Outcasts and Grumblers: God Is After You

A sermon by Lanny Peters

Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church

September 12, 2004

Upon the occasion of the celebration of his fifteenth year as pastor

Luke 15: 1-10

Everywhere Jesus went he seemed to attract two extremes, social outcasts and self-righteous grumblers. So it is once again in this week’s story from the lectionary. All the sinners in town, including the hated tax collectors who colluded with the occupying Romans, were crowded near to listen to Jesus. The Pharisees, a lay group of devoutly religious people, and the scribes, the educated interpreters of the law, watched this and grumbled.

They grumbled because not only did Jesus welcome these sinners, he even sat down and ate with them. The Pharisees and scribes were experts in the purity laws, which distinguished between what was clean and unclean. Contact with unclean foods, unclean substances, and unclean persons made you unclean, ritually defiled before God. The word “sinners” would include those who did not observe these ritual laws as well as those who broke the moral laws. It was especially important that you ate only with others who observed ritual purity. But Jesus paid little or no attention to these important laws and revered traditions and would hang out and sit down and eat with anybody. So they grumbled, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” which by definition made him unclean and a sinner as well. 

As was his usual style, Jesus chose not to argue with his critics but instead told parables so that all could listen, outcasts and grumblers alike. “Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Jesus may have paused a moment, but both the outcasts and grumblers would not have needed long to answer that question. The answer was, nobody! Or at least nobody in their right mind would leave 99 sheep alone in the wilderness where they could be stolen or attacked by wild animals. Nope, you would have to stay put and protect 99 per cent of your investment and hope that the lost sheep makes its way home or at least finds a place to hide until someone comes along to help watch your flock while you go after it.

But the character in the parable is not just anyone. He leaves the rest of the sheep to fend by themselves while he goes looking for the one lost sheep. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and throws a party. “Come rejoice with me, for I have found the one sheep that was lost.” A big party to welcome home a dumb sheep? Nobody would act like that. Except--the God that Jesus knows. “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance.” This is not a story about the way humans act; it is a story about the way God acts. The party is taking place in heaven.

Just in case they missed the point, Jesus tries again. “Or which of you women, when you have lost a silver dollar, will move all of your furniture out of the house, rip up the carpet, move all the heavy appliances out in the yard, and when you have found your lost coin, will run out and shout to the neighbors, ‘You’re all invited to a party like you have never seen. I found my silver dollar.’ ”         (William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Vol. 32, No. , p. 47, altered.)

“Who would do that,” Jesus asks, and the outcasts and grumblers look at each other and all think, nobody! At least no one in her right mind would. It would cost more to throw such a party than the found coin was worth to begin with. Yet it is just like this with God, Jesus says, for “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Jesus is still not through. Following the stories we heard read in Luke, Jesus goes on to tell the story of two brothers, a prodigal son and his elder brother. Like the previous two parables, this one concludes with a big party thrown by their father for the lost son who has come home. As that parable closes, the elder son is grumbling outside the house while the father invites him to come on in and join the party.

Each of these parables indicates that heaven goes wild over just one lost soul that finds his or her way to God. But they are not really about sinners--lost, repentant or self-righteous. They are about the divine mercy that characterizes God. As William Willimon says, “Here is a God who is not a dispassionate, cool, disinterested bureaucrat. (This God) is not only gracious, but also resourceful, who not only loves but also seeks, searches, finds, and saves the beloved.” Pulpit Resource, p. 46

Perhaps no modern Christian writer illustrates this again and again in creative ways than Flannery O’Connor. Her short story “Parker’s Back” is a fine example. The sinner in that story named Parker is a real scoundrel that despite his tough exterior comes to realize that God is searching for him. His wife Sarah Ruth is as fine a depiction of a modern day Pharisee, as you could want. Like Jesus’ parables, the story is told with zest and humor, leaving lots of room to find your self in it. I highly recommend it.

Another Flannery O’Connor classic is “Revelation” with one of my favorite characters in all of literature, Ruby Turpin.

She is one fine Christian lady who makes a practice of sizing everyone else up until a girl in a doctor’s office unexplainably hurls a book on Human Development at her and then attacks her and calls her “a warthog from Hell.” Ruby, along with everyone else around her, tries to explain it away as just some crazed act of a lunatic girl, but Ruby can’t let go of it. Here’s the scene later that day at home with her husband Claude:

Neither of them felt like eating so they put on their house clothes and lowered the shade in the bedroom and lay down, Claud with his leg on a pillow and herself with a damp washcloth over her eye. The instant she was flat on her back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head. She moaned, a low quiet moan.

"I am not," she said tearfully, "a wart hog. From hell." But the denial had no force. The girl's eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.

She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell into her hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring. She wanted to tell him what the girl had said. At the same time, she did not wish to put the image of herself as a wart hog from hell into his mind.

She sends Claude to take the hired help home and goes to their pigpen. Looking out at the grunting, dirty pigs, she gets even angrier. She takes the water hose and starts washing them off. 

Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood on the side of the pen, holding the hose and pointing the stream of water at the hind quarters of any shoat that looked as if it might try to lie down. When he had had time to get over the hill, she turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She turned back again and seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose and she drew in her breath.

"What do you send me a message like that for?" she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. "How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?" Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.

"Why me?" she rumbled. "It's no trash around here, black or white, that I haven't given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church."

She appeared to be the right size woman to command the arena before her. "How am I a hog?" she demanded. "Exactly how am I like them?" and she jabbed the stream of water at the shoats. "There was plenty of trash there. It didn't have to be me.”

In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak of highway had turned lavender. She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. "Go on," she yelled, "call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!"

A garbled echo returned to her.

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, "Who do you think you are?"

The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a trans-parent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.

In Flannery O’Connor’s stories and Jesus’ parables, God is seeking the outcast and the Pharisee. The outcasts come willingly to Jesus because they experience his unconditional love for them. The Pharisees do not even know they are lost. Like Ruby Turpin, they look with judgment upon Jesus, “Who do you think you are?” accepting these people and even eating with them!

The ending of the story is worth a read as Ruby’s “revelation” is a glimpse of Claud and her marching along with all sorts of outcasts toward the kingdom of God. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little bit of everything and the God-given right to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could sense by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

Flannery understood what Jesus saw; that our very virtues can be turned into a source of judgmental self-righteousness that blinds us to our own humanity and our connection to others. 

So which ones are we in the parable, the outcasts or the grumblers? Why, we are both.

Yesterday, a dozen or so of us from Oakhurst were at the 9/11 commemorative worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was an incredible tapestry of scriptures and prayers by Muslims, Jews, Buddhists Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians. The preacher, Joanna Adams, called us to keep hope alive, the kind demonstrated by Sojourner Truth when she said, “Hope-- in spite of all the evidence.” And then go about changing the evidence. Adams also challenged us to not be pulled into the current political climate in such a way that we demonize those with whom we disagree. She told the story of another memorial service held at Ebenezer in 1999 after stock trader Mark Barton shot and killed his wife and kids and nine other people at two brokerage firms in Atlanta. Bishop Tutu was invited to speak at the service.

At one point, a man in the audience stood up and angrily asked him, “How are we going to get rid of guns and the NRA?” Bishop Tutu said gently, “I do not know, but we must not forget that every member of the NRA is a beloved child of God.”

Boy, I hate to hear that. I want to yell out with Ruby Turpin, “God, who do you think you are?” Next thing you’ll be loving fundamentalists. 

Alan Culpepper says, “The question these parables raise is not whether one will repent but whether or not we will join the party when God celebrates the return of one who is not like us and unworthy of God’s mercy by our standards…. The parables also suggest one of the deep truths about God’s mercy; only those who celebrate God’s grace to others can receive it themselves. Grace is the rule in God’s household. God is giving a party, and you are invited. Now will you come or not?”  (Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XV, No. 5 page 58.)

Now having heard that warning from Jesus to any of us who try to be in charge of the guest list for God’s party, I also want to celebrate the grace of God that so many of us have experienced in this wonderful party that we call Oakhurst Baptist Church.

We are as capable of being self-righteous as the best of them, and yet we also have experienced God’s deep grace. This morning we started a new membership class. This is my 31^st membership class and every time I am amazed at the stories of how people found their way here, or sometimes found their way back here.

It has been my experience that many of you, probably a large majority, were rejected by some church. Frank Maddox, who read the scripture today, grew up in Madison, Georgia, in a church where his father was a deacon and his mother a mainstay. (On the same highway where Flannery O’Connor lived a couple of towns down.) He loved the church, but when he came to admit to himself that he was a gay man, he left the church because he assumed there would never be a place for him. Frank is a deeply spiritual person, and without a community to support this spiritual journey, there was a void. Into that void came alcoholism. But according to Jesus, when we get lost on our journey, God leaves the safety of heaven itself and comes looking for us. Depending on just how lost we are it can take God a good while of searching. But God does not give up. No one was more surprised and happier when Frank found a church than his momma. One of my favorite images is that of her and Frank together making new banners to be used during Advent at Oakhurst Baptist Church, where her son was a deacon. Tonight the deacons will gather for a meal at Frank’s home, which is always a treat because of his gracious hospitality and lovely home. I could tell a hundred other stories of folks gay and straight, young and old, black and white, rich and poor that have found their way here after not being welcomed somewhere else.

One of the great joys of being a pastor here is being a doorkeeper in this house of God. When someone comes and tells me their story about being lost on their spiritual journey, I can say with joy, ‘Welcome home.”

Yes, this is one incredible party that God has thrown here at Oakhurst Baptist Church. I am still as surprised as any of you that I was invited. It was surely only by the grace of God. It has been such a great party that I have been here fifteen years and still can’t leave. And amazingly, I haven’t gotten bounced out either.

Thanks to each of you and thanks be to God for a wonderful, grace-filled fifteen years.