Sermon - Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost (9/15/2019)
Ex. 32:7-14; Ps. 51:1-10; 1 Tim. 1:12-17; Lk. 15:1-10
Imagine that, when you get home from church this morning, one of your neighbors is in front of her house and waves you over as you drive up. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, I wanted to tell you. I had ten coins but when I looked this morning there were only nine, and I tore my house apart looking for it everywhere.” I’m sorry, I haven’t seen it. “No, I found it! It was under the rug in the bathroom. But I found it! Come inside and rejoice with me!”
I don’t know about you, but I would be a little cautious. Something seems excessive, doesn’t it? I mean, I misplace things all the time, and it’s a relief when I find them, but I generally don’t feel the urge to share the joy with my neighbors. This morning I couldn’t find my glasses. If you have glasses you know it’s hard to lose them because you can’t see them very well without your glasses. I crawled around the floor under the bed, more than once, and nothing. Then I found them on my desk next to the computer. And I was happy, I suppose, for a moment. But if I wasn’t preaching on these texts this morning, I don’t think it would have occurred to me to bother sharing the experience at all, let alone to throw a party to celebrate the accomplishment. “I found a coin; rejoice with me?” It sounds like somebody looking for a reason to drink.
Jesus tells these two stories of losing, and seeking, and finding, and rejoicing as the warmup act to the story of the Prodigal Son. A man had a hundred sheep and lost one of them; a woman had ten coins and lost one of them; a father had two sons and lost one of them – well, both of them, actually, in different ways. The man, and the woman, and the father, all of them go to extraordinary lengths to find what they had lost. The stories are all memorable because the man, and the woman, and the father all go above and beyond what most people would do to find what they had lost. And the man, and the woman, and the father all rejoice extravangently when they find what was missing.
And I suppose it is perhaps obvious that the man and the woman and the father are intended to show us something of what God is like. Jesus is being criticized for eating at table with the wrong kinds of people, and Jesus responds by telling stories about a God who is like a man, a woman, and a father who keep losing things, and people. But who are not satisfied until every single one who is lost is restored. Who will do anything, even things that don’t make a lot of sense, to get back what was lost. And who is determined in the end to rejoice over the restoration of everyone and everything to its proper place. This is the character of God, says Jesus – and moreover, this has always been the character of God.
If you want to see how the Biblical witness has always been that the character of God is to spare no effort to bring back what is lost, take a look at today’s first reading. The people have just left Egypt and made their way to Mount Sinai, where God is going to give them the Law for how they are to live as God’s people in the Promised Land. At Mount Sinai Moses goes up the mountain alone, and God gives the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law to Moses there on Mount Sinai.
But Moses is gone a long time, and the people get nervous. And they pool together their gold, and make a golden calf. Ultimately the people decided that the golden calf was the god who delivered them from Egypt. Now, they weren’t stupid, they knew that the physical object of the golden calf had not delivered them from Egypt; they didn’t even make it until after they left. But it was a way of saying, with symbolism and with stories and with devotion, that they had escaped from Egypt by their own power in order to do whatever it was they wanted to do. Like the proverbial kid who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, the people took God’s gift of freedom and said it was their own accomplishment.
And up on Mount Sinai, God sees that the people of God are lost. And God loses it, so to speak, for a moment. God says, Moses, you won’t believe what your people are up to. And Moses is, like, my people? Look, I was minding my own business when you called me to take care of your people. But God goes on to say, No, I’ve had it with these people. I give them freedom and this is what they do with it? Forget it, let me just send them all to hell right now. I’ll start over again with you, Moses, I’ll make your descendents as countless as the stars in the sky, et cetera, et cetera, you know the rest. And Moses says, No, God, you can’t do that. It’s not in your nature, it’s not who you are.
First of all, Moses says, you can’t free your people from Egypt and then destroy them as soon as they leave. What will the Egyptians think? Who is ever going to trust you again? And what about the promise you made to Abraham, to give the Promised Land to his descendents? Was that an unconditional promise or not? If it’s conditional, if you can take it away from the descendents of Abraham and give it to the descendents of Moses instead, what good is it? You’ll just take it away again. No, you chose a people, you made promises to them, you started this project of working with one people in this world so that you could bring peace and life to the whole world. Have you lost your people? Then you need to get them back again.
There is a whole strain of theology coming from the Reformation that stresses the complete sovereignty of God – God can do whatever God wants and we have no right to complain. If God wants to predestine people to hell, ours is not to question why. Martin Luther was strongly opposed to this view – Luther agreed that God is God and we are not, but Luther said that the God of the Bible is a God who makes promises. A promise to God’s people, and a promise to each one of us in our baptism, to be our God who loves us and sets us free no matter what. And so unless you are willing to call God a liar, then we should hold God to those promises. If you’re going to worship a God who can do whatever God wants, including abandon God’s promises, then you might as well worship the golden calf. It’s the same idea. But, Moses reminds God that if God wants to work in the world through a people, then when the people get lost, God has no choice but to bring them back again. And God agrees with Moses.
But if God’s character is to be faithful to God’s promises, then of course, when any of us, or all of us, misuse the freedom and the good things of the world that God has given us, then God will not rest until everything that was lost has been found again. And this is, I think, the defense that Jesus makes of his own apparent lack of standards about whom he associates with: We know that God does anything to find what is lost, to heal what is broken, to right what is wrong, so if we are God’s children why should we not do the same? If it seems odd for Jesus, or for Christians generally, to care so much for the lost and forgotten, perhaps we don’t trust the character of God the way Moses did, or Martin Luther did.
So let’s be bold and remind God, as well as ourselves, this morning, of God’s promise never to abandon us, never to stop loving us, never to write off a single person as lost. Let’s come to the Lord’s table, all of us, as God’s invited guests, and receive the promise that God would do anything, give us God’s own flesh and blood, to bring us back and make real in us the promises God has made. Let’s try to enter into the celebration of all of heaven whenever God finds the lost and sets them free.