Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture: Luke 15:1-10

I have had the privilege of a front row seat over the last year as my home congregation has worked to sell their building and dissolve as a congregation. I can’t quit telling stories about First Church because I am so fascinated and amazed at the grace they’re enacting in this big, sad, weird transition. You all have heard a lot of these stories, and I’ve got another one for you this morning.

As First Church has moved on from being a congregation, they’ve started calling themselves “First Church Fellowship,” mostly because it was the “fellowship” part of church that they were so sad to leave behind. They knew that they wouldn’t really miss the committee meetings or even worship, but they would miss EACH OTHER a lot. These days, they meet four or five times a month, just to be together: a monthly women’s luncheon, a regular supper club gathering, a Keenagers’ meal and a crochet group. 

They’re also meeting one Sunday each month in a park for a short devotion and a BYO lunch picnic. A couple of months ago, the group of twenty or so folks gathered in a reserved picnic shelter in a local park here in Roanoke. When church folks arrived, a handful of unhoused neighbors were hanging out in the shelter. The church people greeted them, explained that they were going to have a short devotional and a meal, apologized for interrupting these neighbors’ Sunday morning, and invited them to stay and participate. Surprisingly, several of them did.

As the devotional wound down, someone in the church group decided that they should take up an offering – a regular part of a Sunday worship service in the sanctuary, but not something this group needed to do now that they had approximately zero communal expenses. They collected a hundred or so dollars, in cash, and distributed it among the unhoused folks who had joined them for the morning.

When I heard this story, my friend Michael – who may have been the one behind taking up offering in the first place – confessed that being in the park with those neighbors, talking about scripture and eating together, collecting a cash offering and immediately giving it to people who very obviously needed it…all of this felt more like CHURCH than the last six months’ of First Church’s official existence combined.

Do you see why I can’t quit telling these First Church stories? They’re just so good. So filled with grace. This congregation is full of people who know what church is meant to be and have done good, hard work to be able to unearth themselves from the burdens of institution in order to be liberated to follow Jesus. I’ll keep telling the stories as long as I can.

Jesus also loved to tell stories. In Luke’s gospel, more than half of all the things Jesus says are parables. You might know that the word parable means “something cast alongside.” A parable isn’t a news item, and it isn’t even a simple story. It’s a teaching aid, an illustration, a tiny little tangled up puzzle to invite our bewilderment and our contemplation. Jesus is far too smart and far too interesting to say anything that doesn’t lead us into some serious introspection.

In this passage, Jesus finds himself being surrounded by the people Luke categorizes as “tax collectors and sinners,” which is biblical code for “the most-hated people in society.” And the Pharisees and scribes – aka religious leaders, pastors, bishops, elders – hate it. They start grumbling (which the religious leaders LOVE to do about Jesus) about how Jesus really shouldn’t be hanging out with the riffraff so much, how he was decreasing the cache and property values of their profession, how he should really learn to have some tact and class. So Jesus tells a few stories – not aimlessly, not on a whim, but parables, stories aimed AT the Pharisees and scribes.

“Which of you,” he says, “having a hundred sheep and losing one, wouldn’t leave the 99 to go find the lost one?” “And what woman,” he continues, “having ten dollars and losing one, wouldn’t light a lamp and search high and low in her house until she finds it?”

It’s kind of important to say that the scenarios Jesus offers up here are NOT common sense. Shepherds do NOT leave 99 sheep to find one – that’s illogical. A poor woman wouldn’t spend precious lamp oil to find one dollar when she still has nine in her possession. And the real kicker is that both these characters, when they find the missing item, THROW GIANT PARTIES! They spend a ton of cash, waste a ton of time, expend significant energy to gather their friends and neighbors, kill a fatted calf and REJOICE. 

I thought about that First Church story of hanging out with unhoused neighbors in the park when I read this story of Jesus telling a parable for the sour-mouthed pharisees this week. Selling your building and dissolving your 130 year old institution is NOT the common sense thing for a group of Jesus followers to do, right now. We live in uncertain times, and most folks – both individually and communally – are making decisions that amount to hunkering down, securing their assets, finding ways to keep their assets safe. Letting go of it all is a counter-intuitive way to behave when life gets scary and dangerous.

