Proper 19C - Track 1 Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10
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I was able to attend the retreat I was waitlisted for so I needed to board my youngest dog for a few days. When I came back, Molly and I had a joyful moment, like one of those in the TikTok clip.
In Luke, Jesus tells a story about the “99 Righteous” and one other guy who had wandered off. The other guy was found and brought home. It was a joyful moment.
That other guy is us. Has to be. Because there are no “99 Righteous.” We are all that guy who wanders off.
I have been reading Jesus and the Law of Moses by Paul Sloan.1 He writes:
“The depiction of Israel living under the Law is not that of a people bearing an intolerable burden by which they struggled to ‘earn’ their salvation, or a burden causing despair of ever finding a gracious God. On the contrary, the Law assured them of God’s desire to dwell with them, revealed to them God’s requirements, and declared to them the divinely prescribed means through which they could regularly commune with God and experience [God’s] grace and forgiveness.”
In other words, God has never required our perfection. It was always understood that we would sin, make mistakes and wander off. For foreseeable events, provisions must be made. Or as my exercise guru says, “To fail to plan is to plan to fail.”
It was foreseeable that we would wander off, and God had a plan. Long before Jesus was born, in the Law, God provided remedies. Which is to say that God’s covenant with God’s people was, from the beginning, a “relationship built to last.”2
The Revised Common Lectionary misleads us whenever it suggests that Jesus was antagonistic towards the Law or purity regulations3 or that he offered some new, different God.
I don’t think he did.
I think Jesus knew what the Pharisees and the scribes knew: that there were no “99 Righteous,” that everyone wanders off and that a loving God had made the way back obvious and accessible.
Then as now, with God, we are in a relationship that is built to last. That makes for joyful moments.
Watching the TikTok clip I wonder . . . Who is happier, the person or the dog?
Post script: I underestimated how much time I would need for my non-lectionary related project. I want more! So for a while, there may still be posts, they won’t be about the Sunday readings. For a while anyway.
Peace and ♥️
Sloan, Paul T., Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism, (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI. 2025) at 13-14. Emphasis added. Sloan teaches at Houston Christian University, a Baptist school which has some convictions (“Ten Pillars”) with which I strongly disagree. I haven’t finished the book, but so far it does not seem that Sloan’s scholarship is affected by the school’s convictions.
Paula Fredriksen’s phrase, quoted in Jesus and the Law of Moses at 13.
“Impurity” was not immorality.
We are all that guy who wandered off…. You sure have a gift for making things so relatable and understandable.
'Howdy pilgrim', welcome back ! Thank you for the encouraging message .