Moses went up the mountain of God and stayed for forty days—a long time, long enough for the people to give up on him and give up on the unseen and apparently unavailable God about whom Moses had told them. They were far from irreligious, those people— they hungered for God, they desperately wanted a God close at hand, a God they could visualize and call their own.

The hiatus in today’s first reading goes on to describe how Aaron acquiesced and gave the people what they wanted. He collected all their gold, threw it into a crucible and—voila!—one golden calf. “Here, O Israel,” he told them, “behold your god, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” And then comes the part that Cecil B. DeMille really went after in his gradiose epic, “The Ten Commandments,” when we are told “the people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” And, according to DeMille, indulge they did— although very discreetly by modern standards since he made that movie in the ‘50’s.

Our reading this morning edits out all this fun stuff and cuts immediately to God and Moses alone on the mountaintop. God is, to put it mildly, absolutely furious at this quick turning away from his commandments; he has tried the people in the tribunal of his heart and judged them guilty; his justice demands a grievous punishment so he will wipe them out and start all over again with Moses.

But Moses intercedes for his people and God’s people. “Why?” he asks the LORD, “why did you to all the trouble of bringing your people out of Egypt if you’re going to destroy them? Why do you want to give the Egyptians call to blame you for their demise?” And then he pleads with his God, and begs him to remember the promises he had made to the patriarchs that they would be the fathers of a great nation who would live in the promised land. Remain true to yourself, Moses begs his God; and God relents, he changes his mind. God shows himself to be more than justice, he shows that he is above all a God of mercy.

I don’t know what you all learned about God in Sunday School or confirmation classes or in religious studies, but I can tell you that I never learned that ours is a God who can change his mind. ‘Immutable’ is a classic description of God— he is changeless, “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow”— “naught changes thee,” we sang in the opening hymn this morning. Well, that never seems to have occurred to the authors and editors of these first books of the Old Testament. Their God is always a dynamic power, struggling with a sovereignty that brooks no mocking, no turning away, and a mercy that is always ready to forgive, eager to forgive, desperate to be given the chance to forgive. That dynamic and tension is everywhere in these old tales just as it is present in all our own closest and dearest relationships with other people, that constant balacing between or own need to be fully ourselves, to realize our own potential, and the needs and demands that those we love make upon us and our own individuality.

Jesus was far from unaware of this dynamic in the God he called Father; but Jesus was convinced that the mercy side, the love side, if you will, would always prevail. We can see this today’s gospel reading where Luke gives us two little parables about losing and searching, about restoration and celebration. There’s a third story in this set, by the way, a profound tale about a son who was lost and, after searching his own heart, was restored to a loving father with great rejoicing and celebration, the story of the prodigal son.

The setting is for these parables important here. Pharisees, those staunch upholders of the laws of God, are grinching among themselves because Jesus not only pays attention to tax collectors and sinners but even—(gasp)—eats with them! We don’t have to imagine Cecil B. DeMille style revelling when we think about these sinners, because to the Pharisees the category included everyone who was not as staunch and strong as they were in keeping the laws of their God— I imagine it would include everyone here. So Jesus tells the grinchers about a shepherd who leaves his flock behind to search for a lost sheep— we can imagine a lamb— and then he goes on to describe a woman who loses a small coin and searches diligently until she finds it. In each case, friends and neighbors are called in to rejoice at the recovery of what was lost. And in each case, the point is the same: that God himself rejoices with extraordinary extravagance when anyone who has been lost to him finds his way back home.

There is certainly an implied rebuke to the Pharisees and their ilk in these little stories; for Jesus could see how they begrudged those other people their chance to hear him and to learn from him and to stumble their own ways home to their Father in heaven. Poor Pharisees—they are so human! It can sometimes be so hard to rejoice in someone else’s good fortune. It can be so easy to begrudge another’s success, so easy to feel cheated when we are bested in the game we call life.

Jesus knew what Moses discovered on the mountain top: that the Lord is a God of mercy for whom love always outweighs any other need. But that in itself makes a call and claim on us, a call to be generous ourselves toward blessings that come to others and a claim on us to rejoice wholeheartedly, extravagantly, extraordinarily in the lives and good fortunes of everyone. That is not always our natural reaction, it may take thought and care and hard work but it is a key to the kingdom of heaven.

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