Enormous changes at the last minute (or over a lifetime)

The writer Grace Paley published a collection of short stories in 1985 titled “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.” If there is a thread tying together our readings this morning, it is this: God’s dramatic intervention in the lives of God’s people. In Exodus, God changes his mind about disaster and punishment. The author of Psalm 51 moves from deep awareness of sin to a vision of sin redeemed and transformed, a clean heart and a renewed spirit. In the letter to Timothy, Paul writes about his own experience of conversion and redemption. He was a man of violence and sin, whom in a single encounter God raised up as a leader and teacher, apostle and evangelist.

Enormous changes at the last minute. 

Jesus comes at this theme from a couple of different directions. There is the enormous change in paradigm—welcoming sinners and eating with them—and the stories of rejoicing over finding what has been given up for lost, rejoicing that even something insignificant is important in God’s eyes. Jesus came to call people back to God, not only some people, but all people. He didn’t say how long it would take for us to return to God. He doesn’t say his mission has an expiration date. Sometimes the sheep gets found and then lost again. Sometimes another sheep gets lost. If I were a lost sheep, which I certainly have been, I’d want to be found again and again. 

These two parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, along with the parable of the Prodigal Son, all flow together in the Gospel of Luke. Together they are Jesus’ answer to the grumbling of the Pharisees: we don’t get why you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners. We know the answer, of course. We know that Jesus came for those tax collectors and sinners. Yay, Jesus!

And yet, truthfully, abandoning 99 of anything for which you’re responsible in order to go after one is just silly, especially if you are a shepherd. Which is when we remember this is a parable. It’s supposed to call established norms into question and make us think about things in a new way. 

Enormous changes at the last minute occur when God intervenes in business as usual, or when we do, to do God’s work of seeking out the last, the least, and the lost. 

We need to remember that enormous changes at the last minute might take a lifetime. Transformation happens in the twinkling of an eye or so slowly you don’t even know it’s happening. Who knows how long the psalmist pled with God for forgiveness, or how long it took to hear God’s answer? Who knows how many times that shepherd had to go after that sheep?

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Both kinds of transformation happen quickly and slowly every week when we take the ordinary stuff of bread and wine and God transforms them into holy food and drink for our own journey of transformation and for our corporate transformation. This usually happens imperceptibly unless we are knocked around by dramatic events of life: the time when you got that horrible diagnosis, or your partner died or left you, or you had to put a child in treatment, or end the life of a beloved pet. That time when the world seemed to change forever. At these times, perhaps this table can be the place we go to remember other moments of loss, fear, or joy. 

There is drama and bad news around us every day. I don’t remember a time in my own life—which is a longer and longer every minute!—or in what I know about history when this was not the case. People are suffering in our city and around the world. I don’t think this is God’s intention, and I don’t think we’re supposed to look away, as tempting as that may be. 

Each of us is impacted differently by the events around us. In coming among us, Jesus gives us a different way of responding, with love and with hope. Often, responding with love and with hope is about as countercultural as one can get. There are ways that church is outside of culture, and there are ways that the church is created by God to transform culture. In either case, we cannot be church if we cannot stay together through our different experiences. This is what it means to be church. Staying together. 

If there is anything in terrible experiences that is worth finding and rejoicing over, it is our shared awareness of God’s goodness and generosity, of stories remembered and broken open. God gives us the grace, the strength and wisdom to look in difficult events for the lost and the last, the forgotten and outcast bits of our own selves, our community, our nation, and the world. I pray that we will seek out and find those missing, broken bits over which Jesus rejoices, and rejoice with him.