16th Sunday after Pentecost
When you are being screamed at by an irate boss, it takes everything in you to keep In touch with an inner self that knows you are a good person and that believes the boss can’t destroy that certitude. Reading Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy 30:15-20 last Sunday required you to keep your balance. If you have been brought up with a terrifying concept of God, this passage will only add to it or throw you back into it.
In those extremely rough days—no electricity, no escape from the heat, little food, scarce water, unclear direction—Moses had a tough time reminding all those people what they were doing and why. “Do you really want to go back there to Egypt? Must I remind you what the situation was really like there? Can you not retain your belief in a God who offers you life In the midst of this difficult journey?” Keep choosing God, Moses seemed to be saying, no matter how hard it gets.
This week’s first reading switches to Exodus 32:7-14. It is a famous story. It’s a story of what can happen when people are led into strange new territory and then the leader disappears. Is he coming back? When? So what do we do now? Aren’t we supposed to be GOING somewhere? You can imagine the bickering, the attempts by one after the other to put forward their ideas. But finally they settle on Aaron, the brother of Moses, as leader, but one they can control.
The people longed for an icon, something tangible, an image. They were willing to pay big money for it—to bring Aaron all their gold and jewelry. Wow! At this point, many preachers will remind us of a long list of things that WE substitute for God. And we squirm in our seats and try not to feel guilty.
But Thomas Keating says that the greatest gift we can give God is to allow Him to love us! He says that we cannot separate His might, His omnipotence, from His mercy, His forgiveness. Makes you wonder what would have happened if Aaron had proclaimed a series of sessions on how to pray and taught people how to use this wilderness experience as a way to contact God, or, better, as a way to let God contact them, each and every person. And the way that’s expressed in this passage from Exodus is that Moses gets God to change His mind about destroying the people. Unfortunately, we take from this passage the idea that we must pray harder, amass points, find someone holy (Jesus?) to intercede with God so that He will change His mind and be forgiving, kind and loving to us. NOT NECESSARY. The message of Jesus is: the Father loves you and wants to be one with you.
Getting to that openness so that His love can fill it can be like a journey through the desert and an exodus from the familiar. And so Psalm 51 is still appropriate: "Create in me [us] a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me [us]." An ‘examination of consciousness’ is still helpful, if—in Eckhard Tolle’s insight—the examination carries us to the knowledge of the Being that is beyond our situational life, beyond our boss’s rants, and beyond space and time.
In 1 Timothy 1:12-17, the Pauline author acknowledges his sinfulness, but explains that he obtained mercy because he did sinful things “ignorantly, in unbelief” (1:13). But many of us don’t have that excuse. However, we do have Jesus’ words from the cross: “Father, forgive them , because they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). And the Father does just that.
Jesus models the Father’s concern by associating with sinners and telling stories about lost sheep and lost coins. The owners drop everything and everyone to go look (Luke 15: 1-10). And when the owners find the sheep and the coin, there is great rejoicing. And when we are found, there will be great rejoicing!
No comments:
Post a Comment