Lectionary readings: Exodus 32:7-14 and 1
Timothy 1:12-17 and Luke 15:1-10
In our Old Testament reading, we see the Lord God and
Moses in conversation. The Lord has appointed Moses to lead his people, whom
the Lord has delivered from great distress in Egypt and brought out with the
intention of establishing them in the land God had promised to Abraham’s
descendants. But even as the Lord grants Moses a private audience, as our late
Queen met with fifteen Prime Ministers in private audience, the people are
quick to turn away from the One who had delivered them from evil. In the Hebrew,
the Lord says to Moses something to the effect of, ‘Let me draw in my breath
through my nostrils,’ the idea that we live because God’s breath is in our
lungs and when the Lord breathes that breath back in, we are unmade. The Lord
says, ‘Depart from before me, Moses, that you may be spared, for I am about to
recall the life breath of the people.’ But Moses does not depart. Instead, he
intercedes for his people before the Lord, pleads that they might be spared,
and, indeed, flourish, to the glory of the Lord’s reputation.
It may be sheer coincidence that the Lectionary invites
us to reflect on this portion of Scripture this Sunday, but it is deeply
fitting, for Elizabeth II was a Queen who interceded on behalf of the people
she believed God had appointed her to lead, at the end of every day, for over
seventy years. At the time she came to the throne, it was the consensus that
the Lord had delivered us from the horror of a second world war within a generation.
By the time of her Silver Jubilee, that consensus was long gone; how soon we forget
and turn away from the Lord. And yet, she continued to intercede for us; and we
will never know what enormity of loss was held back on account of one prayerful
woman not much more than five feet tall.
In our Epistle from the New Testament, we hear the
apostle Paul reflect on his gratitude to Jesus Christ his Lord, ‘who has
strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,’
despite his own deep awareness of his own shortcomings.
And, again, this was likewise the repeated public
testimony of our late Sovereign Lady Elizabeth. In different ways, we are all
called by Jesus into his service, however unworthy, unprepared, or unlikely we
feel; and this can be your testimony, too.
But it is on the Gospel that I would like to focus
today.
We are created to be integrated beings. When we read
in the law that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your
neighbour as yourself” (see Luke 10:25-37) this is not an injunction,
but a promise: you shall love, in this fully-integrated,
all-encompassing, way, even if that is not yet your experience. This is the
Word speaking something into being, just as that same Word declared, ‘“Let
there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and
God separated the light from the darkness.’ (Genesis 1:3, 4).
We are created to be integrated beings. And yet, in
our formative years, we might experience things that cause us to push away parts
of the person God is calling into being, deep down into our subconscious; or to
fragment ourselves, at the physical level of the connections within our brain. We
are created to be integrated beings. But in these past few days, since the
announcement of the Queen’s death, and the Proclamation of our new King, Charles
III, many will have found themselves somewhat discombobulated. For most of her
subjects, the Queen has been the only monarch we have known, a constant in change,
including the change in our purses and pockets. Her passing has resulted in a
slow-motion explosion in our common life, in which the weight and cost of the
pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis, and a nonstop news cycle, as well as
our own personal losses of loved ones, are, also, all caught up. So, we may find
ourselves, our heart and soul and strength and mind, blown apart.
The search for meaning, for an integrated life—whether
looked for in work, or financial security, or pleasure; or in an ever-present
monarch—is, ultimately, the search for God in our lives: the object of our
love, around whom all our desires find their homecoming.
In Luke chapter 15, we see both observant
Pharisees and scribes, and divergent tax collectors and sinners come to Jesus.
Each, in their own different ways, live fragmented lives. One group is afraid
of losing God’s favour; the other believes they do not deserve God’s favour. One
group has known inconsistent care, perhaps through loss or hardship; the other,
an absence of safety, perhaps through more and greater losses. One is
risk-averse; the other, reckless. Both groups are intrigued by Jesus, and
whether he is good for them or not. And when the Pharisees grumble on account
of Jesus welcoming sinners and eating with them, he responds with stories,
about sinners.
A sinner is one who falls short. Jesus tells a story
about a shepherd, a story about a woman. The shepherd has a hundred sheep and
loses one. The woman has ten silver coins and loses one. In each instance,
their wholeness is broken. Not utter disintegration, but crisis enough to cause
agitation and cry out for resolution.
Shepherds did not own sheep; they were responsible,
for the sheep, to the owner of the sheep. The woman’s coins are her wedding
dowry, and she was accountable to her husband. Each has fallen short. Each is a
sinner. And each repents, or turns around, retraces their steps, finds what
they have lost. Then each one calls together their friends and neighbours to
rejoice with them. Both the shepherd and the woman are restored to wellbeing.
The tax collectors and sinners are finding Jesus—the lamb
of God; the coin bearing the image of the king—and calling their friends and
neighbours to rejoice with them, in joyful, celebratory feasts. The Pharisees
and scribes are also searching, are so close to the end of their searching, and
yet, there is something holding them back. They are not, yet, able to enter the
experience of joy. Jesus goes so far as to imply that they ‘need no repentance’
to do so: it is they, themselves, holding themselves back from taking the final
step to the table.
Telling them directly won’t help them: they’ll deny
it, and walk away; or agree, but still be unable to find joy. Jesus needs to
find a way to help them integrate their experience into a coherent story, for
themselves. He does so through the telling of stories: stories that are quite
open-ended, and thick with multiple layers. If their upbringing has caused them
to see God as distant and austere, waiting to pronounce disappointment or
disapproval, then here’s a story set in the wilderness, the austere place where
God provided manna and quail day after day, week on week, month on month, year
on year. Give them a story that allows them to take up the fragments of their
own stories and present them as a coherent whole. If their upbringing has
caused them to see God as a husband to be tip-toed around, here is a story open
enough to see themselves as beloved, adorned, honoured. Here are stories in
which you might search, until you find what you need: meaning—given by Jesus.
And this, according to Jesus’ stories, integrates all
creation: heaven and earth, angels and humans, sinners and friends and
neighbours.
Her Late Majesty the Queen knew that she was a
shepherd, entrusted with the care of the Lord’s sheep. That she was a woman
entrusted by God with a crown, just as the woman in Jesus’ parable had been
given a string of silver coins by her husband to wear on her forehead. That she
was a sinner, who fell short of what was entrusted to her care, but who
nonetheless was determined to search until she found Jesus in every circumstance;
Jesus, who strengthened her, having found her faithful in the service to which
he had appointed her. And in this mutual trust, she found great joy—and threw a
lot of parties. Over her ninety-six years of life, though touched by tragedy,
she grew into God’s promise that “You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with
all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” You can know the same.
May God give you grace to gather up the fragments of
your being, and of these strange days we are living through, and to know the
wholeness found in being caught up by Jesus, as we draw near to him. Amen.
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