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Luke 15:3-7; Romans 5:6-10

Typically, the fourth Advent candle celebrates God’s healing love. Perhaps our focus should be less on the baby in the manger and more upon this child’s 33 years of life and the meaning it has given to so many of us since his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans.

We know some of how Jesus lived during his three-year ministry, how he died as a protest against the corrupt religious and political leadership, how he reminded us to love each other and our enemies, and how he invited us to accept the reconciling and right relationship- building love of God. Knowing these things, it would be good for us to examine how well we have used these gifts as a people and as individuals.

Today we explore Jesus’ story about love in action. Then we’ll examine a Pauline teaching of the unlikely thing Jesus did to open the way for God’s healing miracle for all who have felt out of place. Both passages call us to improve community life through extravagant love along with its vulnerability.

A lost sheep

Our first text is one of three stories about something lost, then found. Luke informs us that Jesus told this story in response to an implied criticism of his association and table fellowship with sinners.

In the story, the herder of one hundred sheep loses track of one. Jesus, in effect, asked his listeners, “Which one of you wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness to track down the one lost?”

Likely the immediate answer would have been, “Not me!” The risk of abandoning the herd to the wilderness would have been great, for the wilderness was wild!

Literally, the story sounds impractical, but it is metaphorically sound if we think of the “herd” as a faith community. The herd can look after its remaining members even if the shepherd is temporarily unavailable. Besides, we needn’t worry. The lost was found. The shepherd threw a party.

Luke, not wanting us to miss the point, has Jesus make it clear: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (v. 7). Part of the purpose for Jesus’ presence in the world was his mission of authentic hope through redemptive love to replace culture’s false hope of redemptive violence.

As Luke reports, Jesus tells two more stories—one about a coin and one about a son being lost. In his telling, neither the sheep nor the coin was responsible for its state of being lost. However, the son was complicit in his state of disorientation. This trilogy of parables underscores that being lost or feeling lost has many contributing causes, but love finds a way back “home.”

Sound simplistic? Paul helps us understand just how complicated this miracle is.

What, when, and how

In his letter to the Roman congregation(s), Paul ventures to explain how God invites and offers help to get us “home.” Civil rights worker Clarence Jordan translates Romans 5:6 as, “While we were real sick, in the nick of time Christ died for people who couldn’t care less for a loving God.” Most translators wrestle with the complex process. Words seldom have simple correlation from one language to another; we have to make inadequate choices.

Where the NRSVue translates the Greek word as “weak,” Jordan uses “real sick.” Both are accurate as it describes a hopeless condition. Most of us can identify with feeling impotent to solve a family problem, or exhausted in illness, or feeling hopeless. The Greek tense behind “were” specifically references an ongoing action: “while we were being in a hopeless condition.”

As I read this, I hear Paul including himself with the Roman readers identifying with trying to cope in difficult times; those very moments may be when God uses the historical Jesus’ death as an opportunity for healing.

At the end of that sentence, the NRSVue uses the adjective “ungodly,” which conveys one aspect of Paul’s Greek word but misses other aspects, such as an attitude of disrespect, lacking in empathy, irreverent, impious, or ignoring the sustaining presence of a creatively loving God. The term “ungodly” is correct but inadequate as it can easily be dismissed as “not us,” yet this sentence is intended to be
about us. Perhaps verse 6 should read, “Christ suffered death for disrespectful folk (like us).”

However it is translated, Paul sets the stage for us to understand that God continues to enfold us and invites us
ever closer to our spiritual home. Whether we recognize God or not, we are presented with new choices, one of which is always becoming more connected to both our Creator and creation. The living Christ is the source of our energy and the magnet of love which guides and empowers us.

In verses 7 and 8, Paul clarifies how unlikely it is that someone would go to their death for the sake of others. He makes the point that this act of Christ was to demonstrate the love of God. For Paul, Jesus’ acts were more than the exclusive act of a person; his actions were a collaborative accomplishment between Jesus and God. The creeds from the 4th and 5th centuries wrestle with what that collaboration was and seem to settle on the notion that Jesus was “fully God and fully human.” What do you think about this “collaboration” that led to Jesus’ acceptance of death as making a way for people like us where there was no way?

In verse 8, Paul uses future tense to talk about being “saved,” and again we must pause to consider his meaning. The Greek word translated “saved” has a cluster of meanings: to be healed, rescued, delivered, preserved from harm. These meanings can be applied to things physical, emotional, or spiritual. In verse 9, it is applied to God’s wrath, while in verse 10 it seems to be applied to something more.

If Paul means that God’s wrath is the natural consequence of our disrespect, lack of empathy, irreverence, impiety, or otherwise ignoring God, then the power of salvation begins now as we surrender to the love of God, which is their opposite. As we demonstrate the love of God
in our congregation, we are examples to one another of God’s transforming love, not only in us but for and in each other.

The language of verses 8-10 summarizes the steps of God’s accomplishment of salvation through the fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Verses 8-9 state that “while we still were sinners Christ died for us” [past] and “since we have now been justified by his blood” [present] and we will “be saved through him from the wrath of God” [future]. The same exercise can be done with Romans 5:10 to identify
the past, present, and future of our salvation through Jesus. Given the present, past, and future language, we come to realize this is not one and done, but a process, for which we need each other: the body of Christ, “his life” (v. 10).

What is my takeaway?

Paul has laid out an important aspect of the good news about God’s work through Jesus: humans easily become lost, sometimes through no fault of our own. Sometimes we are unwittingly complicit in getting lost through a lack of respect, empathy, and caring for our own spirituality; we allow lostness to bloom its deadly blossom in our lives.

But all is not as lost as it may feel; God has a plan for that.