Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 7:11-14 OR Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15: 1-10 I once imagined the easiest commandment to keep was the one against idolatry. It seemed rather simple: don’t go sacrificing animals to statues of false gods and I’d be fine. I was much younger then. I hadn’t yet lived into life’s ambiguities, hadn’t yet recognized the power of my own desires, hadn’t yet read enough theology – Augustine in particular.
When I understood idolatry as getting the order of my loves wrong, specifically by desiring (and thus secretly worshipping) something more than God, I saw false gods everywhere. Nearly all recorded history – from the founding of ancient Sumer to the unedifying rhetoric of the current US presidential race – can be read through a biblical lens as a very long series of idolatries, all of them sad.
In the same way that a microscope reveals nasty-looking creatures swimming in a glass of tainted water, a biblical lens makes visible the idolatries that reign in what we like to call “the world,” as if we were merely in the world and not of it. The Bible doesn’t cut us much slack when it comes to our dealings with the world. What other nation besides the Jews would include the prophets – those town criers of communal betrayal and merited retribution – in their sacred texts, second only to Torah itself?
As for Christians today, it’s not as if the line between faithful church and idolatrous world is bright, broad, and evident to all. Nor am I one to lecture another on keeping one’s loves in the proper order. If I’m able to rightly name another’s sin, it’s because I know that sin from the inside.
The Bible encourages us to be faithful, to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, (and mind, per the New Testament), but it concedes that we’re likely to fail. Our hearts are soiled, we’re not quite sure what a soul is, we've spent our strength on trivial tasks, and our minds are forever distracted.
Prophets like Isaiah, Hosea, and Ezekiel readily acknowledge this. Yet their sense of God’s response to our waywardness is somewhat different than that in this week’s Exodus reading, where Moses apparently needs to talk God down from yet another fit of righteous anger. For these prophets, the revealed dynamic is God’s fidelity to us despite our serial adulteries. The metaphorical language turns from crime and punishment to betrayal and reconciliation. Bad things follow when we redirect our loves away from God and toward lesser goods, but God remains faithful, beckoning us homeward.
The first century Jewish prophet that Christians recognize as Messiah and Son of God knew Torah well enough to argue with fellow rabbis. He quotes often from Exodus and Deuteronomy. He surely prayed the psalms, quoting them as well. Among the prophets, he had a fondness for Isaiah.
When confronted by rabbis who complain about his poor taste in dinner companions, Jesus responds with the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep. It’s a story we Christians have heard too often to hear well. Does it really make human sense for a shepherd to leave ninety-nine sheep unwatched and unprotected while searching for a single stray that might be trapped, wounded, or already dead? He better have some well-trained and ferocious-looking dogs to mind the flock while he’s gone.
The parable of the woman and the lost coin is similarly opaque to us moderns. Having invited the neighborhood over to share her joy, how is she going to afford the expected hospitality one shows guests? Might it cost more than a single coin? Like the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine to find the one, she’s not doing the math right.
It helps to recall that these two parables lead directly into the so-called “Prodigal Son” story, in which the real dynamic (also rendered opaque by focusing on the wayward son) is the contrast between the “good son’s” understandable sense of fairness and the father’s truly prodigal celebration of forgiveness. When it comes to forgiveness, God isn’t reasonable. At least not in human terms.
The singer-songwriter duo, Over the Rhine, has a song named,
“All My Favorite People are Broken.” Broken people happen to be God’s favorite, too – perhaps because that’s the only way they come. God loves broken people so much he let us break Jesus’ body on the cross – not to abandon Jesus there but to make painfully clear that our brokenness isn’t the final word. The final word is – now and always – God’s fidelity and love.
The Body of Christ we are called to join is made of broken people. None of us deserve to be there. We’re all idolators who’ve been given a second, third, or four hundred and ninetieth chance to love the proper things in their proper order. It doesn’t come naturally to us. We shouldn’t imagine it’s any easier for the people who annoy, offend, or wrong us. That may take me a long time to accept. Good thing God’s got the time.
The seventh century desert ascetic, Isaac of Syria, gets very near the heart of today’s gospel in his fifty-first homily:
Be a herald of God’s goodness, for God rules over you, unworthy though you are. Although your debt to Him is very great, He is not seen exacting payment from you; and from the small works you do, He bestows great rewards ... Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright, His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind.
Amen.