In the same way that the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go find the single lost one, in the same way that the poor woman wastes lamp oil to search for one coin when she’s already got 9 others tucked safely in her purse, selling all you have and giving it to the poor – which is one way to look at what First Church has done over the last year – is nonsensical. It is not what church consultants would call “good stewardship.” It is not anywhere near an attempt to make sure the institution is sustainable for future generations. 

In this parable, Jesus is inviting the Pharisees – who are so caught up in institutional rules and regulations that they can’t even begin to see the power and beauty of eating with “sinners” – to reconsider everything they’ve ever known about what it means to live a faithful life.

In this parable, Jesus is also inviting US to reconsider what we think we know about it.

What does it mean to live faithfully? If we listen to Jesus, faithful living doesn’t mean maintaining existing structures for the sake of maintaining them. In this parable, the shepherd doesn’t worry one bit about the 99 sheep who are content to mill around there in the flock. The poor woman isn’t consumed with counting her remaining 9 coins and finding the highest yield investment for them. Both people leave the certainty of what they know to seek out what’s missing.

And THEN, when they find the missing thing, they THROW HUGE PARTIES! In case you’re wondering, this is also not the logical, common-sense thing to do. The shepherd and the woman have already acted in ways that their friends and neighbors would find irresponsible and incomprehensible, leaving the entire flock alone and vulnerable, wasting precious resources to light a lamp in order to find a single coin. And now, they’re being profligate, wasteful, over-the-top about it: inviting all the friends and neighbors to join them to rejoice that their irresponsible behavior led to this small, barely discernible victory.

There are not many people who find themselves able to celebrate with the First Church people about what selling their building and dissolving their congregational status means. Most people, when I talk about it, get sad. They share condolences. They actually say, out loud, “oh, how terrible!” “What a loss!” But I think, in several ways, ways that are growing as they are able to put some distance between them and the very real losses involved in shutting down an institution, First Church people are finding immense freedom and unexpected joys. I suspect that they are experiencing the relief and delight of finding the things that got lost somewhere along the way.

Michael’s comment about being more like church in that picnic shelter with unhoused neighbors is what set off this line of thinking for me. Those neighbors would not have set foot in the gigantic First Church building. Those offering dollars would have gone immediately toward a new roof or a new boiler or figuring out how many hours the congregation could employ a part-time pastor to keep things running. 

It makes me wonder what precious things we’ve lost as we commit all our time, energy, resources and expectations to maintaining institutional structures and systemic habits. What might we find if we have the courage to leave all that behind, setting out to find what’s lost? And how will we rejoice when we find it? Who will we invite to join us? And who will be open enough to join in the party?

The song we’re about to sing has been stuck in my head since I heard it a few weeks ago. It’s called “Hillbilly Hymn,” and it is an exploration of what kind of faithfulness Jesus actually asks of us. What DOES Jesus want us to be doing with our resources, our time, our money, our energy? How much of it SHOULD we be spending on taking care of sure things, and how much should we be spending leaving all that behind in order to seek out what’s missing?

I have had the privilege of a front row seat over the last year as my home congregation has worked to sell their building and dissolve as a congregation. I can’t quit telling stories about First Church because I am so fascinated and amazed at the grace they’re enacting in this big, sad, weird transition. You all have heard a lot of these stories, and I’ve got another one for you this morning.

As First Church has moved on from being a congregation, they’ve started calling themselves “First Church Fellowship,” mostly because it was the “fellowship” part of church that they were so sad to leave behind. They knew that they wouldn’t really miss the committee meetings or even worship, but they would miss EACH OTHER a lot. These days, they meet four or five times a month, just to be together: a monthly women’s luncheon, a regular supper club gathering, a Keenagers’ meal and a crochet group. 

They’re also meeting one Sunday each month in a park for a short devotion and a BYO lunch picnic. A couple of months ago, the group of twenty or so folks gathered in a reserved picnic shelter in a local park here in Roanoke. When church folks arrived, a handful of unhoused neighbors were hanging out in the shelter. The church people greeted them, explained that they were going to have a short devotional and a meal, apologized for interrupting these neighbors’ Sunday morning, and invited them to stay and participate. Surprisingly, several of them did.

As the devotional wound down, someone in the church group decided that they should take up an offering – a regular part of a Sunday worship service in the sanctuary, but not something this group needed to do now that they had approximately zero communal expenses. They collected a hundred or so dollars, in cash, and distributed it among the unhoused folks who had joined them for the morning.

