Every where you go these days you have tag lines and mission statements telling you what the company or store or service or even church you are going to is all aboutand how it diferentiates itself from other organisations just like it. Some of them are good and helpful but other leave me wondering...
I came across an interesting App this week. It was a mission
statement generator… you put in various keywords and it would turn them into a
mission statement… Here is a couple it randomly produced.
"It is our mission to continue to
authoritatively provide access to diverse services to stay relevant in
tomorrow's world." ..does that grab
you… does it make things clear?
“Our challenge is to continue to seamlessly engineer
quality meta-services as well as proactively synthesize best-of-breed
infrastructures.” Wow that’s inspiring!
I think it’s supposed to be humorous and lampoon the way
corporates and organisations articulate what their purpose is… Columnist Minda Zetlin said the app takes
verbs and nouns and adjectives and rearranges them into your typical mission
statements delightfully full of meaningless corporate-speak.” They don’t say a
lot but they use a lot of fancy words to say it… in that process real mission
and vision can get lost. But not with Jesus…
We’ve come to the end of Luke’s narrative of Jesus journey
to Jerusalem. It started way back in chapter 10 and it’s taken us most of a
year to work our way through this central third of the gospel. Jesus finishes
his ministry before he enters Jerusalem by giving what could be seen as his
mission statement… “the son of man has come to seek and save the lost”… This
does not come out of a corporate rebranding exercise, or an organisational restructuring
process, or trying to differentiate oneself from the competition, but it comes
straight out of two encounters with real people whose lives are transformed by
meeting Jesus. It does not come out of an academic exercise or commercial reality
or organisational necessity but from Jesus personifying the very heart of God
in showing God’s love to a blind beggar a short tax collector and through his
death and resurrection showing that same love to you and me; to us. ‘The son of
man has come to seek and save the lost.’
Right at the start of his ministry recorded in Luke 4 Jesus
stood and read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue of his home town…
‘the spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has Sent me to proclaim good news to the
poor, recovery of sight for the blind, release for the prisoner and freedom for
the captives and proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Jesus concluded by
saying this scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing. This was the
mission that God had sent Jesus to do.
Now as he draws near to that missions ending we see all that
incorporated in ‘the son of man has come to seek and save the lost’.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been looking at this last
section of Luke’s Jesus journey that focuses on how do you enter the kingdom of
God and how do you respond to Jesus. It starts and ends with a parable Jesus
tells to correct peoples thinking about the kingdom of God. The parable of the two men who went up to thetemple to pray the Pharisee who thought he was righteous and looked down on
others and a tax collector who knew who his need for God and asked for mercy,
Jesus said the tax collector had gone home justified that day; put right with
God. Then the parable about investing in the kingdom of God that we will finish
this series with next week. Then we had
two encounters that showed a negative response to Jesus. The disciples tryingto keep the children away from Jesus because they didn’t think they were
important, and the rich young ruler, who wanted to hold on to what he had and
wouldn’t trust totally in Jesus, so went away sad. Today we are looking at two
positive encounters that show how people respond to Jesus and are welcomed into
the kingdom of God. Sandwiched in the centre of these two sets of encounters
Jesus again talked of his death and resurrection. In the middle of these
encounters is the central way in which Jesus would seek and save the lost.
We are used to looking at the blind beggar and the short tax
collector separately, but today we are going to look at them together.
Firstly, both find themselves on the outside, and outcast.
The Blind beggar is separated from his community, because of his disability, we
see him sitting on the side of the road, he is outside Jericho. He is an
example of the poor and marginalised, without family to help him, with no hope
except for the alms of those passing by on their way to Jerusalem. There was
also a religious stigma attached to his disability, that somehow this maybe
God’s punishment for wrongdoing and sin. It is unspoken in this passage but in
other places in the gospel it rears its head again and again. The man born
blind in John 9… is a good example, the Pharisees write him off as being
steeped in sin at birth. But Jesus never sees people like that. Zacchaeus, our
short tax collector, is ostracised by his community, as a chief tax collector
he not only was a quisling a traitor working for the Romans, but also would
have been seen as undoubtable dishonest; making his money from unfair taxes,
and getting richer and richer by extracting commission from those who worked
under him. The fact that Zacchaeus couldn’t see Jesus in Jericho was not
because of his stature but his disliked status. The crowd should have parted
for this prominent man but they didn’t and wouldn’t.
We don’t like the term lost these days it implies that
people are on the wrong path, have wilfully wandered off and gone astray, have
no sense of direction or purpose for life.
for some that is an apt description. Many of us have found ourselves in
dark places in our lives with no sense of how to get out. But in the gospels
lost has more a sense of being missed, of missing. The parable of the lost
sheep and the lost coin, and the lost son, focus not on the lostness of the
coin, the sheep and the son but on the missing of the shepherd, widow and
father. It says they are of value and loved by God who then set out to go and
find and bring back, who looked longingly for the first glimpse of return to
run and embrace. When we used to go shopping as a family one of the kids would
keep and eye out for me. Because I could wander off on my own errand or be
distracted by something, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t get lost and
they could guide me back to the rest of the family. Elder care they called it. But
a good example of how lost is used here, as missed.
