Even without looking at the calendar you can tell it’s late Summer, for now the spiders outside are coming into the house to establish their winter quarters. Each one seems to be claiming a corner of the room or bookcase or doorframe, and spinning a complex web to trap any small insects who might blunder into it. Sometimes they’re bigger webs, and they trap ME! That brings us to the upcoming weekend’s texts, which describe the rip we humans have made in the complexity of Creation.
A searing desert wind leads JEREMIAH to speak at the People of God, and especially their leaders (4:11-12, 22-28). He calls the people “foolish” and “stupid”, “skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good”. God sees only a deserted desolation, absent of song and of human community. “The behavior of Israel, its leaders and people, amounts to a rejection of the generous purposes and character of God in creating the world and then Israel itself.” (Dwight M. Lundgren, in FEASTING on the WORD, C 4:55) The GOOD news comes in the 27th verse, “Yet I will not make a full end.”
A more positive note is struck by the writer of I TIMOTHY 1:12-17: he describes how broken Saul’s/Paul’s life and conduct had been, and what a great change was seen in Paul after his blindness/conversion. “But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.” It seems as if God is willing to take lemons and make lemonade! God goes to remarkable extremes to repair Creation, to let the people know that evil and brokenness shall not prevail; and that wholeness of body, mind and spirit is the ultimate connection that binds each to the other…
In LUKE 15:1-10, Jesus tells two dinner-table stories: one is the story of the Good Shepherd who leaves his 99 faithful sheep and goes searching for the one who’s wandered off; and the second is the account of the conscientious woman who has mislaid one of her ten matching coins (a dowry?), and who turns the house inside out to find it. They’re jubilantly successful, of course–“Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Is that why I spend so much time repenting about Yesterday? to give the angels joy Today?) Note that the joyful community is because the evil-doer has been restored to them, and wholeness once again reigns.
Back to the spider-webs–even though we diligently try to sweep ’em away, soon the persistent little arachnids have spun a new and improved castle in the corner. Every time we humans tear the completeness of their cloth, they repair it! Maybe a tenacious God is telling me a parable about the wholeness designed by the Creator…and how I can yet be part of that…
In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King
Please join me every Tuesday to again wrestle with scripture lessons assigned to the upcoming weekend; at horacebrownking.com
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