When I heard this story, my friend Michael – who may have been the one behind taking up offering in the first place – confessed that being in the park with those neighbors, talking about scripture and eating together, collecting a cash offering and immediately giving it to people who very obviously needed it…all of this felt more like CHURCH than the last six months’ of First Church’s official existence combined.

Do you see why I can’t quit telling these First Church stories? They’re just so good. So filled with grace. This congregation is full of people who know what church is meant to be and have done good, hard work to be able to unearth themselves from the burdens of institution in order to be liberated to follow Jesus. I’ll keep telling the stories as long as I can.

Jesus also loved to tell stories. In Luke’s gospel, more than half of all the things Jesus says are parables. You might know that the word parable means “something cast alongside.” A parable isn’t a news item, and it isn’t even a simple story. It’s a teaching aid, an illustration, a tiny little tangled up puzzle to invite our bewilderment and our contemplation. Jesus is far too smart and far too interesting to say anything that doesn’t lead us into some serious introspection.

In this passage, Jesus finds himself being surrounded by the people Luke categorizes as “tax collectors and sinners,” which is biblical code for “the most-hated people in society.” And the Pharisees and scribes – aka religious leaders, pastors, bishops, elders – hate it. They start grumbling (which the religious leaders LOVE to do about Jesus) about how Jesus really shouldn’t be hanging out with the riffraff so much, how he was decreasing the cache and property values of their profession, how he should really learn to have some tact and class. So Jesus tells a few stories – not aimlessly, not on a whim, but parables, stories aimed AT the Pharisees and scribes.

“Which of you,” he says, “having a hundred sheep and losing one, wouldn’t leave the 99 to go find the lost one?” “And what woman,” he continues, “having ten dollars and losing one, wouldn’t light a lamp and search high and low in her house until she finds it?”

It’s kind of important to say that the scenarios Jesus offers up here are NOT common sense. Shepherds do NOT leave 99 sheep to find one – that’s illogical. A poor woman wouldn’t spend precious lamp oil to find one dollar when she still has nine in her possession. And the real kicker is that both these characters, when they find the missing item, THROW GIANT PARTIES! They spend a ton of cash, waste a ton of time, expend significant energy to gather their friends and neighbors, kill a fatted calf and REJOICE. 

I thought about that First Church story of hanging out with unhoused neighbors in the park when I read this story of Jesus telling a parable for the sour-mouthed pharisees this week. Selling your building and dissolving your 130 year old institution is NOT the common sense thing for a group of Jesus followers to do, right now. We live in uncertain times, and most folks – both individually and communally – are making decisions that amount to hunkering down, securing their assets, finding ways to keep their assets safe. Letting go of it all is a counter-intuitive way to behave when life gets scary and dangerous.

In the same way that the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go find the single lost one, in the same way that the poor woman wastes lamp oil to search for one coin when she’s already got 9 others tucked safely in her purse, selling all you have and giving it to the poor – which is one way to look at what First Church has done over the last year – is nonsensical. It is not what church consultants would call “good stewardship.” It is not anywhere near an attempt to make sure the institution is sustainable for future generations. 

In this parable, Jesus is inviting the Pharisees – who are so caught up in institutional rules and regulations that they can’t even begin to see the power and beauty of eating with “sinners” – to reconsider everything they’ve ever known about what it means to live a faithful life.

In this parable, Jesus is also inviting US to reconsider what we think we know about it.

What does it mean to live faithfully? If we listen to Jesus, faithful living doesn’t mean maintaining existing structures for the sake of maintaining them. In this parable, the shepherd doesn’t worry one bit about the 99 sheep who are content to mill around there in the flock. The poor woman isn’t consumed with counting her remaining 9 coins and finding the highest yield investment for them. Both people leave the certainty of what they know to seek out what’s missing.

And THEN, when they find the missing thing, they THROW HUGE PARTIES! In case you’re wondering, this is also not the logical, common-sense thing to do. The shepherd and the woman have already acted in ways that their friends and neighbors would find irresponsible and incomprehensible, leaving the entire flock alone and vulnerable, wasting precious resources to light a lamp in order to find a single coin. And now, they’re being profligate, wasteful, over-the-top about it: inviting all the friends and neighbors to join them to rejoice that their irresponsible behavior led to this small, barely discernible victory.

