Drawing near.

Lent 3C - Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

On the first day in Puppy Kindergarten the instructor taught us an emergency recall method she named “Crazy Lady.” I had to use it a week later when Luke, my puppy, got away from me and started trotting down a long driveway towards the busy road.

“Come” did not work. My frightened version of “come” didn’t work, and I knew if I chased him, he would run faster. So I did the Crazy Lady. I dropped to the ground, waved my arms and kicked my feet while making loud, weird noises. Luke was more curious about the Crazy Lady than about the road, so he turned around and thankfully came back.

There was an even more unusual sight in this Sunday’s first reading. Moses saw a burning bush which the fire did not burn up. It was so unusual that Moses had to go closer. I’m pretty sure that if he thought God was involved with that bush, he would have run the other way. At the time, Moses was a criminal refugee – back home he was wanted for murder.

But Moses went close enough to hear God speaking from the bush. He heard God’s new name. No longer the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” No longer a deity defined by old national or ethnic stories, God would now be a God of the present. “I am who am.”¹

In the gospel, Jesus was asked if those who had been killed by Pilate or by the falling tower were being punished by God. We may worry about what God thinks about our past too. But Jesus said, “no.” God does not punish us or care about our past. God is more like a Gardener who believes that even a tree should have a second chance, or a third, or a fourth. God is in the present.

The late Jack Spong, author, Episcopal bishop and maker of much ecclesiastical “good trouble” liked to talk about “loving wastefully.” He wrote:

“If God is the Source of Love, then the only way I can worship God is by loving ‘wastefully’. . . [meaning] the kind of love that never stops to calculate whether the object of its love is worthy to be its recipient… It is in the act of loving ‘wastefully’ that I believe I make God visible.”²

I think that’s what Jesus did. In healings, teachings, compassion, forgiveness, meals, arguments, truth-telling and companionship, he loved wastefully. Unusually wastefully. And so it is that in him we see God’s love made visible and tangible, for all of us, so that all of us might draw near.

Peace.

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Photo by Rustam Mussabekov on Unsplash

1. Richard J. Clifford, S.J. in his article “Exodus” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. , 1990) at 47.

2. John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. (Harper Collins, New York 2019) at 286.