14th Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2019
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; 1Timothy 1:12-17; Luke
15:1-10
There are two themes tying together our Scripture
readings this morning. The first one is sin. In Jeremiah, God’s people are
about to be on the receiving end of divine judgment because of their sin. Jesus
is charged with welcoming sinners and eating with them. (How dare he! He’s
supposed to be eating with the good people, with us.) And then Timothy says,
“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am chief.”[1]
We know what Paul wrote to the Romans, that “all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God.”[2]
None of us is perfect, no matter how we appear to the outside world or how much
we cultivate our social media profiles. We all sin. We all are in need of a
Savior. We are all in need of gathering in, like we just sang, at some point in
our lives or another. We all need seeking out, just as the shepherd went after
the one lost sheep and the woman went after her one lost coin. We all need to
know that we matter and are loved, even when we’ve gone astray, even when we’re
lost, even when we’ve sinned and completely made a mess of things. We need to
know that someone will look for us, someone will welcome us, someone will still
make room for us to sit with them at their table. We need to know we’re not
beyond redemption, not beyond hope. And God does that, but not before first God
sends a wind.
In Jeremiah, God sends a hot wind, kinda like the one we had
on Thursday. I could feel it standing at the afternoon bus stop – 90 degrees,
full sun, and a hot wind was blowing. Through Jeremiah, God says, “A scorching
wind from the barren heights in the desert blows toward my people, but not to
winnow [as in to separate the wheat from the chaff] or cleanse [a refreshing
wind; no] a wind too strong for that comes from me.”[3]
A wind that is too strong to winnow or to cleanse or to refresh leaves, what? A
wind that scatters? A wind that pushes?
I remember one Sunday afternoon in Nicaragua,
I was at the home of an American missionary family, when the sky in one
direction turned brown. We all went inside, which in those houses means the
bedrooms. All the other rooms are open air; the bedrooms are the only ones with
all four walls and a ceiling. And this huge dust storm blew through. The air
turned windy and much cooler. Within 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, everything was covered with a half inch
of dust that then took hours to clean up off the floors and everything that had
been exposed to it. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even a hurricane,
because there was no rain, just dust.
 |
| This is just a stock photo showing a dust storm. I did not take a picture of the one I experienced in Nicaragua. |
In
the Mediterranean they have a wind called the sirocco. (This is your vocabulary
word for the day.) It is a hot, devastating wind that can reach hurricane
speeds and brings dry and dusty conditions, much like what I experienced in
Nicaragua. The sirocco starts in the Sahara desert in the middle of Africa and
blows north into Northern Africa and across the Mediterranean Sea into Southern
Europe.
These
are the hot, scorching winds from the desert that God sends to God’s people.
It’s not refreshing. It’s not cooling. It’s not blowing away the pollen. It’s
blowing in dirt and sand. When I went
home for the first time after nine months in Nicaragua, it felt like it took me
the whole two weeks to scrub all the dirt and dust off me and out of the
creases in my elbows and out of my ears and every other crevice. When I
returned to Nicaragua you know what the top comment I received was? “Heather,
your feet are so clean!” They hadn’t been exposed to this dust and dirt of the
ages for two weeks!
There
is a Greek phrase that some churches use during their communion liturgy, it’s
“kyrie eleison.” Sound familiar to anyone? It means “Lord, have mercy.” The 1980s
rock band, Mr. Mister, released a song by that title in 1985. The first verse begin, “The wind blows hard
against this mountain side/ Across the sea into my soul/ It reaches into where
I cannot hide/ Setting my feet upon the road…” This is a strong wind. It blows
hard; it’s not refreshing or soothing. It goes across the sea and gets into
your crevices, deep into your soul, where you cannot hide. Kyrie eleison, Lord,
have mercy, indeed. This is a wind that seeks you out, that will not let you go
until it has found you and puts you on the road you must travel. “Kyrie
eleison, down the road that I must travel/ Kyrie eleison, through the darkness
of the night.” In those parables that Jesus tells about the lost sheep and the
lost coin, we’re not the shepherd or the coin collector. We are what has been
lost and is in need of finding. And God sends this hot wind, that is not going
to feel good, to come find you and bring you back.
Because,
don’t forget, the Hebrew word for wind is the same word for breath and the same
word for God’s Spirit. This is the Holy Spirit moving. Not in ways that are
comforting, but in ways that are discomforting. This is the Spirit moving over
the waters at the beginning of creation, yet this is not a time of creating, or
even a time of separating the crop from the weed, or a time of refreshing and
renewal. You may not want to be found.
You may like the dark cave you found, or stumbled upon, on your own. But God’s
Spirit seeks you out. And there’s comfort in being found and the reminder you
are loved. And you also have to clean up afterward, ‘cuz you’re filthy from
whatever hole you fell into like the sheep or the dust you accumulated hiding
under the furniture like the coin. You have to take stock of where you are now,
because you are not the same as you were before.
And
here’s the second theme word found in all three of these Scriptures: grace.
Even in Jeremiah pronouncing this divine judgment, God says, “I will not make a
full end.” And you are still my people. You are still my child. I will not
destroy completely. There is still hope. Timothy phrases it as “I received
mercy,” the answer to that prayer of kyrie eleison. “I was shown mercy and… the
grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly.” Grace overflowed. Amazing
grace. Jesus came to save sinners, which includes you and me. We want to think
we’re exempt. We want to think we have our lives all together. Look at your
neighbor. They don’t have everything in their lives all together, either.
You
might think the shepherd’s got 99 sheep, surely one more doesn’t matter. It
might even seem foolish to leave 99 to go looking for the one. 1 Corinthians
1:18 says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” To those of
us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
I
got involved in international missions through my mom. When I was in 6th
grade she, as a nurse, joined a medical/dental team out of Maryland that made
yearly trips to Honduras and Guatemala. They had team shirts every year, with
whatever design on the front. On the back, the shirts always said, “Dios te
ama,” Spanish for “God loves you,” and a starfish. Do you know the story of the
starfish?
One
day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something
up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What
are you doing?” The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The
surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”
“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and
hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”After listening politely,
the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf.
Then, smiling at the man, he said…” I made a difference for that one.”
We can’t do everything. We can’t help all people. But
God’s not asking us to. God’s asking us to love the people given to us to love.
God’s asking you to love your neighbor as yourself. When you find yourself
blown with a hot wind onto another road that you did not choose, it’s not a
problem to solve, because there is no going back to where you were. The only
way to go is forward. Adjust to your new surroundings. Learn about this new
road. Pray kyrie eleison, Lord, have mercy. And when things are different, when
you’re in the wilderness, the key questions to ask are: “How will we now be
with God? How will we now be with one another? Who are we now? What does God
want us to do now? Who is our neighbor now?”[4]
There may not be easy answers. The answers may be not what you want to hear.
But this is the time when the questions are more important than the answers. Winds
have blown through this church, many kinds of winds including a hot,
devastating wind. The wind blew the couple joining our church today here to us, just as
it blew each of us here. The good news is that this wind, even in this form, is
still God’s Spirit at work, moving, moving us, blowing through our church and
our community, not leaving us the same yet not leaving us alone or forsaken or
abandoned, either. This is God’s Spirit in the form of a 2x4, saying, “Get
moving!” Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.
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