There are not many people who find themselves able to celebrate with the First Church people about what selling their building and dissolving their congregational status means. Most people, when I talk about it, get sad. They share condolences. They actually say, out loud, “oh, how terrible!” “What a loss!” But I think, in several ways, ways that are growing as they are able to put some distance between them and the very real losses involved in shutting down an institution, First Church people are finding immense freedom and unexpected joys. I suspect that they are experiencing the relief and delight of finding the things that got lost somewhere along the way.

Michael’s comment about being more like church in that picnic shelter with unhoused neighbors is what set off this line of thinking for me. Those neighbors would not have set foot in the gigantic First Church building. Those offering dollars would have gone immediately toward a new roof or a new boiler or figuring out how many hours the congregation could employ a part-time pastor to keep things running. 

It makes me wonder what precious things we’ve lost as we commit all our time, energy, resources and expectations to maintaining institutional structures and systemic habits. What might we find if we have the courage to leave all that behind, setting out to find what’s lost? And how will we rejoice when we find it? Who will we invite to join us? And who will be open enough to join in the party?

The song we’re about to sing has been stuck in my head since I heard it a few weeks ago. It’s called “Hillbilly Hymn,” and it is an exploration of what kind of faithfulness Jesus actually asks of us. What DOES Jesus want us to be doing with our resources, our time, our money, our energy? How much of it SHOULD we be spending on taking care of sure things, and how much should we be spending leaving all that behind in order to seek out what’s missing?

I have had the privilege of a front row seat over the last year as my home congregation has worked to sell their building and dissolve as a congregation. I can’t quit telling stories about First Church because I am so fascinated and amazed at the grace they’re enacting in this big, sad, weird transition. You all have heard a lot of these stories, and I’ve got another one for you this morning.

As First Church has moved on from being a congregation, they’ve started calling themselves “First Church Fellowship,” mostly because it was the “fellowship” part of church that they were so sad to leave behind. They knew that they wouldn’t really miss the committee meetings or even worship, but they would miss EACH OTHER a lot. These days, they meet four or five times a month, just to be together: a monthly women’s luncheon, a regular supper club gathering, a Keenagers’ meal and a crochet group. 

They’re also meeting one Sunday each month in a park for a short devotion and a BYO lunch picnic. A couple of months ago, the group of twenty or so folks gathered in a reserved picnic shelter in a local park here in Roanoke. When church folks arrived, a handful of unhoused neighbors were hanging out in the shelter. The church people greeted them, explained that they were going to have a short devotional and a meal, apologized for interrupting these neighbors’ Sunday morning, and invited them to stay and participate. Surprisingly, several of them did.

As the devotional wound down, someone in the church group decided that they should take up an offering – a regular part of a Sunday worship service in the sanctuary, but not something this group needed to do now that they had approximately zero communal expenses. They collected a hundred or so dollars, in cash, and distributed it among the unhoused folks who had joined them for the morning.

When I heard this story, my friend Michael – who may have been the one behind taking up offering in the first place – confessed that being in the park with those neighbors, talking about scripture and eating together, collecting a cash offering and immediately giving it to people who very obviously needed it…all of this felt more like CHURCH than the last six months’ of First Church’s official existence combined.

Do you see why I can’t quit telling these First Church stories? They’re just so good. So filled with grace. This congregation is full of people who know what church is meant to be and have done good, hard work to be able to unearth themselves from the burdens of institution in order to be liberated to follow Jesus. I’ll keep telling the stories as long as I can.

Jesus also loved to tell stories. In Luke’s gospel, more than half of all the things Jesus says are parables. You might know that the word parable means “something cast alongside.” A parable isn’t a news item, and it isn’t even a simple story. It’s a teaching aid, an illustration, a tiny little tangled up puzzle to invite our bewilderment and our contemplation. Jesus is far too smart and far too interesting to say anything that doesn’t lead us into some serious introspection.

In this passage, Jesus finds himself being surrounded by the people Luke categorizes as “tax collectors and sinners,” which is biblical code for “the most-hated people in society.” And the Pharisees and scribes – aka religious leaders, pastors, bishops, elders – hate it. They start grumbling (which the religious leaders LOVE to do about Jesus) about how Jesus really shouldn’t be hanging out with the riffraff so much, how he was decreasing the cache and property values of their profession, how he should really learn to have some tact and class. So Jesus tells a few stories – not aimlessly, not on a whim, but parables, stories aimed AT the Pharisees and scribes.

