christians, formerly regarded to be sinners.
Paul had been a religious person but he had been lost and did not realize it. Each of us in various ways and on a continuum of being found, have been lost. The state of "lostness" is a metaphor for the what we call sin.
Being lost is like being in our car and driving with GPS and the GPS service is lost and we don't know where to turn or go next.
Being lost is not being able to access our interior GPS, which is the image of God on our lives, and know the right directions for our lives.
What happens when we are lost? We don't know how to make decisions in the right way and in the right direction; we are disoriented and alienated from rightness.
Imagine ourselves as archers with blindfolds; we have bow and arrows but we do not know where to shoot our arrows.
The New Testament word for sin is an archery term which means missing the mark, missing the target. In our lostness, we not only do not hit the mark, we do not even know the direction of the approved target.
This is where we celebrate the life of Jesus as the one who claims us from the lost and found box of life.
Jesus takes our blinders off and shows us the map of where we are. Jesus with his example of living shows us the target virtues of our lives. And further, when we fail to reach the target virtues in perfect ways, we are forgiven, and we pick up our arrows and keep trying for the elusive perfection, elusive because we won't reach it, but perfect because Christ who is perfect allows us to borrow his perfection as a stand in for us not yet having arrived.
Let us rejoice today in having been lost, because lost things and people are valued by the owners who have lost them. God as our creator and owner values us to always be reaching out to us and finding us and then commissioning us to help Christ be a part of the search and rescue team of humanity to help other people come to be known as found and loved by Christ.
Let us rejoice today in having been found by Christ because we are regarded to be valued; let us go forth to value other people and do so by practicing love and justice as the best way to find the lost people of our world. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment