Faith Practices – Deep Celebration
A sermon brought forth from Luke 15:1-10 preached on July 31, 2022
The spiritual disciplines help us keep Christ close. They lead us underneath the surface of our lives and into its depths. When it comes to our faith, we tend to keep up with the externals, but God’s not interested in external expressions. God doesn’t want moralists or rule-keepers; God wants companions—people who spend their days responding to His Presence.
The Pharisees stopped listening to God. Instead, they took all words God had given their people over the centuries, the ones meant to lead them into rich life with God and one another, and calcified them. They made relics out of what God had always intended to be a means of relationship. Instead of following God, they followed a bunch of external rules—and they called it devotion.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore the spiritual disciplines of prayer, wonder, remembering, and serving. When we give ourselves to the spiritual disciplines of our faith, we give ourselves to God, to a real personal presence. We’re in search of a relationship with Christ that has substance and a consequential faith—that is, a faith that changes things. If we’re not in search of a closer relationship with Jesus, we’re just playing church.
Through the spiritual disciplines, we are being discipled by Jesus. By giving ourselves to them, we do not learn what we should believe about Jesus, we learn to be with Jesus, to be attentive to the heart of God. God intends for us to grow toward Christlikeness.
In the words of Biblical spirituality teacher, Don Whitney,
“We aren't merely to wait for holiness; we're to pursue it."
We’re to seek after God’s heart, and God’s heart is made of celebration. God rejoices in His creation. He has from the beginning. And from the beginning creation itself took joy in the God who made it. We are made to rejoice, and God is good.
“This man receives sinners and eats with them.”
That is the Pharisees’ indictment of Jesus. That was their gotcha line. That, they thought, should be all it takes to discredit Jesus, to make all the people following Him around and hanging on every word coming from His mouth walk away, dismiss Him, and reject Him. “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”
But could there be a more comforting statement about the goodness of God than that? This is one of those rare instances where the Pharisees preach the Gospel, that this man receives sinners. Yes, this is good news for you and me. What they meant as an indictment, we celebrate with praise.
“This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Maybe there’s hope for me yet! That’s the Gospel. The Pharisees had no intention of preaching the Gospel for Jesus, they meant to malign Him. It’s the tax collectors and sinners—the ones the Pharisees were mad at Jesus for receiving and eating with—who are the ones heaven is ecstatic to have. Heaven’s not chasing after Pharisees, because the Pharisees don’t think they’re lost, and they find no need to repent. There’s no joy for them because even with Jesus right in front of them they can’t hear the heavens celebrating. The tax collectors and sinners see Jesus and know that heaven’s close. The Pharisees couldn’t.
These two parables depict the compassionate concern of a living God and His unbounded joy when the lost are found. What shepherd throws a block party because they find one lost sheep? Seems a bit overboard. Or what woman invites her neighbors over for an open house after finding a day’s wages? She probably spent three days’ wages at Party City preparing for it. These people need to sign up for an accounting class. This all seems like over-celebration. It’s all out of perspective. It’s wasteful. Which is the point.
The way God celebrates is wasteful and uneconomical. It isn’t prudent. These parables illustrate heaven’s joy-filled response when lost people are found and come back home, and God is more committed to the search for us than any shepherd with a missing sheep or woman who’s down a day’s wages. But they cannot celebrate alone. Heaven delights in the recovery of what’s lost. That news is too good to keep bottled up.
The cost of throwing a party no doubt exceeds the value of either the sheep or the lost coin, but that only adds to the extravagance and joy of the occasion. We celebrate who we are in the presence of God, and we do that with each other. We are called to go out of our way to celebrate how loved another is in the presence of God.
These parables are about restoration, return, and standing in the joy of finding. God is committed to searching for His people. Just as the shepherd and the woman exhaust themselves in an unreasonable and diligent search for their lost possessions, God is irrational in His love to regain what’s lost about us. No time doing so is counted as lost, and no cost is too great. What is lost about us has not been forgotten by God. It’s treasured by God. In Jesus's parables, it’s not the shepherd’s or the woman’s recognition that’s celebrated; it’s the lost thing now found that’s the reason for joy.
But before we go further, we need to know there’s an essential difference between celebrating and being entertained. There’s nothing wrong with entertaining or being entertained, but there’s something we should notice about it. We seek out entertainment when we want something for ourselves when we need to gratify a need we have. When it comes to entertainment, we aren’t looking to get personally involved, we’re looking to forget about the real world for a little while. When we celebrate, though, we forget ourselves and we move toward others, we concern ourselves with someone else’s joy, and we give the best of who we are out of gratitude for another.
When we celebrate when we’re able to move past ourselves, forget our needs, and join with others in joy. Underneath celebration is the astounding recognition that we live in a large and good world, and we are just a small part of it.
And do you want to know the greatest of all truths? God in Jesus Christ has done that for us. You are cause for God’s deep celebration?
Celebration, at its heart, is the practice of choosing to be truly present in the moments in our lives, to slow down enough to connect with what was happening to those around Him. You can bet that because Jesus saw with God’s eyes, He noticed all that was bent out of shape about this world, but still, He stopped and took notice of what was good. Jesus was able to receive the sacred things that every day brings. He spent them upon this earth celebrating—attuned and responsive to the God of all good gifts.
A celebration can involve big plans, going out to eat, fireworks, and birthday parties, but at its heart, author Shauna Niequist writes,
“it's about being present to what is, noticing the good that still exists even in the middle of the broken.”1
Celebration also deepens our attention. When we celebrate in the way God intends, our love for Him, for this life He has for us, and our love for our neighbors will grow. Through the spiritual practice of celebration, we delight in circumstances, relationships, and occasions that help us remember and anticipate God's abundant goodness, creativity, faithfulness, beauty, and love.
I invite you into the spiritual practice of deep celebration. Try this: Take a stroll sometime this week. Have nowhere in particular in mind. Just walk. Bring your phone with you but put it on airplane mode. Have it only to take pictures with.
Other ideas: Pause to mark the milestones in your and your family’s life, even the minor ones that nobody else notices. Celebrate other people. Congratulate someone else’s achievement, small or large. Watch the sun rise or set. Or maybe both. Notice all the ways the world is bigger than you but holds onto you and gives itself to you.
Seek after your family and friends. If you’ve put off getting together with anyone, track them down this week. Don’t wait any longer. Make plans to find one another. And when you gather, celebrate the differences you’ve made in each other’s lives. Tell the stories of all the ways you have found yourselves in one another, how you’re all better human beings because of each other. Tell the whole story.
And celebrate that God has more to give this world.
All praise to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.
Shauna Niequist, “What is Celebration?”, Today’s Christian Woman, Christianity Today, 2013.