"Go Ahead, Make My Day!”

A Sermon Based Upon Luke 15: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Pentecost 16c, September 15th, 2013

  " …I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents." (Luk 15:10 NRS).

“Go ahead, make my day!”   Who is old enough to remember than famous line from Clint Eastwood’s movie character, “Dirty Harry” in the 1983 film, “Sudden Impact”?  It was voted no. 6 by the American Film institute’s list of best 100 year quotes. 

In the movie, Harry  Callahan (Clint Eastwood) goes into a diner for a morning cup of coffee.  When Callahan discovers a robbery in the diner, he kills the robbers in a shootout.  However, a surviving robber grabs the fleeing waitress Loretta, holds his gun to her head, and threatens to shoot. Instead of backing off, Harry points his .44 Magnum revolver into the boy's face and dares him to shoot, saying with clenched teeth and in his characteristic rough grumble, "Go ahead, make my day," meaning that if the robber attempts to harm Loretta in any way, Harry would be happy to dispatch the robber.  

Interestingly, the actual catch phrase, "go ahead, make my day" comes from independent filmmaker, Charles B. Pierce.  He says it came from his father Mack, who used to tell him as a child, "Charlie, just let me come home one more day, without you mowing that lawn, son just go ahead.....make my day"  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ahead,_make_my_day).    Of course, Pierce’s father Mack was being factious.   He did not really enjoy getting angry at his son for not mowing the yard.  What would have made him really happy was that his son would have mowed the yard just like he told him. 

Our text today raises the interesting question of what makes ‘heaven happy?’   Jesus concludes his story about finding lost things by speaking about what brings heaven joy.   Who would even care about that, right?   Most of us are much more involved in making ourselves happy, making others happy on earth, rather than in heaven.  We think about a lot smaller things, like that little boy, like how to get out of mowing the lawn.  Who cares about bringing happiness that doesn’t center on us?

Jesus does.  This is what makes Jesus different.  This is why Jesus still challenges our world.  This is why we call Jesus ‘the savior of the world’.   Jesus puts us to finding joy and happiness in an entirely different way than we thought. 

GETTING LOST?

Any therapist will tell you that ‘happiness’ is something you’re least likely to find when you go looking for it.   Happiness is a by-product of living the right kind of life and doing the right kind of things, they say.   There is something moral, good, and responsible built into the true nature of happiness.  The Bible says the same kind of thing.  The truth is truth, no matter where you find it.  

But the Bible’s own view of ‘finding joy by doing the right thing’ has a surprising twist to it.  The way to joy is not found when we do just any kind of good or right thing, like being a responsible person, caring for our family, or doing a good deed or random act of kindness, but the way to heavenly joy is found when ‘lost’ people are found.   This is the entire focus of our text today about finding lost things.  The whole point of Jesus’ story is to get us to find joy in recovering people who get lost in life.   Of course, the whole idea of being ‘lost’ has a rather strange sound to it?   In a world with so much information, with so many resources, with so many opportunities in life, and even, with churches over almost every hill and around every corner, who in the world could ever still be ‘lost’?

Cory Monteith was.  I only bring up the recent much publicized death of the famous glee star by the dangerous mixture of alcohol and heroin to remind us that people still do get lost, even when it looks like they have everything.  Lostness as a condition of the human soul and spirit, is just as real and prominent today as lostness was in the world of Jesus.  People can get lost with addictions, lost in bad habits, lost by bad choices and more often than we like to think, people be lost in life due to no fault of their own.   

My wife and I have had a running discussion about my sense of ‘good direction’ and her lack of it.  She reminds me often, that my sense of direction is not as good as I think it is.   I can get lost too.  She reminds me of the time we were traveling in German looking for a hotel.  It’s just over the next hill.  Then it was just over the next one, and the next.   We keep looking for an affordable hotel so long, that we ended up stopping the car and sleeping in it on the street.   But of course, we still weren’t lost.  I knew exactly where we were on the map.  The only problem was the map did not tell us how cooled it be would be or how much a hotel would cost, which we couldn’t afford.  It was a lot cheaper to remain ‘lost’ on the street.

We don’t always realize what it means to be ‘lost’ or that we can be ‘lost’ in this world of GPS, cell phones, and instant navigations.   The designation of being ‘lost’ doesn’t have the fear or punch it used to have.  Besides, “how can we be lost, when we always know exactly where we are?”   When I’m driving down the road, all I have to do is push a button and find my coordinate anytime and anywhere.  There is much a less chance that I would make a wrong turn.  Right?   Not always. 

·         In 2012, Tokoyo students driving in Austria, ending up listening to their GPS give directions and they ended up trying to navigate a road in high water.  They didn’t have enough sense to realize they would get stuck.   

·         In 2011, three woman rented a Mercedez in Seattle and ended up on a boat ramp, kept following directions and drove straight into a swamp.  

