Text: 1 Tim 1:12-17 (Ex 32:7-14, Luke 15:1-10)                                              W 17^th Sunday after Pentecost

The Kind of People God Chooses

            In the name of him in whom we were chosen from before the foundation of the world to adopted as the children of God, dear brothers and sisters in Christ: I’m sure that you are aware that the appointed Scripture readings for each Sunday are designed to compliment each other.  They usually treat the same subject, or have a common theme, or there are threads of ideas that they all share.  Some weeks it’s very obvious; but other times I’ll admit that it’s a little tougher to see the connections.  I’d rate today’s readings somewhat on the easy side.  Though the settings and circumstances are quite a bit different: we’ve got Moses on Mt. Sinai talking with God in the Old Testament; part of a letter from St. Paul to his young protégé, Timothy, for today’s Epistle; and in the Gospel, Jesus telling two short parables about finding something that was lost – the one theme that really stands out in all three is how the Lord our God always seems to associate himself with the wrong sort of people.  It’s said that bad company corrupts good morals; and for us, most of the time it’s true.  Nevertheless it’s a “saying of the wise” that apparently the Lord himself chooses to ignore.

            This is stated explicitly in the Gospel for today, where we find gathering around Jesus and fellowshipping with him the very worst elements of society: the tax collectors and sinners. And it’s a pity that when they printed the word sinners on the back of your bulletin, they put it in quotation marks; the implication being that they really weren’t such bad folks, it’s just that’s what they were being called by judgmental Pharisees and teachers of the Law. But that’s not right.  You need to understand that there’re no quotation marks in the original text.  It’s St. Luke under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit who is calling these people sinners.  And sure, everybody sins – but not everyone so brazen about it.  What we’re talking about here are the people who make no bones about the fact that they’re sinners.  They know what God’s Law says and they don’t care; they’re going to do what they want to do.  And they don’t care if the whole world knows it.  For most of them it’s how they make their livings.  It’s the prostitutes, hoodlums, petty criminals, pickpockets, and con artists we’ve got here with Jesus.  In modern terms it would be the gang members, strippers, pornographers, cocaine addicts, and drug dealers that you see when you’re in the wrong parts of our cities after dark.  These are the folks that our Lord Jesus gathered to himself.  The Lord chooses sinners.

            Similarly, in the Old Testament, we’re given a glimpse of the true spiritual character of the nation of Israel. These are the people God chose above all other nations to be his own.  And what we see in them is really pathetic.  The scene is Mount Sinai where Moses is receiving the Law directly from God on the mountain’s peak. The people are camped around the base of mountain waiting for Moses to return from the thick, black, thundering cloud and smoke that conceal the top of the mountain – and the glory of God – from their view.  Now, understand that before Moses went up the mountain, the Lord himself spoke to all the people and gave them the Ten Commandments.  They all heard him.  And so they all heard commandment number one:  “Have no other gods, and do not make for yourselves any idols.”  So, what do they do?  They get impatient with Moses for taking so long, and right there in the shadow of Sinai, where they can look up and see the cloud that they know very well conceals the glory of the God who rescued them from slavery in Egypt with great signs and wonders, and led them out across the desert miraculously providing them with food and water everyday—right there they make for themselves an idol of a calf and fall down worshipping it saying, “Not that Guy up there on the mountain, no, this hunk of metal is the god that led us out of Egypt.”

We hear a story like this with open-mouthed incredulity.  How, we wonder, could a group of people be so stupid, so spiritually thick-headed and blind that they could do such a thing – make and worship a false god when the real McCoy is right there in plain sight?  Sure, there might be a few folks that are that dumb, there’s always a couple in the crowd; but we’re talking about an entire nation here, some two million people – and every last one of them so spiritually dense that they seem to be impenetrable – and yet they’re the people God chose above all others with whom he would make his special covenant, and through whom he would bring his Son and our Savior into this world.  The Lord chooses those who are spiritually blind fools.

            And then we turn to today’s Epistle lesson in which St. Paul writes to Timothy about the man he was before coming to know the Lord Jesus as his Savior.  He wasn’t just your run of the mill sinner who broke God’s Laws mostly for personal gratification like the people Jesus was criticized for associating with, nor was he spiritually ignorant in the same sense as the people who worshipped the golden calf.  No, he loved God’s Law, he knew it very well, and tried his best to obey it.  He would rather have died than participate in the kind of blatant idolatry his ancestors engaged in.  And yet, he considered his own sin much, much worse than either of these other two examples.  For he hadn’t just wandered away from God’s Word; he had taken an active role in attempting to destroy it.  He calls himself a blasphemer; that is someone who had cursed the name of God – he had despised the name of Jesus and heaped profanities upon him.  He calls himself a persecutor – and we know that he was tireless in his efforts to chase down men, women, and children who confessed Jesus as Lord.  He had gone about seizing their homes and property, taking them away in chains, and doing whatever he could to see that they were tortured and executed.  He also calls himself a violent man.  And unfortunately that translation doesn’t quite capture the whole sense of the Greek word that Paul uses.  It’s the word from which we get our English word “hubris” – which is a fancy way to say pride, except it’s pride in boldface and with a capital “P”.  But what Paul means is that he was extremely proud of the way he hurt Christians, even to the point of sadism; that is, like a twisted psychopath he very much enjoyed making the believers in Jesus suffer.  He liked being responsible for hurting them.  He took pleasure in their pain and misery, it’s what he considered his crowning achievement—up until the day he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, anyway.

