Hilton Head Island, SC – September 17, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 5:27-32; Luke 5:33-39
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “I have not come to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” – Luke 5:32
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
After the Civil War, there were a few communities in the United States that were known for the rigidity of their morality. Among them were the Oneida Colony in New York State, New Harmony, Indiana, and the Amana Colony in Iowa. These communities were founded by religious separatists who wanted to withdraw from the larger society into their own small, self-protected enclaves. Fundamentalist Methodists founded Asbury Park and Ocean Grove on the New Jersey Shore with the same ideas in mind. For decades, blue laws governed those seaside towns every day of the week (especially Ocean Grove), and not just on Sundays.
Probably none of us grew up in cities or towns that were anything like that. The oldest among us might recall religious-based stringencies from your youth, whereby you were not allowed to play cards or go to movies on Sundays. But those were family restrictions, not societal restrictions, and thus they were perceived to be all the more restrictive by you poor, innocent, long-suffering youth who had to abide by them. Children raised in families like that believed they were seriously thwarted compared to those in more liberal households.
The whole of Judea in the time of Jesus was like Ocean Grove. It wasn’t just here and there that isolated towns were bastions of purported moral sanctity; the entire Jewish culture of Palestine was like that in the first century of the Common Era. Everyone back then was perceived either to be a biblical-law-keeper or a biblical-law-breaker. And “law” did not mean civil law; it meant religious law, biblical law, the “proper” understanding of the Torah as interpreted by the religious a uthorities. Most people thought they were required to follow every one of the 600-plus laws of the Hebrew Bible. Those who did not attempt to do that were considered sinners. It wasn’t always that way in Jewish history, but that was how it was when Jesus lived in Judea.
Jesus was a deliberate biblical-law-breaker. He observed most laws of the Torah, but not all. Therefore he was considered a sinner by most contemporary religious leaders.
We don’t use the word “sinners” very much anymore. At least most Mainline Protestants and most Roman Catholics do not. Many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians still refer to certain people as sinners, but the rest of us are so acculturated into the larger society that we don’t use that terminology very often, even among ourselves. Whether that trend is a good thing is debatable. Nearly fifty years ago the renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book called Whatever Happened to Sin? It is a valid question, but it is not the theme of this sermon.
However, “sin” was big in Jesus’ time. The Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, and scribes talked about sin a lot. It was their religious “stock-in-trade.”
Probably most Jews in the first century thought that righteousness was determined by how faithfully anyone adhered to the religious laws: the Ten Commandments, the dietary laws, the laws regarding interactions with other people, the laws of ritual cleanliness, and so on. Those who did their best to follow the biblical laws were reckoned to be righteous, like the folks in Amana and Asbury Park. Those who knew they were not strictly adhering to the religious laws were thought by “the righteous” to be sinners.
There are two kinds of “righteous” people. The first kind are those who are righteous. They always strive to do the right, even though they know there are many times when they fail. The second kind of “righteous” people are those who pride themselves on being righteous, but who, in fact, often are not righteous, because they, like everyone else, commit sins. They may act properly in public, but in private they may cheat in business dealings, or they may lie or gossip. Either they refuse to recognize their failings or they truly believe they are always righteous. To use a phrase common among those kinds of religious people, they are not “right with God” precisely because they are convinced they always are right with God.
On the cover of today’s bulletin is a quote from the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. He said, “There are only two kinds of people: the righteous, who believe themselves sinners, and the rest, sinners, who believe themselves righteous.”
From the time Jesus began his public ministry in the region of the Galilee, he deliberately concentrated his efforts among those whom the religious leaders of his day considered to be sinners. He did that because he thought he could make some headway with them. Those who considered themselves righteous were put off by Jesus, because he did not avoid people who were widely assumed to be sinners. My mother had a two-line bit of doggerel she often repeated to prevent her sons from becoming judgmental about other people. In a snarky sing-song, she would say, “We don’t smoke, and we don’t chew/ And we don’t go with the boys” (or girls) “who do.”
The letter of James in the New Testament is thought to have been written by James, the brother of Jesus. One of its most famous verses is this: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (1:27).
Jesus would certainly agree with the first half of that statement, but he would strongly disagree with the second half. Jesus did not believe anyone could remain unspotted from the world. If James truly believed that was possible, I suspect Jesus and James had many theological disputes over their differences of opinion on that matter in their younger days.
Jesus believed the religion of his time had turned into an ossified list of Do’s and Don’t’s. He taught that true faith in God should liberate people, not enslave them. And so he purposefully focused on the people whom the religious authorities had frozen out of the community of faith.
In our scripture reading for today, it says, “The Pharisees and their scribes murmured against (Jesus’) disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?’” (Lk. 5:30) After all, Matthew, one of Jesus’ disciples, was a tax collector. Tax collectors were assumed to take more money from people than was warranted. They were the “corrupt government bureaucrats” of their day. Some of the rabbis refused to allow tax collectors into the synagogues. No wonder the Pharisees and scribes were aghast that Jesus spent any time with such apparent reprobates.
