September 13, 2007
Curbs
Pent 16/19C Lk 15.1-10
There’s a certain sort of excess in Jesus that I used to find outrageous, but increasingly now find absolutely joyful.
He zaps helpless fig trees. He sleeps on the fantail of a boat in a hurricane. He feeds thousands with next to nothing. He praises a shepherd who’d ignore ninety-nine beetleheaded sheep just to go after one that’s lost. He heals. He admonishes. He predicts, and he indicts. He commends a poor widow who finds a lost coin and spends whatever others she has left just to celebrate. He makes one wonder whether the gospel’s not only about change, but also about small change.
And this is the son in whom God is proud and to whom God also wants us to listen? This is the one for whom we should seek in our neighbor? This is what happens when the Word becomes flesh? This is the Way? The Truth? The Life? The Christ?
Well… Yes.
It’s no wonder the tax collectors and sinners were curious. The prophets were easily enough ignored, but not this. They could identify with Jesus even for no other reason than his apparent profligacy, a certain kind of recklessness that in a way rather confirmed their own. And it’s no wonder the religious leaders and lesser satraps got even stiffer in their necks than usual. One audience with him, and all their careful religion school curriculum was either ready for rewrite or else down the drain.
Is there any conceivable message for us, his church, his disciples, those of us gathering together Sunday in and Sunday out in his name? Maybe. Perhaps the tithe is more like ninety percent than ten. It’s all finders-keepers with the rest.
But then… When God imaged us, was it not to be free to choose, to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with God and all creation? That’s not so difficult to imagine, now, is it? Except maybe the harmony part. No, but it’s often a total pain to make a go of it. Rather does it seem if we’re going to be “religious” at all, we’d prefer to make religion like, say, algebra’s “word problems.” Remember how in so-called grammar school we hated the word problems? Or remember how in penmanship we hated the pushpulls and the ovals? Did you ever erase the push-pull overruns off the tops and bottoms of the lines? Religion. Neat, at all costs.
What Jesus wants is faith, not religion. Risk, not certainty. He had no place to lay his head. Why should that be so important to us? Forget asking what would Jesus do. And start asking what would Jesus be. But for the time, maybe best keep it between the curbs. It’s wild and wooly out there, especially when the primates come to town.
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