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September 13, 1998
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Here's a scene. You and your spouse are getting ready to take a weekend trip together. It will be your first time to get away from the house and from the kids in months, maybe even years. You begin to make your plans together to get away and to leave the teenage children at home. (Your teenagers start to make plans too.) You have lengthy discussions with each other about what to do with the kids while you go on your brief excursion out of town.
You think they should go to the neighbors' house; your spouse thinks they ought to come with you, or perhaps be locked in a safe house with adequate food and water and then released when you get home. Your kids say, "Everything will be just fine. We can call Aunt Jane if there are any problems, and you know that the neighbors will be looking after us — just fine!"
Reluctantly, you agree. You leave them at home and off you go on your well deserved and much needed trip. You and your spouse have a wonderful time together. You reconnect, you communicate on levels you have not reached in years. Just to be safe, you make a couple of phone calls home to be sure that everything goes well. You and your spouse convince each other all weekend that everything is just fine. After all, didn't you raise the children to be responsible? What do you have to worry about?
You come home a little bit earlier on Sunday afternoon than you had announced to the kids. (Traffic just worked out that way, didn't it?) You turn onto the block in which you live and you realize there are tire tracks on the lawn that weren't there on Friday. Then you notice that Recycle America is going to owe you a thank you note for all the aluminum that has accumulated on your front porch. Now, you are still optimistic, and you start to make your way from the car to the front door, when a horrified voice from inside says, "They're home! Hide that! You, keep on cleaning!"
You and your spouse look at each other and your spouse says, "They are YOUR children!" And you just say, "I'm going to kill them! I am going to kill them!"
God says to Moses, "They are YOUR people, Moses! All I had to do was leave them alone and see what they did!" Moses and God were spending time together, time together on the mountain for the first time since they left Egypt. Guiding people through a wilderness experience requires a lot of God's attention. Moses leaves the people in his brother's capable hands and things start going downhill from there.
For the first time since they left Egypt the people are without tangible signs of God's presence. There isn't a pillar of fire guiding them by night anymore. Evidence that comforted them and guided them is now gone and the people say, "We had better do something quickly! You go home and get your gold; let's throw together an idol to worship, something we can sink our teeth into, something we can get our hands around. That calf over there, the one the Assyrians talked about, that is a symbol for fertility isn't it? Bring that over here and we will get something going!"
God hears them, and like you at the door of your house, God is ready to kill them! But like your spouse, who of course is the voice of reason at this point, Moses appeals to the other side of Gods anger which is the feeling of being betrayed. "Wait a minute. You created these children, you brought them up. Yes, you can take them out, but look at what they have done with their creativity. Let's give them another chance. Maybe we could go for a drive around the block again." And God changes his mind.
That is a tough concept for many of us to imagine. God changes his mind. Notice that the only time God changes his mind in the Bible is when things go in our favor. Abraham pleads with God to spare the people in Sodom and Gomorrah, and God gives in. Micah also interceded for the people and God changed his mind about destroying the city. Jesus says there is more cause for rejoicing when one person repents than when the other 99 are righteous.
When God left us alone things didn't go well. We didn't get it. We started killing each other. We started worshiping idols and we called them wealth, prosperity and progress rather than worshiping God. We bowed down to foreign Gods who led us from truly loving each other, truly loving God. God saw this and at that doorway he decided we needed a savior.
We still do — not because we are the kids in the house frantically trying to put things in order and God is at the door about to come in and clean us out.
No, we are the parents at the door and those kids inside the house — those kids are the people who most need our love, our forgiveness, our direction. They are everyone that you know. Some days they might even be you. Without the kind of love that Jesus taught us, the kind that allows us to eat with tax collectors and sinners, we will never get through that doorway — we will never know each other. We will never be able to love each other.
And so Jesus stands at the door with us and says, "They are my kids too. I love them as if they were my own. I will hold them accountable for their behavior and I may discipline them. That's how Jesus loves you and as Jesus loves me.
AMEN
Exodus 32:1, 7-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
The Rev. Sean A. Cox
seancox@stmargarets.org
13 September 1998
[The Sermons of the Rev. Lois Hart]