And that’s why he describes himself as the worst of the worse:  the chief of sinners, for his was the worst of sins – he had delighted in making himself God’s enemy.  And it’s interesting that he says it in the present tense.  It’s not, “I was the chief of sinners”, but rather, “I am still the chief of sinners.”  Though he knew he had been forgiven for Christ’s sake, the memory and shame of what he had done still haunted him; and more than that he also knew what kinds of self-seeking evils still filled his heart.  He understood that as much as he now wanted to follow Christ and do his bidding, there was always inside something – his old sinful nature – that dragged him down and held him low so that he still found himself not doing the things he knew were right, and instead always turning to do and think the things he knew were opposed to God.  And yet despite all that, Paul is the man through whom our Lord worked the most mightily to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the world. If we could name a superstar among the apostles, he’d be the one – the one who had been God’s enemy.  But that’s whom our Lord chooses to get his work done: he chooses his enemies.

            And so what we see in all three of these readings is that the Lord chooses exactly the opposite of who we would expect.  It defies human logic.  Even kids on the playground know that when you’re choosing up sides for a ball game you want on your side the players who are the biggest, the most talented, and the most experienced.  Oh, and you pick your friends too.  But that isn’t how the Lord operates.  He picks those who are full of sin and foolishness.  He picks those who hate him.  He picks those who are not willing, who don’t even want to play on his side. In short, he picks the losers.  Or to say it like this morning’s Gospel reading says it, he picks the lost.

            Which begs the question, “Why?”  I mean, look: as we consider the history of God’s people we see mostly a list of failures.  Oh, there are a few bright spots here and there, and with their help the church of God always manages squeak by.  But even at its best the church just sort of limps along.  It’s always struggling.  And the total number of faithful people is always fairly small compared to the world’s total population.  And so it makes a person wonder, couldn’t the Lord have accomplished a lot more if he’d simply worked with people of a higher caliber to begin with? Just think of what might have been accomplished if he had chosen the brightest, the best, and the noblest examples of humankind.  The possibilities seem endless.  So, did he really have to choose the worst sinners, the most stiff-necked and stubborn of nations, and his most violent enemies?

            Well, to answer that question briefly, St. Paul would answer, “Yes, the Lord had to choose the very worst.”  Why?  Well, Paul explains why he was chosen.  He said it was so that in him Christ Jesus could demonstrate his unlimited patience and superabundant mercy.  God chooses the worst to show how great his compassion for those who are lost really is.  You see, if he had only given us examples that involved people who by human standards were good and wise and righteous then we’d always be wondering if we measured up to the standard.  The questions we’d all be faced with are, “Am I good enough for the Lord?” and “Does God’s grace in Christ reach down also to me?”

            I often listen to Christian radio call in talk shows, and I also read what kinds of questions are being asked on a number of Internet sites where people can get answers from various religious teachers.  And some of the most frequently asked questions have to do with this issue.  People want to know if they have sinned so severely that they have now been cut off from God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ.  They want to know if their faith is too weak for salvation, or if their ongoing struggles with sin will destroy them.  They want to know if their spiritual lethargy and lack of commitment that is evidenced by the comparisons they make with other Christians they feel are more godly and productive will weigh against them in the final judgment. By choosing the worst examples that humanity has to offer, the Lord proves to us that no one while he lives in this world is beyond the reach of his love and forgiveness in Christ, and that whosoever will believe on him has eternal life.  That’s why God chooses to do his work through the worst kind of people.

            At least that’s part of the reason.  Another big reason he chooses to work through the worst of sinners is because if he’s going to do his work through people at all, he really doesn’t have another choice.  The Scriptures make this clear:  “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.  There is no one who does good, no, not one.  All like sheep have gone astray, and there is no one seeks who after God.  They are all together corrupt.”  When we speak of comparing sinners with each other so that we can say some are worse than others, we’re really speaking a language that the Scriptures do not know. We are only commenting on the outward appearance – what we can see.  But God searches the hearts of people.  From his perspective there is only one kind of sinner; and that’s the worst kind. Like I said before, St. Paul who had long ago given up his persecution of the Christian church and become its leading advocate still considered himself the chief of sinners.  It’s really a question of Christian maturity. Growth in the faith is marked not by looking over your shoulder to see how high you’ve climbed – that’s what the self righteous Pharisees were doing.  No, true growth in the faith is achieved by descending into the depths of your own sinful heart in order to see how much more you need to rely on Christ and the sacrifice he made so that your sins would be forgiven.

            And let me offer yet a third reason why God chooses to work through the “worst” kind of sinners.  It has to do with what I call the super-ball effect.  The thing about a super-ball, of course, is the way it bounces.  When you’re playing with one, the game is not to see how high you can throw it – you can do that with any ball.  No, what you want to do with a super-ball is see how high it will rebound when you throw it down with all of your might.  Sinners are like super-balls.  It’s when they are thrown down hard by God – it’s when their illusions about their own inherent goodness are destroyed and when their spiritual trophies are revealed to be the idols (the golden calves) that they really are – that’s when they bounce up the highest because that’s when their hope and reliance on Christ and his sacrifice of atonement is the greatest.  That’s why Paul could say in all truth and humility that he worked harder than all the other apostles.  He wasn’t just tooting his own horn by saying that, what he was doing was giving all credit to the Lord Jesus who threw him down so hard that he rebounded with strength and determination that were not his own.  He accomplished more in Christ because he knew how much he, the chief of sinners, needed Christ and his righteousness.

            So that’s why God chooses the kind of people he does.  And that’s why God chose you – yet another chief of sinners. He chose you so that you too might be an example to others of his unlimited patience and forgiveness in Christ Jesus.  He chose you so that, having thrown you down by confronting you with your sin, you would with the power of his Word and Spirit bounce back infinitely higher than you ever could have climbed on your own.  And he chose you in his Son so that you too would be his own and live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as he is risen from the dead, and lives and reigns to all eternity. So then, may we receive the grace always to confess with St. Paul, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.”  For this is most certainly true.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!