16 09 07 LOST Exodus 32: 7-14 / Luke 15:1-10 Michael Northcott
’There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’
Lost – the daughter of an Indian woman who went into labour in an Indian factory making clothes for Gap Primark and MandS who was nine months pregnant; she asked to be let go to walk to a clinic and was told not until she had filled in paper forms which would take her over an hour. When she finally got outside the factory gates she collapsed and gave birth to the baby in the street and the child died.
Lost – the child shot in a pub car park in Croxteth – lost too to Croxteth are the traditional working class jobs, and the traditional families, on this 50s housing estate – as the workshop of Britain turned into a shopping mall and finance house, the jobs exported to India and China, so the moral fabric of Britain was fractured, broken.
Lost – the greenhouse gas emissions from ships and planes shipping clothes, electronic goods, office and home furnishings – from China and India to Britain.
Lost – 1 million Iraqis who have died according to the latest British survey since the war began in 2003 – in a country whose vast oil reserves are needed to fuel the global economy.
Lost – ‘God’ – the God who is really there, the God who commands, the God who creates and redeems. The God of the British went from being a personal presence in their churches, fields, homes and lives to being distant in time and in space – to being a God of last resort – who after the horrors of Two World Wars seemed hardly there at all and as the big bang and evolution seemed to explain more and more of the beginning of life and chemistry and genes now explain its end, and electronic distraction filled up the spaces in between.
In the story of the golden calf the Hebrews were lost in the wilderness. They had escaped slavery in Egypt where at least they knew where their next meal was coming from only to end up wandering in the desert to the east of the Nile without homes or fields or flocks. And then they loose their God and their leader – the very one who had led them out promising them a better life, a life of freedom from slavery, the redemption of their God – only to disappear up a mountain in a puff of smoke. And in the absence of their God and their royal prince they turn to the surety of what they have left – their gold and jewellery, their mobile financial wealth – they have Aaron melt it all down and turn it into an idol they can touch and see – a golden calf.
Idols are replacing the god we have lost in our own society also. Open the page of any newspaper – God is not there, and there are precious few heroes. But by page 5 you are sure to have encountered a car advertisement. The car is often set – like the golden calf – on a mountain landscape, like the new ‘Touareg’ VW 4 wheel drive or the Land Rover Discovery Jeremy Clarkson drove to the top of a Scottish mountain in Sutherland. Cars are literally killing this planet of ours – they are the biggest single cause of premature death in most countries on earth. More people die on America’s roads in a month than died in the two towers of the World Trade Centre on that fateful day in September six years ago. More people die on Britain’s roads each year than died in the yearlong blitz of aerial bombing on London in the Second World War. And emissions from these cars – lost in the atmosphere, but not lost in space – they stay inside the envelope of gases that keep the planet warm, and they add to them. Insidiously as they build up in the skies they melt the glaciers and drive the weird weather – droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves – which increasingly is causing lost harvests and wrecked lives from Burkino Faso to Brisbane.
Cows too – real living cows not golden ones – are also implicated in all this; cow stomachs emit more global warming gases than all the world’s airplanes – methane is 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. There is a cow for every household on earth and most of those cows are fed with soya grown on former rainforest lands which had once been a giant carbon and methane store whereas now all their stored carbon is also lost in the atmosphere.
Between them the car/oil industry and the cow/food industry are the most powerful lobbies in government. Foot and Mouth, oil wars and weird weather filled our papers this summer – but the papers have no joined-up narrative; they and their readers have lost the plot – we don’t see them as part of a connected story.
But the earth is joined up – it has a story to tell of a beneficent creator who promised he would not cause nature to flood again after Noah. And God kept his promise, to the earth and to the people of Israel – the last 12,000 years are unique in the history of the planet. Extremes of heat and cold that had driven ice ages and warm periods ended with the last great floods that filled the Black Sea and the passages between Britain and Europe, Russia and Alaska, with water – since then unprecedented temperature stability has enabled civilisation to spread so that stories like the golden calf were not only told over again but written down in ancient manuscripts preserved across thousands of years.
But we industrial humans have taken charge of the planet while we have been loosing its story – a case if ever there was one of the blind leading the blind. The fabled Northwest passage between Atlantic and Pacific opened up this weekend. In 50 years the Arctic will be ice free in summer. And within that same time frame 40 per cent of the planet’s species will become extinct, many crop lands will dry up and fresh water sources decline to the point where people in Australia, the American Southwest, parts of Spain, Greece and Italy will have precious little water left and some will face the prospect of abandoning their farms and even cities to the spreading deserts.
