1 Timothy 1:12-17 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Second Sunday after Pentecost Sunday, June 7, 2026 “Jesus Loves the Worst of Sinners”
From 2004 until 2020, for 18 seasons total, a show aired on television called The Biggest Loser. I’m sure the producers of the show understood that they had hit on a creative title. To call someone a loser doesn’t usually make them happy. It isn’t a compliment. But in this case, the goal was actually to be the biggest loser. The show was about losing weight. A lot of the people on the show lost a lot of weight. Some over 100 pounds, a few over 200 pounds. The winner of the show was the one who lost the highest percentage of his or her body weight. That’s the biggest loser. The readings in our worship service today suggest a cast of characters for our own sort of reality television show. Maybe we could even steal a title and call this show The Biggest Loser. A little more direct and to the point, we could call it The Biggest Sinner. Let’s think back on the contestants that we’ve introduced. From today’s Gospel, we have Matthew. Pretty much what we have to say about Matthew is the job that he was doing. If there was one job at the time when Jesus lived that was associated with sin, one job that everyone detested, it was the job that Matthew had. He was a tax collector. Tax collectors were notorious sinners. They worked for the Roman government, and the Romans were the ones keeping God’s people the Israelites away from ruling themselves and living productively in the Promised Land, at least according to the way many people thought. Tax collectors were largely Jewish people, Israelites, who were working for the enemy. They were taking money from their own people and giving it to their oppressors. And on top of all that, they were not very honest about it. The way they got to be tax collectors was by promising a certain income to the Romans. Then they went out and got as much money as they could from their own people so they could keep plenty for themselves. We have no reason to suspect that Matthew was somehow drastically different. He was a tax collector. That’s our contestant one. Contestant two lived long before Matthew did. He lived before the people had come to the Promised Land. He lived while the people were serving as slaves in Egypt. Contestant two is Moses. God called Moses to be a leader. We heard about that in our First Reading. Moses objected. “Who am I?” he asked. “What if they ask me who you are?” he asked God. Moses had other objections that we didn’t read. He was not very confident in his ability to step up, and seemingly for good reason. No doubt Moses remembered what had happened the last time he had tried to step up and rally his people and help them. He had killed a man. And the people didn’t even follow him, they were just worried that he might do something to them in anger. Believe it or not, contestant three is going to be our winner. He tells us as much. Paul does not say that he is a very bad sinner. He says he is the worst. We don’t usually like to confess that. We try to minimize our sins in comparison to others. We try to rationalize them away, explain the challenging circumstances that got us there. We try to convince people our sins aren’t so bad. The comparison game looks pretty good for us right now, doesn’t it? We didn’t kill anyone. We didn’t betray our own people to make a little money off of oppressors. We didn’t do what Paul did, either. Paul briefly summarizes his past as he calls himself “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man.” Maybe you’ve learned about his life before. The first time Scripture introduces us to Paul, he actually goes by the name Saul, and he is the guy watching the coats of the people stoning a Christian man named Stephen to death. Pretty violent. It gets worse, because Paul believed that this was the thing that Jewish believers should be doing. He thought of Christians, followers of Christ, as people who had abandoned the true faith and needed to be stopped. Paul got orders from high ranking officials, and he began to round up as many Christians as he could. He went from town to town looking for them. He would have people killed for what they believed and confessed, and he was absolutely convinced that he was doing what was best. And then God stopped him. The living Jesus Christ came to Paul right as he was traveling to do more of his dirty work. He was on his way to Damascus, and he was headed there to find Christians and send them to the authorities. Instead, Jesus met him in a blinding light and told him that he was persecuting the one who had died and was alive again. And Jesus had big plans for Paul. Paul writes about that here: “he treated me