This morning’s ‘Ice-breaker’ that we gave you as you took your seats for Cafe Church was a light-hearted exercise to get you thinking about how we naturally look at people and are tempted to pigeon-hole them or put them into categories...often on the basis of very little knowledge of them or perhaps just on hearsay or on what we’ve read in the newspapers. At worst, I am sure you have heard people put whole professions, countries, races into the ‘bad’ or ‘sinners’ pigeonhole. Now we know that’s not the right thing to do – well, yes, alright, there’s always the French. But seriously though, when we think about whom God loves and whom Jesus came to save, if we are tempted to pigeon-hole people in this way we can all too easily forget or even get in the way of his message of mercy and forgiveness offered to all. And, sadly, it is often the good – or at least those who, like the Pharisee in our reading or the Charity Worker in our sketch, consider themselves good – who are the worst offenders! Someone once said, ‘You really can’t be looking up to God if you are too busy looking down your nose at your neighbour?’ The Pharisee and the Tax-collector were praying because they want to be acceptable to God, to enter his Kingdom, to go to Heaven. The sketch brought this to the present day and gave a broader range of people.
Now of course as a society, at work, at school, we have to be honest and realistic about people’s bad behaviour, and take appropriate action to prevent people hurting themselves or others; and it’s no use pretending people are good when they’re not. But, Christians, says Jesus, are to learn to look at other people the way he does. What he sees is not just their problems but their potential; their potential, that is, when they start to really trust in him.
Many people of course trust in themselves or in something else, such as money or status or success – which is so often why they find their relationships with other people and with God so difficult: others, like the tax-collector or the banker in the sketch, have no trust left at all, especially in themselves, because, unlike the proud, they think they are not good enough for God. The problem is that both too little as well as too much confidence in ourselves can make it difficult for God to get through to us!
In Jesus’ day, whilst the self-righteous tended to avoid him or try to entrap him, the sinners flocked to him; but they no longer flock to the church today. So what are we doing wrong? Why is it that so many people think of the church as a place where you may go ONLY once you’ve cleaned up your act? If the Church is called to proclaim and to live God’s message of reconciliation, what do we need to do, perhaps to change, in order to make the Church attractive to sinners? What are we are not doing? What are we doing to put them off?
Well, Jesus told us that the reason why he came was – ‘to save sinners’, and certainly one of the reasons why people don’t come to church is because they think, rightly or wrongly, that the people who go to Church consider themselves to be better than those who don’t. Now we can cry ‘Untrue, untrue, all we like; but that is what many people think. Now without a doubt, the first thing that any Christian has to understand about himself or herself is that she or he is a ‘sinner’. I know it is not a term people like but it is just a technical or descriptive term describing people who are not perfect. So unless there is anyone here who thinks that they are perfect – don’t get me wrong, I think you are all wonderful – but none of us is perfect. To ‘sin’ simply means to ‘fall short of the mark’; in this case, God’s mark. And God’s mark, if you want to know where the standard lies, what the entry requirement is for Heaven, for eternal life, is Jesus. That’s why we are all sinners; all of us, because he is the standard. So the next time someone calls you a sinner, instead of squaring up to them or bursting into tears, you can begin a very productive conversation with them by saying, ‘Yes, I am, but I’m a forgiven sinner; and God is helping me to become more like Jesus.’ When we admit this, it not only helps us in being honest about ourselves, it helps us to look at other people differently; it helps us to begin to see them as Jesus sees them – not just their shortcomings, not just their sins, not just their problems, but their potential...with him.
This looking at people in terms of their potential with Jesus is called grace: it’s not about pretending people are good when they’re obviously not; nor is about being tolerant of things about people that are in fact intolerable; it’s about seeing them as Jesus sees them. Jesus didn’t inspect the track record and cross-question the thief on the cross before he promised that he would be with him in heaven, he just accepted the thief’s admission of guilt and his desire to be with him...that’s the first step in repentance - responding to Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, reconciliation, and eternal life. Now many of you here I am sure have fantastic track records of being good, and that’s great; but no matter how good you try to become, God is not going to love you any the more; equally well, however bad – heaven forbid !- you become, he is not going to love you any the less; because, like any parent, you are his creation, he loves you, and he wants the best for you.
The danger for those who are so aware of their own achievements and of others’ failings is that it becomes very difficult for them to keep the Second Commandment, very difficult to act with grace, very difficult to see people and treat people the way Jesus did. At our Church School in the village we have five ‘core values’; each one of these is based upon the teaching of Jesus and how he treated people. C.S. LEWIS said this: ‘To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in others because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.’
And yes, if we insist on going our own way and refusing his help, then we do take ourselves further and further away from his love. And the further we move, the more difficult it is for us to respond to his love. But he never stops loving us or trying to call us back: it’s just that we become more and more blind to it, more and more deaf, the further we move away from him. There really is nothing we can do to make God love us more: there really is nothing we can do to make God love us less. But the question remains, how will we respond to his forgiveness and love?
We are all of us sinners in need of God’s forgiveness; but God gave up his own son rather than give up on us. Such love!
I think Jesus preferred the company of sinners because they had an honesty about themselves that he did not find in the self-righteous. There was no pretence, so He could deal with them. The self-righteous put on airs and put up defences. In the end it was the righteous not the sinners who arrested him. When the Christian looks at another human-being, he or she looks at a fellow sinner. The question we must ask them is whether or not they know themselves to be a forgiven sinner. 
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