September is declared by Patriarch Bartholomew and World Council of Churches ‘Creation time’ in the church’s calendar; the time to recollect what we are in danger of losing – a beneficent divinely created pro-life earth.
In Jesus God reveals what the stories of Moses did not affirm – that not only Israelites but all people, all species, the creation itself are the subjects of God’s redeeming purposes.
God in Jesus becomes Incarnate to redeem all life from destruction, to seek and save a world that is lost.
The single most repeated image of Jesus in early church is NOT a tortured man hanging on a cross – no – it is a shepherd with a lost sheep on his shoulder.
The God of the early Christians was the gentle and heroic shepherd who had sought and found the lost, the God who ate with sinners and the poor while disregarding the wealthy and powerful; the God who disregards the 99 to go in search of the one who is lost; the God who risks everything to save the one who has fallen off the hill.
Those who are really lost know they need to be found. The sick know they need a healer. But the majority carry on with at best a vague sense of unease, oblivious that their lives have no plot, no story, even though they are sustained by hidden connections of the kind that took real jobs away, that enslave workers in India and China, that put emissions in the air to fill Princes Street and Ocean Terminal with clothes, and the roads in between with computer laden banks, shops and offices.
Where is hope? In the God who eats with sinners – who turns a meal into a redemptive celebration, who seeks and saves the lost, who will be present in this bread and this wine, not lost up a mountain. When we meet the shepherd in this meal we meet our redeemer – we meet the author of our story, and we meet the saviour of the world. God risks everything – God’s own life – to seek and save a lost world.
Some say what is the point in me giving up my car, stopping eating meat, insulating my house, buying local food, consuming less – when everyone else is carrying on regardless and celebrities are lauded for their heedless consumption of private planes, homes, clothes and cars.
But Jesus says ‘there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’
We are not called to save the planet – but we are called to be found – to get back on the map, to reconnect the story of our life with the story of the good shepherd, to respond in love to the loving persistence of our creator-redeemer.
And once we are found it becomes possible to imagine, and to work, for a peaceable world, a more just society, a more sustainable way of living. Once we are found our efforts do not seem futile or lost – they become part of a larger story, a plot that has meaning, a drama of faith and hope whose beginning and end is love, love that risks everything to seek and save the lost.
’There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’
Lost – the daughter of an Indian woman who went into labour in an Indian factory making clothes for Gap Primark and MandS who was nine months pregnant; she asked to be let go to walk to a clinic and was told not until she had filled in paper forms which would take her over an hour. When she finally got outside the factory gates she collapsed and gave birth to the baby in the street and the child died.
Lost – the child shot in a pub car park in Croxteth – lost too to Croxteth are the traditional working class jobs, and the traditional families, on this 50s housing estate – as the workshop of Britain turned into a shopping mall and finance house, the jobs exported to India and China, so the moral fabric of Britain was fractured, broken.
Lost – the greenhouse gas emissions from ships and planes shipping clothes, electronic goods, office and home furnishings – from China and India to Britain.
Lost – 1 million Iraqis who have died according to the latest British survey since the war began in 2003 – in a country whose vast oil reserves are needed to fuel the global economy.
Lost – ‘God’ – the God who is really there, the God who commands, the God who creates and redeems. The God of the British went from being a personal presence in their churches, fields, homes and lives to being distant in time and in space – to being a God of last resort – who after the horrors of Two World Wars seemed hardly there at all and as the big bang and evolution seemed to explain more and more of the beginning of life and chemistry and genes now explain its end, and electronic distraction filled up the spaces in between.
In the story of the golden calf the Hebrews were lost in the wilderness. They had escaped slavery in Egypt where at least they knew where their next meal was coming from only to end up wandering in the desert to the east of the Nile without homes or fields or flocks. And then they loose their God and their leader – the very one who had led them out promising them a better life, a life of freedom from slavery, the redemption of their God – only to disappear up a mountain in a puff of smoke. And in the absence of their God and their royal prince they turn to the surety of what they have left – their gold and jewellery, their mobile financial wealth – they have Aaron melt it all down and turn it into an idol they can touch and see – a golden calf.
