Would you let your kids go to a
Youth Group run by Jesus?
A sermon on Luke chapter 15

One day when many tax collectors and other outcasts came to listen to Jesus, the Pharisees and teachers of the Law started grumbling, "This man welcomes outcasts and even eats with them!"

So Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them---what do you do? You leave the other ninety-nine sheep in the pasture and go looking for the one that got lost until you find it. When you find it, you are so happy that you put it on your shoulders and carry it back home. Then you call your friends and neighbors together and say to them, 'I am so happy I found my lost sheep. Let us celebrate!' In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine respectable people who do not need to repent.

"Or suppose a woman who has ten silver coins loses one of them, what does she do? She lights a lamp, sweeps her house, and looks carefully everywhere until she finds it. When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together, and says, 'I am so happy I found the coin I lost. Let us celebrate!' In the same way, I tell you, the angels of God rejoice over one sinner who repents."

Jesus went on to say, "There was once a man who had two sons. The younger one said to him, 'Father, give me my share of the property now.' So the man divided his property between his two sons. After a few days the younger son sold his part of the property and left home with the money. He went to a country far away, where he wasted his money in reckless living. He spent everything he had. Then a severe famine spread over that country, and he was left without a thing.

So he went to work for one of the citizens of that country, who sent him out to his farm to take care of the pigs. He wished he could fill himself with the bean pods the pigs ate, but no one gave him anything to eat. At last he came to his senses and said, 'All my father's hired workers have more than they can eat, and here I am about to starve! I will get up and go to my father and say, "Father, I have sinned against God and against you. I am no longer fit to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired workers." ' So he got up and started back to his father.

"He was still a long way from home when his father saw him; his heart was filled with pity, and he ran, threw his arms around his son, and kissed him. 'Father,' the son said, 'I have sinned against God and against you. I am no longer fit to be called your son.' But the father called to his servants. 'Hurry!' he said. 'Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet. Then go and get the prize calf and kill it, and let us celebrate with a feast! For this son of mine was dead, but now he is alive; he was lost, but now he has been found.'

We're in Luke chapter 15, and Jesus appears to be partying again!

Jesus was fond of saying that the Kingdom of God is like a party, and he seemed keen to illustrate that with his lifestyle, wherein he was a frequent guest at dinner parties and a not too infrequent host of spontaneous soirees.

And I don't think that Jesus' religious peers would have been too concerned about all that, austere though they may have been, had it not been for the type of persons He regularly invited to join Him at these parties."This man welcomes outcasts and even eats with them!" (read 'parties' with them)

I remember well, back at my home church in Surry Hills, we decided one Easter to put on a party for the homeless in our area. I used to run a youth group back there in the early 80's - at the Chinese Presbyterian Church of Surry Hills, and we decided to invite all the homeless persons from the local shelters to dinner at the church.

We already had a long-term working relationship with the local Sydney City Mission homes and other detox centres in the area. The only problem was that most of us were too young to drive, and a lot of the homeless persons were not very mobile, but the local Missionbeat drivers helped out by bussing everybody who couldn't walk up to the church hall, and since half the kids in the youth group had parents who owned Chinese restaurants, we were able to put on a tremendous smorgasbord, followed by a movie ('Chariots of Fire', I think it was).

That night was probably the best memory I have of my many years in the Chinese Presbyterian Church. The only problem was that, after it was all over, the elders of the church forbade us from ever repeating the performance, the explicit reason given was that one of the girls had been propositioned by one of the old men!

At the time I thought, 'what a bunch of wankers!' But now I too am a parent, and I can better understand why a parent might not be overjoyed at the thought of his daughter's youth group being overtaken by ageing alcoholic men.

I wonder if we would send our kids along to a youth group that Jesus was running?

Of course we might assume that the no-hopers who hung around Jesus, once they were in His company, all behaved like respectable middle-class citizens. Frankly, I doubt it.

I imagine that, given the types of persons that huddled around Jesus, there would have, at the very least, been a fair bit of flirting going on at those gatherings. Maybe the occasional fight would break out? Certainly there would have been some pretty colourful language flying around at those parties, as you get the impression that the grog flowed pretty freely!

Don't forget that, unlike most of us clerical types who try to represent Jesus to the world, Jesus Himself had a reputation for being glutton and a drunkard! I imagine that He got that reputation from the company He kept. And so the upright grumble, saying, "This man welcomes outcasts and even eats with them!"

And Jesus hears them grumbling, and He tells them a story - three stories in fact - about three parties, and each one is framed as a question.

"Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, what do you do?"

Jesus clearly intends this to be a rhetorical question, as He answers it for us - "You leave the other ninety-nine sheep in the pasture and go looking for the one that got lost until you find it."

