Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Exodus 32:7-14 Psalm 51:1-10 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10 Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you from the one who is revealed as merciful. Amen The psalmist cries out to God today, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; in your great compassion blot out my offenses” then goes on to acknowledge that they know they’ve really messed up, they’ve sinned against God and they deserve whatever judgement God hands down and yet they are still bold to call on God to forgive them and end with the petition “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” a petition which frankly seems pretty bold given what the psalmist acknowledged earlier. Who is this person that would be so bold as to ask God to do these things, or perhaps the better question is, who is this God who would hear and consider these requests? Who is God? Yep we’re going there this morning, who is God? Paul in our reading from 1 Timothy describes God as “the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.” and that is a good general description of what most monotheists would say about God, God is the only God, God is immortal-outside of time and God is invisible, we cannot see God, what we know of God is only what God has chosen to reveal to us. And the moments of revelation upon which we most depend are found in the scriptures, the stories of God and people and while that’s a start, even these revelations present a variety of pictures of who God is even in just our selections for today In Exodus we have the all-powerful God meeting with Moses on the mountain top and who is acting kind of like a sullen teenager. God has rescued the Israelites, the people God chose, from Egypt, has led them into the desert and has given them the 10 commandments, God even let the people approach the mountain to see the glory of God, but it was too much for them, they were content to let Moses do all the talking with God, so now Moses has been up on the mountain getting the particulars of the law, and he’s been gone a long time, so long that the people think, well he’s probably dead by now what with all that glory of the Lord, it’s time to take matters into our own hands, so they go to Aaron and say give us a god to worship, and Aaron seemingly without questioning the request takes all their gold and makes the image of a calf and says here, go worship this. Which gets us to our reading for today where God notices what the people have done, how quickly they’ve forgotten the covenant they made with God and “The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” The people messed up and God is ready to give up, change plans, focus on the one who has stayed loyal, maybe pout a bit but unlike a teenager, God’s wrath could actually consume all the people. But here Moses intercedes for the people, Moses reminds God of all the promises God has made over the generations, all the trouble God went to with the plagues, and on top of that, what will the Egyptians think of you if you do this? Moses asks, that you just brought them out to kill them in the mountains. “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.” God can change God’s mind, God is merciful. Which is good for us, because it also seems like God gets really unhappy when people break the rules and God has the power to do something about it. So that’s one picture of God, one who gets angry but is merciful. Then we have Jesus in our gospel for today, we confess that Jesus is God, and so what Jesus does reveals who God is and here he is, teaching a wide variety of people, the usual suspects the scribes and Pharisees who can always be found around a good lecture but also the unlikely suspects the tax collectors and sinners, those whose lives don’t seem to reflect much time spent with God and this is annoying to the pharisees, the professional church goers, who grumble “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” the subtext is that he must not be a very good scholar of the law if he ignores what it says about associating with sinners. And here Jesus, God, turns to them and tells two parables, two teaching stories about first a shepherd who had lost a sheep and then a woman who had lost a coin both go to great lengths to find what they had lost and upon finding the sheep and the coin gather their neighbors together to celebrate. Often interpretations of these stories make the shepherd and the woman the characters who represent God who here is relentless, stubborn, insistent and tireless in pursuit of what was lost, but God here is also foolish because the one who searches in the story is also the one who loses the sheep and the coin in the first place, and they are foolish for spending so much time on one sheep when they had 99 others or on one coin of moderate value when they had 9 others, surely the expense of the party thrown when the lost was found far outweighed that one sheep or that one coin. But this is God’s foolishness, foolishness that shows insistent mercy to the lost, who others have calculated to be not worth the trouble, God here, goes to the trouble in defiance of common sense. “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” foolish mercy And the foolishness of God continues on, for who but a fool would use someone who is trying to kill a cause to further it. That’s what Paul was doing, trying to kill the Jesus movement through actually killing those involved, and it’s this person on the way to expand their terror that Jesus comes to and calls, and whose life is changed to where his travels are then to spread the news of Jesus and his letters go to various communities around the world to strengthen their faith in Jesus. Paul says “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners- of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.” Much like the psalmist Paul is fully aware that he deserves whatever judgement God decides to hand down for his actions as a blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence. And he wonders at the grace and mercy of God, who sought him out was patient with him, who changed his life drastically so that now he lives as an example to others of life in Christ. In Paul God is revealed as one who not only uses but seeks out the unlikely, and is patient and persistent with them as grace and mercy turns their lives upside down. Who would do something like that? God, creator of the universe, that’s who, God who gets angry, and then changes their mind, God who is relentless, stubborn, insistent, tireless, foolish, patient, confusing, God, who time after time is revealed as merciful choosing to forgive rather than judge, choosing to set aside anger or what would make the most sense in favor of life and a fresh start no matter how angry God is like with the Israelites, or how little the person is valued by the world like the lost sheep and coin, or even how hopeless a case it seems to be like Paul, God can and will forgive and will create clean hearts and renew right spirits, and God has promised us, through Jesus that God will treat us in the same way When we confess our sins knowing we deserve to be judged, God responds with forgiveness, when we feel lost and insignificant God goes great lengths to find us when we intentionally turn from God, God pursues us with grace and mercy, and when God finally finds us, stuck in a ravine or under the couch covered in dust, God rejoices, because that’s who God is. Amen
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AboutPastor Emily Johnson preaches weekly at Christ Lutheran. These are manuscripts of her sermons given at Christ Lutheran. Feel free to engage with them in the comments section of the blog. Archives
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