·         Do you remember that lesson you learned in kindergarten, “Look both ways before crossing the street?”   A woman in California followed the advice of her GPS which took her the shortest walking distance right through a busy-4-lane highway.  She was hit by a car and injured and ended up suing ‘Google Maps’ and the driver who hit her.  She even claimed her computer for having a mental disorder, saying she would have been smarter to have figured out the route herself.  

·         Or what about that bus at the Tour De France this year, that ended up forcing the entire Bike race to change course, because it followed directions and got wedged under a bridge that was too low. 

·         My wife has her own story to tell.   When she became a realtor, was about the time they first came out with GPS.   So knowing her ‘directional’ handicap, and the fact we were living in the mountains, I bought her one.   She was able to make use of it on her very first showing.  She typed in the address.  Following the voice, but after circling that same mountain 7 times, she finally figured something had gone wrong.  “Do you think we could be lost, her client asked.”   

I don’t care how where you think you are, or even if you are where you think you should be, you can still get lost even with all the information, knowledge and technical gifts our world has to offer.  Lostness is real, and you can be lost even when you don’t think you are.

 GETTING SAVED?

But of course, the ‘lostness’ Jesus is most concerned about is as much spiritual as it is physical.   The religious leaders were upset with Jesus because he ‘welcomed sinners and ate with them’.   The people Jesus came to seek, find, and make heaven happy about, were lost to their religion, lost in their nation, and lost within the society and neighborhoods in which they lived.  Nobody cared about them.  They were not simply lost to God, but they were lost among their neighbors and in their communities, and they were lost, among all things, for ‘religious’ reasons, because not enough was being done to help them find their way back home.  

This is where we come to a roadblock when we think about what it means to be lost and saved.   Is salvation something we do for people, or is salvation something God does in people?    Is salvation something that happens as a result of a ‘social gospel’ of helping the disadvantaged, or is salvation something that happens when we preach, the spirit works, and when people repent of their sins and get right with God.   What does it mean to be found?  When Jesus ‘welcomed and ate with sinners?” how was he making heaven happy, even before Jesus ever died on the cross to pay for their sins? 

I don’t think the answer to heaven’s joy is either social or spiritual, but it’s both.   We should never choose between doing good for someone’s physical situation or showing someone how God can save their soul.   You don’t see souls saved by bypassing the body.  The way to the soul is through, not around the body.  Jesus knew that.   The savior of the world brings salvation to the souls and hearts of sinners by eating and socializing with them as he makes situation in life better.     

Again, Jesus does not circumvent the needs of the body, but the finds the way to the heart and soul through meeting the needs of the whole person.   This is why Jesus was not only a healer of souls, but he was a healer lonely, sick, tired, broken and sinful bodies.  The woman was caught in adultery, and Jesus did not just give her a ticket to heaven, but he gave her forgiveness that offered her a new chance for life.   The man who was paralyzed and was taken to Jesus by his friends, not only got his sins forgiven, but he also got a chance to get up and walk around.    After Jesus welcomes and eats with sinners, he speaks of how happy heaven is when just ‘one’ sinner repents.  Jesus does not overlook the heart, but it is how he gets through into the heart that makes heaven so happy.

Too many of us have over spiritualized the gospel and missed the main part of the drama, where Jesus is a physical healer who cared as much about people’s quality of life on earth as he did about getting them to heaven.    Scholars say when we focus too much on souls and not enough on human needs, we “Platonize” the gospel.   What they mean is that we only focus on getting people into heaven we, strangely enough, following a human philosophy that has overtaken and falsely interpreted the gospel, rather than staying with the good news of the God’s gospel which Jesus lived and preached.  And don’t you know what Paul said about preaching another gospel?  Let me just say that it is not good!   “If anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!” (Gal 1:9 NRS).  I told you it wasn’t good.

What is good about the true gospel is that Jesus cared about people, period.   He brought God’s gift of salvation into the world through meeting human needs hear and now.   And surprisingly, this is what makes heaven happy.    Heaven is not most happy when people get into the heaven, but heaven is most happy when heaven gets into people.  And Jesus shows us how heaven can get into people through their social lives, through their stomachs, and through their ability to find God in ‘human skin’.   Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, ‘the way into a man’s heart is through his stomach’.  That’s what Jesus is doing.  He’s getting to the heart, but he is going through the stomach to get into their soul.     

I think it is most interesting, as least for me as a Lutheran turned Baptist, who first introduced the churches of North America to the so called, “social” side of the gospel.   Rauschenbusch was “brought up in a very religious family, and I thank God for it," he said.  "We had household religious service every day."  After a period of rebelliousness in youth, he said, "I came to my Father, and I began to pray for help and got it.  I had my own religious experience."

