24th Sunday OT: Cycle C 21-22
TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14 | 1 Timothy 1:12-17 | Luke 15:1-32
Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, that we may feel the working of your mercy. Grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.
This is such a rich source of wisdom, these readings. I don’t even know where to start, except I want to obviously start with Exodus. One of the things I’ve found about the Old Testament — and the Bible’s a weird book, in a sense, because you can almost go, and if you’re going to use one-liners, you can make God into anything, a tyrant, an angry, punishing God, a sweet, loving God who adapts to the needs of his people. But nothing seems more important than to realize the ending of the Old Testament story, the full revelation of who God is in Jesus, and the Jesus who appears as the incarnate God is absolutely completely rejected and misunderstood by almost everything that the Old Testament taught. So you get a feeling that we went through a long period of time as human beings were evolving and becoming more conscious of who they were. They were learning about a God almost in stages, from a God who was like all the other gods, tough, angry, intolerant of sin, demanding sacrifices, to a God of mercy. And the one place that the Old Testament could take people during that time was from a place of no laws, no rules to a place of the law, and it was the Ten Commandments. So that was the major, major moment in this story of God the Father working with the Israelite people on the theme, which is throughout the scriptures, how do you move from slavery to freedom. Slavery to what? Slavery to rules and laws. How do you get past that and learn? Through a process of mistakes, sins, problems, who you are, who God is and what you really want, what you really want in your life.
So this first story is so beautiful to me, because it shows that there is, in these early days of Exodus, there is a God who is very much like the other gods. The God Yahweh, the one who says, “I’m the only God,” says, “I’ve just been so worn out by these people. They’re just driving me nuts. They don’t stick with me. They complain all the time. I don't know what I’m going to do with them.” In fact, I love some of these stories, because they make us feel that God is just so like us. But anyway, he’s ready to kill them all. He’s ready to kill them all, and every time you see God changing his mind in the Old Testament, it’s always a change from one thing to another. It’s a change from punishment to mercy, punishment to mercy. And the genius of Moses in this story is that he reminds God of a promise that he made, and so in a way, you could say, in the anger that God felt about the way the Israelites went back to their old ways, what they were really expressing — what God is expressing is his frustration with them, and he really didn’t want to do the destruction. It was just a reaction of anger, and when he’s reminded, “Hey,” Moses says, “You promised these people. You can’t break a promise. How could you bring your people out here and break a promise? What would that look like?” A beautiful story about the evolution of the Old Testament God into the New Testament God.
Now, one of the things that the Old Testament is filled with is — New Testament is too — is the issue of sin, and so in this story, you can see that, when sin was committed, it separated God from the people. Remember, in the first book of Genesis, third chapter of Genesis, when we see sin entering the world through the sin of Adam and Eve, the first reaction of human beings was to feel shame, shame. And what is shame other than a feeling that you are separate from your true self, separate from God? There’s something wrong, something out of balance. It’s a beautiful image of the work that Jesus’ mercy had to accomplish in order for you and me to continue to grow and change. I grew up in a church where sin was the worst thing you could possibly do. Every time I listened to a lesson about anything but morality, it was, “Don’t sin. Don’t sin, because when you sin, you separate yourself from God. And if you separate yourself from God, then there’s nothing, and you’re alone, and it’s dark.” The thing we prize the most, without even realizing it, the thing that we hold onto the most is our relationship with God, and we know now, in the New Testament, God is a lover, a forgiver. He has no reason to ever hold back his love for you or for me, in terms of who we are, because of what we do. He can make that separation so easily.
