The Myth of Diminishing Marginal Value of One With Increase

By

Reverend Litton Logan

September 16, 2007

Scriptures:

Luke 15:1--10 (NRSVA)

¹Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

³So he told them this parable: ⁴“Which one 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? ⁵When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. ⁶And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ ⁷Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

The Parable of the Lost Coin

⁸“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? ⁹When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ ¹⁰Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Sermon:

As Americans, we are truly blessed people. We take pride in the idea that in America the sky is the limit, no institutional caste system, no restrictions to individual accomplishments except one’s initiative and hard work. I dare say that few of us have ever experienced any serious social prejudices, social restrictions, or social or religious persecution. We have much to be thankful for as the people of this land.

However, having grown up in the Deep South, I experienced subtle and not so subtle degrees of social acceptance and status. People it appeared had a prescribed place in the grand scheme of things and were not to presume—get uppity--beyond their stations in life

Social distinctions within the white community were more subtle than those between the races. However, religion was a very important part of one’s social identity in my birth culture regardless of socio-economic status or race. Furthermore, within Christianity there were nuances of Christianity. There were those who were nominally Christian such as Jehovah Witnesses and Unitarians. There were the religions on the cultic fringe like the Mormons, Christian Scientist, Seventh Day Adventist, and the Snake Handling Baptist, etc. Then there were the undisciplined, uneducated, adolescent and emotional churches—the Pentecostals, The Assemblies of God--the Holy Rollers. Lastly, there were those popish churches—the Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Episcopalians—Catholic lights. The only true Christians were some varieties (our variety) of Baptists, the Methodists, and a few Presbyterians. Yet, if one asked the members of the Church of Christ, no one else stood a chance of heaven but them.

It mattered little to people in my church, that we lumped other Christians into categories or degrees of religious heresy and relegated them to hell. It never dawned on us that these people of wayward faith were just as convinced of their divine connection as we were of ours. As much as we spouted God’s love as being the key to salvation, it never made it past our doctrinal stances. We kept to our own kind; least the wiles of these other religions seduce us into apostasy with their half-truths. We avoided at all costs the temptations of rationality, science, history, and commonsense in our faith. Yes, we Southern Baptist were often branded as narrow-minded people of faith. Nevertheless, we at least had a socially recognized denomination.

This kind of thinking and talk sounds rather strange doesn’t it. However, such convoluted religious snobbery is the story behind the stories we’ve heard read to day. A major complaint against Jesus by the religious elite of his day was that he crossed the lines of social and religious propriety to touch the lives of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the excluded.

In the third century C.E., these passages from Luke prompted numerous paintings of Jesus with a lamb slung over his shoulders or cradled in his arms. These paintings portrayed Jesus as the Good Shepherd who goes out to find the “lost” and bring them into the fold of the Christian church. However, there are two interpretations of this idea of Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

One perspective sees Jesus as going out to seek and save the lost sheep of Judaism and bringing the disenfranchised Jews back into good standing in the covenant fold. Another viewpoint sees Jesus as going out into the entire world and bringing into the fold of God all those people whom the Jews had neglected in their divine mandate to bless all nations and peoples of the world.

Jesus’ first audiences were marginalized and disenfranchised Jews. They would have heard the parable of the Good Shepherd as Jesus being a powerful prophet or the hoped for Messiah-warrior-priest-king sent from God to rescue them from injustice and oppression and to restore the Jewish people to a place of world power. Luke’s Jewish-Christian audiences would have probably heard this also.

However, Luke’s gentile audiences may have heard and understood something entirely different and a little more subtle. It is a subtlety, which does away with the idea of the Jews being the superior people in the coming kingdom of God. In the kingdom of God, all people will be of equal value before God. There will be no first-class, second-class, or third-class citizens only people of God.

One of the major things that assured the success of Jesus’ message and his ministry was the contemptuous attitude of the religious elites of his day toward the common people of the land. The religious elite referred to the peasant classes as the ‘Am ‘ha-Arez. In more colloquial terms—ignoramuses. This term ‘Am ‘ha-Arez—people of the land--can be traced back to the time of the Babylonian Exile. In II Kings 24:14, we read that the Babylonians carried the ruling classes and the priestly classes into exile leaving …” the poorest sort of the people of the land.” During the exile, the remaining poor Jews inter-married and acculturated with non-Jewish people, as well as with Samaritans--a people who also claimed covenant relationship with God. When the Babylonian King, Cyrus, released the exiled Jews and they returned to Judea, the Jewish, religious leaders, especially Ezra and Nehemiah, made “separations from the peoples of the lands” [‘amme-ha-arazot], the apostate class, a requirement if a person was to be in good standing in the congregation (Ezra 9:1, Neh. 10:31).