Idols are replacing the god we have lost in our own society also. Open the page of any newspaper – God is not there, and there are precious few heroes. But by page 5 you are sure to have encountered a car advertisement. The car is often set – like the golden calf – on a mountain landscape, like the new ‘Touareg’ VW 4 wheel drive or the Land Rover Discovery Jeremy Clarkson drove to the top of a Scottish mountain in Sutherland. Cars are literally killing this planet of ours – they are the biggest single cause of premature death in most countries on earth. More people die on America’s roads in a month than died in the two towers of the World Trade Centre on that fateful day in September six years ago. More people die on Britain’s roads each year than died in the yearlong blitz of aerial bombing on London in the Second World War. And emissions from these cars – lost in the atmosphere, but not lost in space – they stay inside the envelope of gases that keep the planet warm, and they add to them. Insidiously as they build up in the skies they melt the glaciers and drive the weird weather – droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves – which increasingly is causing lost harvests and wrecked lives from Burkino Faso to Brisbane.
Cows too – real living cows not golden ones – are also implicated in all this; cow stomachs emit more global warming gases than all the world’s airplanes – methane is 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. There is a cow for every household on earth and most of those cows are fed with soya grown on former rainforest lands which had once been a giant carbon and methane store whereas now all their stored carbon is also lost in the atmosphere.
Between them the car/oil industry and the cow/food industry are the most powerful lobbies in government. Foot and Mouth, oil wars and weird weather filled our papers this summer – but the papers have no joined-
But the earth is joined up – it has a story to tell of a beneficent creator who promised he would not cause nature to flood again after Noah. And God kept his promise, to the earth and to the people of Israel – the last 12,000 years are unique in the history of the planet. Extremes of heat and cold that had driven ice ages and warm periods ended with the last great floods that filled the Black Sea and the passages between Britain and Europe, Russia and Alaska, with water – since then unprecedented temperature stability has enabled civilisation to spread so that stories like the golden calf were not only told over again but written down in ancient manuscripts preserved across thousands of years.
But we industrial humans have taken charge of the planet while we have been loosing its story – a case if ever there was one of the blind leading the blind. The fabled Northwest passage between Atlantic and Pacific opened up this weekend. In 50 years the Arctic will be ice free in summer. And within that same time frame 40 per cent of the planet’s species will become extinct, many crop lands will dry up and fresh water sources decline to the point where people in Australia, the American Southwest, parts of Spain, Greece and Italy will have precious little water left and some will face the prospect of abandoning their farms and even cities to the spreading deserts.
September is declared by Patriarch Bartholomew and World Council of Churches ‘Creation time’ in the church’s calendar; the time to recollect what we are in danger of losing – a beneficent divinely created pro-
In Jesus God reveals what the stories of Moses did not affirm – that not only Israelites but all people, all species, the creation itself are the subjects of God’s redeeming purposes.
God in Jesus becomes Incarnate to redeem all life from destruction, to seek and save a world that is lost.
The single most repeated image of Jesus in early church is NOT a tortured man hanging on a cross – no – it is a shepherd with a lost sheep on his shoulder.
The God of the early Christians was the gentle and heroic shepherd who had sought and found the lost, the God who ate with sinners and the poor while disregarding the wealthy and powerful; the God who disregards the 99 to go in search of the one who is lost; the God who risks everything to save the one who has fallen off the hill.
Those who are really lost know they need to be found. The sick know they need a healer. But the majority carry on with at best a vague sense of unease, oblivious that their lives have no plot, no story, even though they are sustained by hidden connections of the kind that took real jobs away, that enslave workers in India and China, that put emissions in the air to fill Princes Street and Ocean Terminal with clothes, and the roads in between with computer laden banks, shops and offices.
Where is hope? In the God who eats with sinners – who turns a meal into a redemptive celebration, who seeks and saves the lost, who will be present in this bread and this wine, not lost up a mountain. When we meet the shepherd in this meal we meet our redeemer – we meet the author of our story, and we meet the saviour of the world. God risks everything – God’s own life – to seek and save a lost world.
Some say what is the point in me giving up my car, stopping eating meat, insulating my house, buying local food, consuming less – when everyone else is carrying on regardless and celebrities are lauded for their heedless consumption of private planes, homes, clothes and cars.
But Jesus says ‘there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’
We are not called to save the planet – but we are called to be found – to get back on the map, to reconnect the story of our life with the story of the good shepherd, to respond in love to the loving persistence of our creator-
And once we are found it becomes possible to imagine, and to work, for a peaceable world, a more just society, a more sustainable way of living. Once we are found our efforts do not seem futile or lost – they become part of a larger story, a plot that has meaning, a drama of faith and hope whose beginning and end is love, love that risks everything to seek and save the lost.