"When you find it", He continues, "you are so happy that you put it on your shoulders and carry it back home. Then you call your friends and neighbours together and say to them, 'I am so happy I found my lost sheep. Let us celebrate!'"

And so you kill the fatted calf (or the fatted sheep perhaps in this case) and have a party, which would sort of destroy the point of finding it, but it's a pretty bizarre story to being with!

What sort of shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred and then responds by leaving the ninety-nine to fend for themselves while he goes off and pours all his time and energy into looking for the one that was lost? What type of shepherd does that? A rather eccentric shepherd, to say the least!

Now I don't pretend to know a lot about shepherding. Indeed, I'm not far ahead of Pink when it comes to understanding the wool trade. Even so, I think I do know something about running a business and I know that if you have a hundred assets of any kind and lose one, you don't sacrifice the ninety-nine in order to get the one back! That's just common sense - something the shepherd in this story doesn't seem to have a lot of!

"Or suppose a woman who has ten silver coins loses one of them - what does she do? She lights a lamp, sweeps her house, and looks carefully everywhere until she finds it. When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbours together, and says to them, 'I am so happy I found the coin I lost. Let us celebrate!"

What sort of woman behaves like that? A woman with a mental illness, surely!

It has been suggested that these ten coins were actually a dowry of some kind and hence worth a fortune, but there's nothing really in this short yarn to suggest that. No, this woman is (to use Susan's term) very much on the spectrum! She loses one lousy coin. She turns her life, and certainly her home, upside-down - pulling up floorboards, furniture in the front yard, etc - looking for it. And when she finds it, she holds a party, which is bound her cost her more than what the coin was worth!

Or what father among you, having a son who got hold of his inheritance, and then took off with it and wasted it all, wouldn't stand out at the front gate each day, waiting for his boy to come home? That's a rather abbreviated version of the last story, but I think I've captured the essence of it nonetheless.

What sort of father continues to hold out hope for his son and then takes him back, even though he has disrespected him, hurt him, abandoned him and betrayed him?

What sort of father does that? A stupid father, of course! A father who cares more about his weak and pathetic offspring than he does about his own good name and reputation! A father who is less concerned with justice than he is with picking up weaklings! A father whose sentimental affection for his wayward child is so all-consuming that he seems to be incapable of just giving thanks for his remaining good children and getting on with life. In other words ... any father, any mother, anyone who loves their children! For love makes us do stupid things.

It's interesting, isn't it, that when you work your way through the stories, you can see a sort of progressive degeneration. We start with the eccentric shepherd, followed by the neurotic-obsessive woman, followed by the insane father, but by the time we get to the father, the insanity is starting to make sense (if you know what I mean) because it is an insanity that is based on love, and love makes us do crazy things!

We love our children. All of us who are parents would, I think, die a thousand times over to save our children from suffering. That doesn't make a lot of sense, but love doesn't always make sense, especially when it comes to our own children.

And this is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to these no-hopers that Jesus likes to hang around with. The question is whether we think of these people as somebody else's problems, or as members of our own family!

Whenever I'm at a gathering with my fellow clerics, people ask me about our Youth Centre. The first question normally is, "so are these kids you're providing for mainly kids from your church?" And the answer is "no". The second question is, "well, do you see a lot of those kids come into the church through your work?", to which the answer again is "no". At some point the question comes, "so why do you bother?"

It's a fair question I suppose. Why would you squander your resources on people who are never likely to repay you or even thank you.

Of course, sometimes I try to defend our work by pointing to our success stories - people we've worked with who have got off the needle and become law-abiding citizens, but the truth is that we haven't had all that many success stories, and in my opinion, we mustn't let the significance of our work be determined by the number of success stories we've had either.

Somebody once said to me that priests and social workers are just glorified prostitutes. They'll give themselves body and soul to help someone, but they charge a price, and the price they charge is 'change'. No change, no love!

We can't demand change, and I don't think Jesus always saw change. Lots of people Jesus touched did change, but do we really think that every sex-worker that came to Jesus ended up getting a job in a bank? I don't think so.

The Kingdom of God is like a party! And I figure that there are three kinds of people you can invite to a party:

The people who deserve to be there (because they are just great people)
People who have earned their right to be there (because you owe them)
The type of people Jesus invited to His parties: missing sheep, lost coins, wayward sons
Do all the sheep get found? Do all the coins turns turn up? Do all the wayward children return home? We know they don't, and we can't demand it and we can't expect it. But when it does happen, "I tell you", says Jesus, "there is more joy in heaven over that one wayward child who finds her way back home than there is over all the rest of us well-behaved children who never left!"