Those who became known as the Pharisees shunned any contact with the ‘Am ha-Arez. This was because such people didn’t keep to the Levitical laws of purity and they neglected many important religious practices of the synagogue. The ‘Am ha-Arez, didn’t diligently apply themselves to the study of the Law and traditions of the rabbis. Traditions that were intended to help sanctify one’s life. Such contempt and avoidance bred bitter feelings on both sides.

I might add that harsh agrarian taxes and the laws of purity forced on the people by the ruling elite were often sources of injustice and people’s poverty. It was from the poor, the unlearned, the untaught, that Jesus drew his followers. Jesus stressed that the individual’s heartfelt love for God given witness in the simplicity of right relationships to one another was what truly endeared one to God.

Thus, Luke could be telling us in our scriptures today that all heaven rejoices when one of God’s elect is brought into a right understanding of their relationship to God as well as when someone who is not a Jew is brought into the kingdom of God under the new covenant in Christ.

We also heard read a parable of a woman who lost one of ten silver coins. This coin was worth about a day’s wages. We don’t know if the lost coin was simply a part of the woman’s savings or possibly one of the ten silver coins that formed a necklace or headdress that many married women wore.

Even though the woman had a surplus of coins, just as the prosperous shepherd had ninety-nine more sheep, she, like the prosperous owner of the sheep, nonetheless went all out to find something of value that was lost. She lit a lamp, swept out the reeds that frequently covered the dirt floors of the poor, and sifted through the sweepings until she found her lost coin. She, like the shepherd, also called her neighbors and asked them to come and celebrate the finding of her lost coin.

Silly, isn’t it, calling all the neighbors to celebrate the finding of a lost sheep or a lost coin. People loose and find things all the time. Sheep are lost all the time and are found, what is the big deal with the celebrations?

Among the poor, disenfranchise Jewish people of the land Jesus’ power to heal and cast out demons and the authority of his simple teachings brought a fresh breath of God’s acceptance to those on the fringes of Judaism.

Let me add that the poor people of the land would most likely not have understood Jesus as you and I understand him. The poor people of the land would probably have understood Jesus to be a powerful, divinely anointed Jewish prophet whose very heart and mind was of God’s heart and mind.

Among the gentiles, however, these two parables told them that no one is beyond God’s care and concern. To the gentiles, Jesus would eventually be understood as God mysteriously incarnate. In this understanding, God had personally come to save all human life—Jew and Gentile--from the consequences of sin in the person of Jesus and his teachings.

Regardless of whether one is Jew or Gentile, both of these parables have at their heart this truth—God’s values are not ours. I repeat--God’s values are not ours. God, however one chooses to understand it, took the initiative to come among humankind in Jesus of Nazareth and to make known the ultimate, life saving ways of God for all humankind. The religious leadership of Jesus’ day and Judaism in the main had failed miserably in their mission to be a blessing to all peoples of the earth. The Jewish religious elite according to the New Testament had excluded people from the kingdom of God based upon petty, human rules, regulations, and distortions of God’s covenant arrangement. Therefore, God, the divine self, in Jesus, in some profound and mysterious way took on the mission of recovering those Jews that had been lost to the covenant kingdom as well as calling into covenant blessing all those who had been excluded from God’s blessing by the ill-conceived Judaism of his day.

God didn’t send a lazy, faithless, arrogant hireling to save us from the worst of ourselves, the worst of others, or from a lack of spiritual relationship with the Holy One of the Universe. Scriptures tell us that in a unique and mysterious way God in Jesus came into the human condition as the true savior of the world.

Said simply, God does not buy into the myth of diminishing marginal value of one with increase. This myth says that the more things a person has the less a person values any single item. If one is a billionaire then a hundred dollars is not very important. A dollar is inconsequential. If a person has a hundred sheep, the loss of one is no big deal. If a person has ten coins and looses one there is still nine in reserve.

Although there are billions and billions of righteous and good people in the world, God does not overvalue them at the cost of undervaluing one person who stands outside of a relationship with God. Each person is important. God spares no effort or expense to seek out the lost or disenfranchised. Furthermore, when one person outside a relationship with God or a disenfranchised soul returns to the fold of God, God rejoices. Jesus tells us in these scriptures that God is fully involved in and affected by what we do, say, and become, even to the point that God rejoices, throws a party, and invites the neighbors--all of God’s people--to rejoice when even one person outside of relationship to God enters into holy communion with God.

Therefore, let us not stifle God’s party spirit and celebrations with our attitudes toward others who may understand God in Christ differently than we do. Let God take care of the theology, you and I need to take care of living out God’s love for all life on this planet and in the universe.