After being schooled in Germany and then the United States, he decided: "It is now no longer my fond hope to be a learned theologian and write big books." "I want to be a pastor, powerful with men, preaching to them Christ as who alone can satisfy their groanings."    In 1885 he became pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in New York City, located at the edge of a depressed area known as Hell's Kitchen.  Here the young pietistic pastor confronted unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, disease, and crime.  "Oh, the children's funerals! they gripped my heart," he later wrote.  "That was one of the things I always went away thinking about—why did the children have to die?"  He immersed himself in the literature of social reform and began to participate in social action groups.   Slowly his ideas took shape. He had come to the pastorate "to save souls in the ordinarily accepted religious sense" but not all the problems he confronted could be addressed in this way.  Though his friends urged him to give up his social work for "Christian work," he believed his social work was Christ's work.   In other words, young Rauschenbusch help the churches in America understand that you not only needed to lead the lost to repent, but you also need to ‘welcome them and eat with them’.  The way to the soul was through the stomach, so to speak.

Rauschenbusch sought to combine his old evangelical passion (which he never abandoned) with his new social awareness.  The kingdom of God became the theme by which he pulled together his views on the social gospel. "Christ's conception of the kingdom of God came to me as a new revelation," he wrote. "Here was the idea and purpose that had dominated the mind of the Master himself …    I found this new conception strangely satisfying.."  Can you hear the renewed passion and joy in his heart?  The call of Christ was not only saving souls, but it was also participating in the lives of those souls who were lost.  It was not simply doing social work, but it was going through a person’s stomach to help them get things right in their heart and life.(http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/131christians/activists/rauschenbusch.html). It was this kind of ‘saving ministry’ that brought Rauschenbusch renewed joy.

BEING FOUND.

If the happiness on earth is as it is in heaven, it must be linked to understanding human lostness and figuring out what can be done about it here and now.  We don’t have to argue whether or not people are still lost, but we do need to think about whether we can lose the joy of being the people of God.  People out there still get lost, and sometimes, we can feel like we are too. So let’s see one final reason heaven jumps for joy. 

Do you see the reason that heaven is happy in the ‘rejoicing’ that goes on when the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son are found, that everybody is happy?    When the shepherd leaves the 99 and goes after the one lost sheep and finds him, he returns and ‘calls together’ his ‘friends and neighbors’ saying ‘rejoice with me’ (v. 6).   When the woman finds the lost coin, she also calls together her ‘friends and neighbors, saying ‘rejoice with me for I have found the coin that I lost.”  Finally, it is when the Father celebrates the homecoming of his lost son, that he says to his slaves, “get the fatted calf and kill it, so we can celebrate” (v. 23).  But when the Elder brother refuses to come to the party, the Father insists, saying, “But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, was lost, but has been found” (v. 32).  

Two things stand out this final picture.   One thing is that the Elder brother has to be reminded that this lost son was also his ‘brother’.  That’s a lesson that still resonates in the hostility and culture wars of our own day.  Can we see people who are struggling as our ‘brothers’, rather than our enemies?   The other thing that stands out is that after finding and rejoicing over a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son, the only one who still needs to be found is the one who is ‘at home’, not the one ‘lost’ out in the world.   Make no mistake, the one who is blocking the joy of the moment is the ‘elder brother’ who remains the fatherliest away from home.   He’s also the one who is the least happy and who still can makes heaven sad.

I've told you this recently, but it's worth repeating again.  Tom Long, once asked in a sermon: “Why is it that sometimes Christians and Churches appear to be the least happy places on earth, and places no one wants to be?  What every happen to that Scripture which said, "I was glad when they said unto me, 'Let us go into the house of the Lord.'" Why should this be so?  If it is not what happened?  Dr. Long goes on to tell how “a few years ago, some members of the church where we worship went on a mission trip to Central America, to Nicaragua. For three weeks they lived in the homes of Nicaraguan Christians. They worked with them, studied the Bible with them, ate with them, and worshipped with them. The American Christians were very impressed by many aspects of the faith of the Nicaraguan Christians, but most of all, by the great sense of joy these people had in their worship and in their lives. These Nicaraguan Christians were very poor. They had no color televisions, no SUVs, no computers. All they had was Jesus, and their worship was free, spirited, and full of joy. The American Christians came home wondering if we were missing something.  Where, for us, is the joy, where is the great joy of our faith, the great joy of worship, the great joy of being in the house of God? (http://day1.org/471-is_there_joy_in_gods_house).

So, this story about lostness, salvation, and joy is not only a story about them, it’s also a story about us.   This means that lostness can happen everywhere to anyone, even in here.  It can happen to you not only after you think you know where you are going, it can also happen to you along the way to where you thought you were going, but somehow you got lost along the way.    What am I trying to say?   I’m trying to say that when we take the place Jesus’ left open, and we really do the things Jesus did, ‘welcoming and eating with sinners’ we too can renew the joy of our own salvation.  Being ‘found’ in this world less religious than it is relational, and it is also reciprocal.  By ‘reciprocal’, I mean that when help those who have been lost in life know they have been found by God and by us (whatever form of ministry or mission that might take…Visitation, Senior Adult ministry, Youth ministry, Soup Kitchen, Working in a Shelter or opening your home to a stranger), when take the place Jesus took, we too know most fully the joy of being found by Him.  So go ahead, make God’s day, and you’ll make yours as well.  Amen.