The thing you do, when it’s a sin, is not really you. So you’re caught in some illusion, some half-truth. You’re seduced into it by someone else, as Adam and Eve was. But the point is, the frightening thing is you are separated from him by your sin, and if that’s really pushed and pushed and pushed inside of you, then the gospel is just what you need, because first of all, the first two images are beautiful images about value. When you value something and you lose it, you’re consumed with trying to find it, and there’s such joy and enthusiasm when you find it. “Where’s my cell phone? Where’s my keys? Where’s this? Where’s that? I have to have it. I have to have it.” And you just go crazy, and yet there’s such a joy in finding it. So he uses, with the scribes and Pharisees, a real attack on their moralism. They think, if they do just what God asks them to do, they have to do nothing more. Follow the letter of the law, and where their heart is, it doesn’t matter. That’s their greatest sin, but even that didn’t separate God from the Pharisees. So you’ll notice that, whether it’s the sheep that is lost or the coin that is lost, there is something that drives people that care for something to keep it, keep connected, keep it one with us.
And then my favorite story, the next one, the younger son and the older son. The one thing about this story that I love so much is that the older son is so representing of the Pharisees. He’s done everything that he was told to do. You can kind of feel, when his brother went off and had a really good time, he resented it. He was angry that he was being celebrated even though he didn’t pay much attention to the fact that he had a conversion because of his sin, but it was all of a sudden this older son was entitled. And when people follow the letter of the law, they can actually fall into that trap of saying, “Listen, I do everything I have to do in order to please God. The rest of my life, which isn’t under the guidance of rules and regulations of the church is mine to use any way I want.” It almost comes to that, but the worst thing that comes with that is, when we do something wrong, when we do sin, something happens to our way of seeing the thing that we sinned in or the problem we had. It’s like the young son, who squandered everything. What he realized was that every sin is a lie. It is a promise that — it promises something that can’t be kept or can’t be received, and so what he finally realizes is the way the life he chose, even though he felt it was his right to do it and he wanted to do it and it felt good to do it, he realized it was empty, empty, empty. And that’s the most beautiful image of why sin exists in the world.
If you have in your mind the desire to stop sinning in all situations, you could never grow and mature as an evolving Christian. Sin is essential. Sin is important, and the thing that is most deadly about it, the sting of sin is death. And the death is not just necessarily like going to hell. No, the death of sin is that gnawing, shameful feeling that you’re not in touch with God any longer, and that is more than we can handle, because I say to you over and over again, the God that lives in you is such an essential part of you for your well-being that, if there’s anything that keeps you from him, that’s dangerous. It leads to darkness and depression. So we have to believe in this thing that so often I don’t think people believe it, that every sin they ever commit is already forgiven — already forgiven. And the other way to say that, and it may be a way that makes more sense, is that nothing that you do keeps you from being who you ultimately really are, and that’s the part that loves you. That’s the part that God loves.
So the challenge of these readings is a wonderful challenge to rethink who is real valuable in the world. Paul is a perfect example. Paul is chosen to be the witness to the mercy of God, the mercy revealed in Jesus of this God who loves sinners, loves them, wants to work with them. Sinners are the only people he can work with, because they have a longing for something that only God can give. And the longing for it is union with God in spite of my sins, called forgiveness. What a gift. So Paul is chosen. He’s a sinner, the worst. He persecuted Christians. He disbelieved in Jesus. He was a Pharisee of the highest rank in the sense of he believed all that, and to take somebody like that, who had gone through a life of following the regulations, rules and things like that and saw Jesus as a lawbreaker and as a disrupter of the power of the institution over people, it’s so easy to see why he is the perfect minister, because he knows what it’s like to be with God, to know his love. He knows the arrogance of thinking, “I don’t need his love. I have earned it. I do everything right. I am perfect in his sight.” But the satisfaction that the older son couldn’t have in the return of his father [sic] is such a beautiful image of the self-righteous ones who do not believe they have to do anything more than the regulations require. That’s a real division from God. Amen.
Father, give us wisdom, the wisdom that is so essential, the wisdom of knowing how you deal with us in our weaknesses, in our brokenness, in our stupidity even. It never diminishes your care and your love. Help us not only to feel that from you but to also offer that to our brothers and sisters as we seek to live the life of forgiveness that brings life and ends separation. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.