Jesus answered their complaint with a famous response. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Jesus did not wait for biblical-law-breaking sinners to come to him; instead he went to them first.
People who believe that religious morality is the essence of religion tend to be gloomy. They seldom accentuate the positive, and almost never eliminate the negative. Thus Jesus was confronted by the critique of the Pharisaical Gloomy Gusses, “Why is it that the followers of John the Baptist fast and offer prayers, but your followers happily eat and drink?” In response, Jesus said rhetorically, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?” Apparently Jesus was already anticipating that his type of ministry would end with his execution. Jesus proclaimed a joyful relationship with God, not a fearful one, predicated on punishment for sin.
And then Jesus told a short parable. “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it onto an old garment. If he does, it won’t match the old garment, and the new piece of material will tear the old piece. Nor does anyone put new wine into old wineskins.”
Religion, all religion, has a tendency to hold fast to the old, and to resist the new. Jesus represented an entirely new approach to the Judaism of his day, and it provoked great resistance among religious leaders. Jesus was mainly concerned about sin (singular), and he was much less concerned about sins (plural). It was not individual sins that separated people from God, Jesus implied. Rather it was sinfulness, the inability to refrain from sinning, and the refusal to acknowledge that fact. Most first-century Judean religious leaders focused primarily on sins, and did not address the reality of sin. Sin results in sins; sins do not result in sin. Jesus was interested in what is in our hearts and minds, not what is in our actions per se.
Hence Jesus believed there was no point in trying to direct his ministry to those who already perceived themselves to be righteous. Instead, he pointed his teachings toward those who had become convinced they were outsiders who would never make it into the religious establishment. Nearly all of the original followers of Jesus were the marginalized of Judea, people whom the religious establishment had concluded were beyond hope of redemption. “I come not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance,” said Jesus, thereby proclaiming that to him no one was beyond redemption.
Faulty religion attempts to keep certain people out. Faithful religion tries to bring everybody in. Faulty religion excludes; faithful religion includes. Jesus was not opposed to religion, far from it. But he favored the right kind of religion, the kind that welcomed the outcast and the forgotten and those who were publicly perceived to be sinful.
Make no mistake about it. Jesus was a radical. He did set not out to be a radical. That was not his fundamental intention at all. But his message was radical. It stood over against the widely-affirmed religious conventions of his time. He was a monkey wrench in the gears of a smoothly-operating religious system. He was a grain of sand in the oyster of a longstanding biblical tradition. The oyster was greatly irritated by the sand, but eventually, after many decades of resistance, a pearl of great price was formulated because of the oyster, and Christianity was the result.
However, Christianity, like its Jewish parent, also later developed the tendency of legalism, whereby sins were perceived to be the problem, not sin, not separation from God.
In the last half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, sin almost disappeared from the vocabulary of millions of American Christians of many types. Jesus didn’t say, “I come to call sinners to a new way of thinking.” Following the biblical tradition, he said, “I come to call sinners to repentance.” To repent literally means “to turn around.” It means to stop living for oneself and to begin living for God. It means to put new wine into new wineskins, to live with joy because of the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ rather than with the Bad News of Constant Reproach from God.
Pathological theology tries to make people fear God. Pathological theology drives people away; it doesn’t invite people in. Pathological theology turns religion into a system on how to be accepted by God rather than proclaiming that everyone is already accepted by God and what they need to do is to accept their acceptance.
Pathological theology quickly turns into theological pathology. It takes biblical truth and twists it into sickness. The word pathology essentially connotes sickness or physical or mental instability and abnormality. Anything that is pathological inevitably leads to sickness. Theological pathology looks at people who do wrong and tells them, “You are doing wrong!” Christian theology looks at people who are doing wrong and says to them, “We want to introduce you to a man who tells all of us how we can learn to do the right!”
There is so much sickness in any form of religion which only points to the obvious, namely, that we all make serious mistakes. However, it offers no way out of that morass, other than to say that we must keep trying until we always get it right. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
On our own, we’ll never get it right. With the Great Physician working within us through his teachings, and with the spirit of God who sent the Great Physician working within us, we can escape ourselves on behalf of God and others. God created us, not for ourselves, but to be in community with one another, and to live with and for one another.
There is an old Negro spiritual that, in its own way, tells the story of Luke 5:27-39. The simple words express deep aspirations from a period very different from our own, but they convey a timeless message.
The Gospel train’s a-comin’
I hear it just at hand
I hear the car wheel rumblin’
And rollin’ through the land
Get on board, little children
Get on board, little children
Get on board, little children
There’s room for plenty more
The fare is cheap and all can go
The rich and poor are there
No second class aboard this train
No difference in the fare
(Refrain)
“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” And there’s always room for plenty more.