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Growing up, I spent most of my summers working as a counselor for Arts Camp at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I worked there so long that I ended up not just helping with the main camp for elementary school kids; I also helped with a camp for middle school and one for kindergarteners.
By the time I started helping with all three camps, a new director for the program was hired. Because of my years serving, she leaned on my experience. This was especially true with one kid in the kindergartner week.
There was this one kid in the group, we’ll call him “Bryan”, who just rubbed my boss the wrong way. That was frankly deserved because he was not particularly well behaved with a penchant for getting into trouble. In fact, about the only one this kid would behave for was me, so my boss leaned on me a lot to help out with him.
The thing is, I really liked Bryan. I still think of him very fondly to his day. The reason I liked him is part of why I was the only one who could get him to behave. Bryan was a troublemaker because he was cognitively at a much higher level than the other kindergartners around him. I saw this in him. So I didn’t treat Bryan like a kindergartner. I treated him like a person. I’d have deeper conversations than I generally had with your typical kindergartner. Because of that, I had his respect, which made it so I didn’t have to discipline him, but could just ask him to do something or, rather, often to stop doing something he didn’t need to be doing at the time.
When did we all get so focused on being better than each other, not just physically or intellectually, but morally? We see this not only in the world and in our country, we see it in our church communities too. Why do we have such a hard time seeing the truth, that we are all just Bryans waiting for someone to understand and love us?
Far too often, we are inclined to only look at the message we see purely on the surface in Jeremiah today, a message of doom to those who frankly deserve punishment. In doing so we forget two things. We forget that before and after this passage from Jeremiah there is a message of hope. In Jeremiah 3:12, God gives the chance to Ancient Israel to return, declaring that He is “merciful”. In Jeremiah 5:18, God even declares, “ I will not make a full end of you.” These are the very same words we hear in our passage from chapter 4 even.
Our Psalm continues this sentiment. Even in the midst of all the evil and corruption in this world, the hope is still that “deliverance [will] come out of Zion”, Zion being another name used in Scripture for Jerusalem.
This hope doesn’t come because there are any who can claim to be good, as it seems so many of us in this world often do. The opposite, in fact, is true. Our Psalm declares that “Every one has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad”. Though moral righteousness is what we wish to proclaim, we ultimately cannot. None of us can claim to be truly good.
Yet there is hope. Just as I grew fond of that little upstart Bryan, so too God loves us. God rejoices not over the righteous, but over that one single person who repents. This is exactly what Jesus tells us this morning. This is the truth behind the parables He tells, first of the Lost Sheep and then of the Lost Coin. God doesn’t love us because we are good. We are not. God loves us in spite of our lack of goodness. God’s hope is that we will return to Him. God hopes that we will turn back from our wickedness and the destruction that brings and come back to Him. God seeks us out to find us and take us back to Him.
The whole point of God coming into this world is to pave the way back to Him. God loves us, even though we are bad. His redemptive act in the form of our Lord Jesus Christ is to make us whole again, even though we don’t deserve it. That is the message we hear in 1 Timothy today. That is the core message of the entire Gospel even.
Why do we judge one another when none of us are good? What is the point? The truth is that there is no point. God isn’t looking at us to judge each other. God just wants us to come back to His arms. God just wants us to return, even though all of us are bad. God wants us present with Him so He can love us more than we deserve.
We’re not called to declare ourselves better or more righteous than others because we are not. Instead we are called to remember that even in our worst and most wretched moments God loves us. God wants us to return so that we can love Him too. Most of all, God wants us to come back so that we can actually remember the greatness in us as being made in God’s Image.
We’re not called to wallow in our sin, but to remember that God has picked us back up. God has forgiven us. If we can live into that forgiveness, that restoration God has given, instead of judging ourselves as better than others, then we can come back to the splendor we have as God’s creations. We must also and always remember that goodness and greatness don’t come from ourselves, but they are gifts from God our Creator, and God alone.