While the blind beggar and Zacchaeus are missing they are
not missed by Jesus. In both instances the crowd wants to keep them away from
Jesus. The beggars cry for help is meet with hushing and be quiting and Jesus
is too busy and too important for you. Zacchaeus is literally stone walled from
seeing Jesus and then he is written off with muttering and being labelled as
unworthy and a sinner. But they are not missed by Jesus. He hears the beggar’s
call over the crowd and he sees the tax collectors enthusiasm over the crowd,
literally over the crowd because he is up a tree… Jesus responds to their
desire to meet him and their need for his grace.
It shows us that Jesus way of looking at people is so
different than our own. In the eyes of the crowd both these men were not worthy of Jesus, but
in Jesus eyes he sees them in their poverty and in their humanity and
brokenness and in their desire for God’s touch and help and reaches out to
them. In our eyes we may not think we are worthy of Jesus, but he looks with
different eyes and see who we really are and can be in relationship with him.
We may look at those around us and make judgment calls on them, but we need to
see them with the eyes of Jesus as precious and missed by God if they were not
there. I went and listened to one of my heroes of the faith Shane Claiborne on
Monday, and you guys missed such an uplifting encouraging challenging evening,
one of the things Shane talked about was his sorrow that in a recent survey in
all fifty states of the Us. America Christians were known primarily for their
opposition to gay’s, for being self-righteous and stand offish and a whole lot
more negative things. He lamented that they were not known as Jesus wanted us
to be by our love. Do we see people through the eyes of Jesus. He also said
that in New Zealand that we are such a post Christian culture that people don’t
really have that preconception of Christians and we can forge a new
consciousness of what we are like to the community around us.
Jesus responds to both the blind beggar and the short tax
collector at their point of need. He asks the blind beggar what he wants and
the blind beggar responds in faith. I want to see. He is an example for us of
faith. It would have been easy to be pressurised by the crowd to ask for
something simpler, food or money, but from what he has hear of Jesus he knows
that he can ask for his sight. He calls Jesus the son of David, that is a
messianic understanding of Jesus. The blind beggar is the one who sees Jesus
for who he is and responds in faith. With Zacchaeus Jesus does not ask him what
he wants rather he invites himself back to Zacchaeus’ place for a meal. While it is Jesus who is receiving
hospitality, it is Jesus who is being hospitable to Zacchaeus, welcoming of him
as a son of Abraham. Zacchaeus we know also is ware of Jesus special place in
God’s plans, when we finally have Zacchaeus speak he addresses Jesus as Lord.
Jesus still meets people at their point of need and brings
transformation. For the blind man it was
sight and belonging again to God’s people who he had been estranged, for
Zacchaeus it was also welcome back and a chance to be reconciled. They are both
saved in the situations they find themselves. Jesus still meets us where we
will come to him with faith, at our points and places of need. Jesus love calls
us also to meet people at points of need in their lives with Gods love, be it
their need for healing, or friendship or inclusion and welcome. People caught
in their poverty and pain, both physical and spiritual, caught in life styles
which separate them from their community and God.
Finally, both men find their lives transformed by
encountering Jesus. There faith takes them from where they are and moves them
on. We are told that the blind beggar follows Jesus, as I was proof reading my
sermon I discovered It originally typed the blond beggar, he leaves where he is
and joins those with Jesus. His life changes because he know focuses on telling
people what Jesus has done for him and praising God. We see that people rejoice
and praise God when they hear and see what has happened. But he goes from being
a beggar to being a disciple.
Zacchaeus does not leave and follow Jesus, however his
response to Jesus is to spontaneously do what the rich young ruler had not been
prepared to do. Zacchaeus, gives half of his money to the poor, and uses the
other half to pay back four times what he owed to anyone whom he had stolen
from, which is the severest penalty for reimbursement in the Jewish law. He has
received the generous gift of grace from God in Jesus and know he responds with
generosity to others. It’s not the way he earns his salvation but rather how he
demonstrates that salvation. Zacchaeus stays where he is, that is a difficult place
for him, he has pressure from the romans to be a tax collector and he has
suspicion from his neighbours, but he stays where he is to live out his
transformed life, maybe he’ll have to down size his house, but he stays to
witness to God’s goodness in that place.
Jesus comes to seek and save the lost means that he comes to
bring transformation into our lives. That we no longer live under the bondage
of our brokenness, lostness and blindness but rather we live out the
transformed life he offers in knowing him. Be it in being prepared to follow
him to new places or where we are and where it is hard, but we are called there
to live out the kingdom of God. Telling of who Jesus is and what he has done
for us and living that out in seeing what we have as being given by God to be
used for his kingdom.
The Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost. To find
who is missing and bring them and us back to God to know God’s goodness and
grace and to live out of that. To seek and save the lost the blind beggar the
short tax collector and you and me. Is
not just a mission statement, an easily remembered tagline but the very heart
of God, the very motivation that led Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem and to
the cross and which is so wonderfully made full of abundant and eternal life in
the resurrection. It’s the Journey and mission that Jesus invites us on as
well. The bind beggar, the short tax collector and you and me; to seek and save
the lost.
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