Scot McKnight wrote an interesting post called Imagine a World 2 that could easily be an intro into my book, Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity. Scot says:

Imagine a world, Jesus once told his followers, where lost people get found. Jesus told three such parables, we call them the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. I want to dabble with the first two today. (You can read the texts after the jump.)

We need to begin at the beginning:

Jesus is eating with the wrong people: tax collectors and sinners. They are as much a stereotype as the Pharisees and legal experts who are inspecting Jesus’ evening behaviors at meals.

We’ve got the Good-but-Inspected-Guy doing the merciful and forgiving thing with the wrong people and the right people fundamentally upset about what’s being done.

Welcoming sinners to table — evidently before they had committed themselves to Torah observance — was the wrong thing to do.

In that context, Jesus says a new imagination is in order. And that imagined world begins with Jesus’ behavior and is justified by his stories of a different world.

The kingdom world of Jesus is a world in which tax collectors are sinners are pursued by God — a shepherd seeking for a lost sheep, a woman scouring a home to find one lost coin — in spite of the risk and are pursued by God through great effort. In addition, when God finds such a lost person, God is overjoyed — here you can think of the amount of wine Jesus produced at the wedding at Cana — to the point that he throws a big party. When he finds the sheep he puts atop his shoulders and carries it home to safety and celebration; the woman cherishes the coin and calls her neighbors.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  We need to begin at the beginning and address the fundamental assumptions that keep us from seeing what God sees.