Passionate God is Heartbroken

Text: Luke 15:1-10
Other texts: Exodus 32

It is possible, I suppose, to have a god who might do anything. Or at least to have a theology that claims it so. But could you praise and worship a god who is capricious, who may not keep promises, who cannot be taken at one’s word?

The relationship between us and the God we worship is based on a covenant, a promise, a contract between us and God. We worship a God who instructs us in how to be righteous—that is, in how to be right with God. We trust that instruction to be true and effective.

It may be that our God can theoretically do anything—it doesn’t say—but theory does not matter here. The God we know has willingly constrained God’s self. I am your God and you are my people, God has told us. We have a relationship in which God has promised to be involved. “You have sworn to [your people] by your own self,” Moses reminds God in our first reading. On God’s own name and by God’s own being has God promised to behave in certain ways toward humans (and toward all creation). And God has enlisted human partners—like Abraham and Sarah and Moses—who rely on and trust in God’s faithfulness to God’s promises.

Today’s first reading comes as Moses has been up on Mount Sinai getting God’s law, retrieving the two tablets on which God had written them. He had been there for forty days, and the people down below had become impatient. They had prevailed on Aaron to make an image of God as a golden calf, immediately violating the first commandments of God about making (and worshipping) idols.

God is not pleased. At first, God blames Moses. “Your people,”—now they are Moses’s people—“are acting perversely.” Then God threatens to wipe out everybody, just as God did before Noah and the flood. Then God tries to bribe Moses, telling him that he, Moses, will be the father of a great nation, a promise God already made long ago to Abraham. Finally, God asks Moses to step back so that God can act without impediment. “Leave me alone,” says God.

But Moses will not step back. Moses argues with God. Moses threatens to embarrass God. Moses reminds God of the covenant that God had made with the people. And in the end, and amazingly, God changes God’s mind.

The God we worship is not a statue made of gold or anything else. Our God is, according this story, moved by argument, persuaded by the threat of embarrassment. God cares what people think of God. This God is not perfect, unemotional, unchangeable, unmoved. Our God has a stake in the fate of the world, admires creation, has desires, weeps when seeing the suffering of humanity and gets annoyed at its stupidity. This is a God who prefers good to right, mercy to judgment. This is not an impassable God, meaning one who cannot, does not, or chooses not to feel. Our God is a God of passion.

In the Gospel reading today, we heard Jesus tell two parables (they are a companion to a third, the story of the Prodigal Son). In each of these parables, something is lost, someone longs to find what is lost, and what is lost is found. In each story, there is a big feast and celebration.

But these are not so much stories about what is lost as they are about finding, about searching for and finding, and rejoicing at finding. What is lost does not ask to be found (they are sheep and coins, after all). Though repentance is mentioned, no one in the parables repents; no one asks for forgiveness. But they are searched for and welcomed home anyway.

The parables are more about the persistence of the seeker than they are about the character of what is sought. They are not about how great the repenters are; they are about how great God is.

It is no fun being lost. Being lost in the woods, lost in the dark city, lost as a child in the mall—it is terrifying. It is a good metaphor for the despair and hopelessness we can feel. Being lost in our lives, feeling as if we had no different future or no future at all, fearful that we might not survive—it is mind-numbing. Feeling as if there is no one in the whole world who might look for us, might try to find us, might bring us home. Feeling that we are wicked, out of control, occupied by demons, sinners unforgiven and unforgivable. Estranged from God, people, and all creation.

And to lose someone—or to see someone we love who is lost or in danger of becoming lost—is heart-breaking.

The Pharisees and scribes see Jesus being somehow corrupted by his fraternization with sinners. His contact with sinners makes him like a sinner, they think. No doubt the sinners see it differently. They are those who, as in the parable, know they are lost. (Unlike the Pharisees, who think they are not.) They eat with Jesus, it seems, because Jesus knows what it is to be lost.

The woman ransacks her house to find the lost coin. The shepherd goes out into the wilderness to find the lost sheep. They are driven to find what is lost. Jesus eats with the sinners—and then tells these stories to explain it—because he is likewise driven. Those who are lost break God’s heart, God’s passionate heart.

We who are lost lose conviction that anyone would come to find us, that we can be found or rescued. But we are not just lost things, one lost thing among many things not lost, a fraction not worth bothering about. We are lost to someone. The shepherd is compelled to search for the lost sheep because the sheep is lost to the shepherd, belongs to the shepherd, is the shepherd’s own. The shepherd cannot be a shepherd without longing to find the lost sheep, any more than God can be God and not search for us lost sinners.

What the shepherd does seems crazy. Which of you, Jesus asks, would not leave the 99 in the wilderness to search for one. The answer of the prudent sheep owner is: none. No one would do that, no one would value the time so cheaply, no one would risk the 99 for the sake of the one. But God does.

Our God—they are your people, Moses eventually reminds God—our God is extravagant and exuberant. Our God is crazy in love with people. With us.

When God declares to the Israelites—and to us—I am your God, you are my people, then God becomes vulnerable to losing us. God’s heart is changed. All heaven rejoices.