“Which of you,” he says, “having a hundred sheep and losing one, wouldn’t leave the 99 to go find the lost one?” “And what woman,” he continues, “having ten dollars and losing one, wouldn’t light a lamp and search high and low in her house until she finds it?”

It’s kind of important to say that the scenarios Jesus offers up here are NOT common sense. Shepherds do NOT leave 99 sheep to find one – that’s illogical. A poor woman wouldn’t spend precious lamp oil to find one dollar when she still has nine in her possession. And the real kicker is that both these characters, when they find the missing item, THROW GIANT PARTIES! They spend a ton of cash, waste a ton of time, expend significant energy to gather their friends and neighbors, kill a fatted calf and REJOICE. 

I thought about that First Church story of hanging out with unhoused neighbors in the park when I read this story of Jesus telling a parable for the sour-mouthed pharisees this week. Selling your building and dissolving your 130 year old institution is NOT the common sense thing for a group of Jesus followers to do, right now. We live in uncertain times, and most folks – both individually and communally – are making decisions that amount to hunkering down, securing their assets, finding ways to keep their assets safe. Letting go of it all is a counter-intuitive way to behave when life gets scary and dangerous.

In the same way that the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go find the single lost one, in the same way that the poor woman wastes lamp oil to search for one coin when she’s already got 9 others tucked safely in her purse, selling all you have and giving it to the poor – which is one way to look at what First Church has done over the last year – is nonsensical. It is not what church consultants would call “good stewardship.” It is not anywhere near an attempt to make sure the institution is sustainable for future generations. 

In this parable, Jesus is inviting the Pharisees – who are so caught up in institutional rules and regulations that they can’t even begin to see the power and beauty of eating with “sinners” – to reconsider everything they’ve ever known about what it means to live a faithful life.

In this parable, Jesus is also inviting US to reconsider what we think we know about it.

What does it mean to live faithfully? If we listen to Jesus, faithful living doesn’t mean maintaining existing structures for the sake of maintaining them. In this parable, the shepherd doesn’t worry one bit about the 99 sheep who are content to mill around there in the flock. The poor woman isn’t consumed with counting her remaining 9 coins and finding the highest yield investment for them. Both people leave the certainty of what they know to seek out what’s missing.

And THEN, when they find the missing thing, they THROW HUGE PARTIES! In case you’re wondering, this is also not the logical, common-sense thing to do. The shepherd and the woman have already acted in ways that their friends and neighbors would find irresponsible and incomprehensible, leaving the entire flock alone and vulnerable, wasting precious resources to light a lamp in order to find a single coin. And now, they’re being profligate, wasteful, over-the-top about it: inviting all the friends and neighbors to join them to rejoice that their irresponsible behavior led to this small, barely discernible victory.

There are not many people who find themselves able to celebrate with the First Church people about what selling their building and dissolving their congregational status means. Most people, when I talk about it, get sad. They share condolences. They actually say, out loud, “oh, how terrible!” “What a loss!” But I think, in several ways, ways that are growing as they are able to put some distance between them and the very real losses involved in shutting down an institution, First Church people are finding immense freedom and unexpected joys. I suspect that they are experiencing the relief and delight of finding the things that got lost somewhere along the way.

Michael’s comment about being more like church in that picnic shelter with unhoused neighbors is what set off this line of thinking for me. Those neighbors would not have set foot in the gigantic First Church building. Those offering dollars would have gone immediately toward a new roof or a new boiler or figuring out how many hours the congregation could employ a part-time pastor to keep things running. 

It makes me wonder what precious things we’ve lost as we commit all our time, energy, resources and expectations to maintaining institutional structures and systemic habits. What might we find if we have the courage to leave all that behind, setting out to find what’s lost? And how will we rejoice when we find it? Who will we invite to join us? And who will be open enough to join in the party?

The song we’re about to sing has been stuck in my head since I heard it a few weeks ago. It’s called “Hillbilly Hymn,” and it is an exploration of what kind of faithfulness Jesus actually asks of us. What DOES Jesus want us to be doing with our resources, our time, our money, our energy? How much of it SHOULD we be spending on taking care of sure things, and how much should we be spending leaving all that behind in order to seek out what’s missing?