Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
Today we get two sides of the story of our relationship with God, the story that is repeated throughout scriptures. We begin with a gift from God; humans turn away from that gift; God judges; humans repent and are forgiven, given new life. And then it begins again.
Jeremiah is reporting on the first part of the story: the Lord is speaking in judgment on his people, who “are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good”. Jeremiah looks around, and the earth is barren, an ecological disaster. The Lord promises some mercy, but only after disaster: “The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.”
It is hard not to see ourselves in the bleak ecological vision of Jeremiah, especially after we in Merced have lived through more than a week of extreme heat. We may not panic when the temperature goes over 100°, but when it reaches 115°, everyone thinks it’s too hot. We know we are living with the results of climate change, with more extreme weather of all kinds. The recent floods in Pakistan meant that one-third of the land was under water. This is perhaps not God’s judgment on us, but we are certainly collectively accountable for the overuse of fossil fuels that has created the climate crisis, a crisis that is most severe in the regions of the world that have done the least to create it.
The psalm continues the account of God’s judgment: “Every one has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad”. Yet there is hope: some have turned to the Lord, and “when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad”.
Human beings fail and fail repeatedly. One of the things that makes the apostle Paul so powerful is his acknowledgement of his own wrongdoing. In the letter to Timothy, he recounts his persecution of Christians. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.” Yet there was mercy, and he had been chosen to serve Christ. For him, “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”, making him a powerful example of the possibility of redemption.
In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus focuses on how much repentence means. God welcomes the righteous, but “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance”. The shepherd goes looking for the lost sheep, just as the widow searches for the coin. Each of us matters. And forgiveness and mercy are available to all of us.
The cycle of the biblical stories always ends one way: with forgiveness and mercy. It is what can give us hope as we confront our individual and collective failures. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”, our closing hymn (#470) proclaims. It is sometimes difficult to trust in that mercy, but it’s there.