Who Is the Sinner?

I asked my wife if she could tell me the theme of Pastor Tim’s sermon on Sunday, January 17th. It was from Luke 15 and the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep. She said, “It was that God’s love for us is crazy; He’s more interested in finding us than we are determined to be lost.”

She always was smarter than me. Well put, I agreed; that was the theme. And I added that the practical application was “therefore go hang out with sinners. It’s okay.”

That’s good news. We get to go out and meet the world. By all means let’s go hang out with sinners. Most of us like the idea. Most of us have a nice little fantasy movie in our heads that shows Jesus hanging out with oppressed and rejected peasants who just need to be given a chance, and they seem to love Him so much. They just needed someone to believe in them.

It’s the myth of the “Noble Savage.” It would make a nice 3-D animated movie that would make fourteen year old girls cry. You could end the movie with Jesus and all the oppressed sinners holding hands in a big circle – a true Kumbaya moment. However, I think reality is much more sobering. Hanging out with sinners is probably much less romantic than we imagine. It probably wouldn’t be any more rewarding than hanging out with church poeple. I mean, people are people. What they’re going to do is hurt us and let us down, just like church-people. What’s worse is, we are probably going to hurt them and let them down – just like we do church people.

I was pondering the well-known statistic proclaiming that the divorce rate inside the Church is about the same as the divorce rate outside the Church. And I started wondering if that was true across the moral board.

If we took a giant back-hoe scoop and scooped up a bucket-load of people randomly from a Sunday morning church meeting (say a thousand or so) and another giant bucket-load of people from say, a Giants game (another thousand), and we compared the two groups, would we find about the same percentage of drug addicts, adulterers, closet drunks, sexual predators, chronic liars, superficial materialists, and self-righteous moralists? Would we find that some of these have turned to Jesus and some have not, just like in church?

Hmm? We wonders, yes we wonders…

- The Crank