The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

September 16, 2007

A Question of Value

Luke 15:1-10

 

Perhaps the most comforting image in the Bible is that of the lost little lamb on the shoulder of the gentle Good Shepherd.  Barbara Brown Taylor has written a beautiful sermon on this text that calls this fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel "the gospel within the gospel.” 

 

These parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, which are followed by the Prodigal Son story, are "all good news" -- one might say, "all good news, all of the time."  But who is this good news for? 

 

 In the book that our Readers & Seekers groups will begin discussing this week, The God of Jesus, Stephen J. Patterson draws on the recent work of sociologists to shed a different light on these parables than that in which I had seen them before.  He begins with information I already knew about how the society in which Jesus lived was organized.  We can picture the shape of society in the Roman Empire as an oil can, with the emperor at the very tip of the spout.  The empire was his to do with as he pleased, his own property whose wealth and produce belonged to him and to those to whom he delegated its benefits and privileges.  The emperor controlled the means to life.

Below the emperor in this oil can image was a very slender neck of the privileged few – the royal household, religious and military officials, local client kings, significant landholders, large-scale merchants.  It was a quid pro quo system in which these few benefited directly from the emperor and, in return, supported his claim to power. 

 

As one reaches the broader part of the oil can funnel, one might find a few more merchants and traders, a small middle class who supported those above them.  But most people would have fit into the large open end of the funnel, the vast majority of persons who lived as peasants, that is, at a daily subsistence level. 

 

As much as 80% of the population lived like this, on the very margins of existence.  As long as they had something to contribute to those above them, produce or livestock to sell, they could eke out a living. 

 

This system is what John Dominic Crossan calls a “brokered Empire,” in which the means to life are carefully brokered from the top down.  But in such a system, there are always a few who don’t have anything to offer those above them.  Those who, for one reason or another, have no land to cultivate have no quid to offer for quo.  They make up a class even below that of peasant – they are the expendables. 

 

They have fallen through the cracks at the bottom of society, and are expendable because they have nothing to offer the culture that might be considered of value.  These are the homeless and the beggars.  These are people who do the jobs no one else will do, when they can get the work.  They sell themselves as agricultural day laborers, receiving enough pay to eat for a day when they are fortunate enough to get a full day’s work, but that is all.  Those who can’t work that way may sell themselves as tax collectors and prostitutes.  It’s that or beg or starve. 

 

All of this I knew, standard knowledge from any sociology course.  What Patterson’s book says that was new to me is about Jesus’ place in this hierarchical social pyramid. 

 

We have always heard that Jesus’ father was a carpenter, and it’s assumed in the tradition that Jesus himself also followed that trade.   From our industrial culture’s social perspective, we think of artisans like carpenters as being above the peasant class, part of the middle class.  But in a pre-industrial, agrarian society, land is the basic economic engine.  Peasants hold land and can therefore participate in the economy.  The artisan class is made up of those who have been dispossessed of their land.  A trade is all that stands between them and starvation, since they can’t raise food. 

 

So if Jesus was in fact a carpenter, he would have ranked below the peasant class, not above it.  He would have occupied that tenuous narrow band of subsistence, hovering just above expendability.  When he wasn’t able to earn a living selling his labor in his craft, he would have had to beg for a living.  So, Patterson claims, Jesus knew expendability and expendables. 

 

In the gospels, and in Paul’s writings, Jesus’ way of life is recalled as being outside the system of brokered power of the Roman Empire.  He is depicted in the gospels as an itinerant teacher who scrounged for a living and encouraged others to do the same.  Whether he did this as one who chose to opt out of the system or whether he was himself a landless  expendable is an unanswered question.

 

What we do know is that these expendables are the so-called sinners whom Jesus called into his following.  He treats these “sinners” as a social category, not a moral one, recognizing the illegitimacy of labeling expendables as sinners in need of repentance.  In Patterson’s words: “A tax collector in that system didn’t need to repent; he just needed a better job.  A prostitute didn’t need better morals; she just needed a legitimate, respectful place to be in the world.”

 

So Jesus called sinners.  Period.  He invited into his company sinners, lepers, people with physical and mental disabilities, prostitutes, tax collectors – all manner of expendable people – and he proclaimed them members of the Empire of God, in which the means to life are free and accessible. 

 

Crossan calls this the “Brokerless Kingdom.”  In contrast to Rome’s highly brokered empire, the Empire of God is that place where the expendables were brought back into the human community, no longer unclean or shamed but treated with honor. 

 

Jesus treated them not as sinful but as righteous, able to stand in the glorious presence of God.  Together they constituted an empire – not one in which the means to life are brokered from the top down in a complex hierarchy of quid pro quo transactions, but unbrokered, freely offered, like God’s own love to all of God’s children. 

 

This is what is symbolized in Jesus’ practice of eating with all manner of folk.  This is why those in his society who were allowed by Rome to hold some power were so scandalized by his eating with tax collectors and sinners: such behavior was a criticism of the way they had been co-opted by the Empire, in order to hold their positions of power. 

 

It all boils down to a question of values.  While some were threatened and others would have simply considered Jesus a nut, some would have said, “In this person’s words and deeds I have experienced God’s very own presence in my life.” 

 

Some people who had experienced Jesus’ open table would have said, “Whoa, I’m never going to do that again.  Eating with the unclean is just not what God-fearing people do.”  But others would have said, “Around that table I experienced something I would claim as nothing less than the very love and acceptance of God.”  It’s a question of values.

 

Early Christians risked believing that what they learned from Jesus and experienced in his presence was an expression of what God was like.  They believed that his activity unveiled the fundamental principle of the universe to them. 

 

From their contact with Jesus, they believed that God valued those whom society had shunned.  God was like the woman searching for the lost coin, like the shepherd leaving his flock to find the one who had strayed.  They no longer felt of no value, but experienced what Henri Nouwen in our own time has claimed, that "We are not loved because we are precious, but we are precious because we are loved."

 

This was the good news, the gospel, that Jesus brought to those at the very bottom of society.  Though our positions in life are more favorable than that of those expendables, it can be good news to us, too, if we are willing to be part of that Empire in which everyone is seen as a child of God, in which everyone is seen as being of value, in which we try, like Jesus, to affirm each one’s dignity and worth and to struggle with them to see that they have access to the means of a good life.

 

We can be part of the system that judges people by what they can give us, that measures worth in commercial terms, that includes only those whom it is advantageous to know.  Or we can be part of the Empire of God in which we know that each one is precious.  It’s all a question of values. 

 

Amen.