Additional Scripture Reference: Exodus 3:1-15
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
Last week’s Old Testament reading discussed God’s covenant with Abraham. In Chapter 15 of the Book of Genesis, verses 13 and 14 offer a promise to Abraham’s descendents. It says,
Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions…”
Abraham lived a long life; and his son Isaac did also. Isaac had a son named Jacob, whose son Joseph ended up becoming the number-two man in all of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself. Joseph saved the Egyptians from starving during a seven-year famine. Pharaoh rewarded Joseph and his father and brothers with lavish gifts and some prime real estate in Egypt.
After Joseph died, and a few more generations of Israelites grew in Egypt, the Egyptians got concerned about their country and the new pharaoh decided the best option to ensure Egyptian power was to enslave the Jews.
Obviously, Abraham didn’t call this one on his own. And Jewish oral tradition passed the events of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph on from generation to generation very accurately. Remember, God told Abraham that the Jews would be enslaved and mistreated for 400 years in a country that wasn’t their own.
If we fast-forward 400 years from the beginning of the Israelites slavery in Egypt, we find Moses sitting on a rock watching his father-in-law’s sheep. Our reading today doesn’t mention it, but few chapters later we learn that Moses was 80 years old when he went to tell Pharaoh to free the Israelites.
An 80-year-old shepherd is generally not looking for a career change. Especially when we realize that the reason Moses has been tending sheep for the past 40 years is because he’s on the lam from the Egyptian authorities for murdering an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.
God decides that the best person to demand that the ruler of Egypt release all the Hebrew slaves is an elderly fugitive with a speech impediment.
Ten plagues later, all the Israelites are freed and given great possessions like gold, silver, and jewels from their former masters in Egypt just as God promised in his message to Abraham.
Today’s Old Testament reading shows that God chose Moses to be the means by which God would keep the promises he made centuries before. Moses had many chances in his life to obey God. At 80 years of age, how many chances do you think he still had left? God revealed himself to Moses, but Moses still had to open his heart and accept God’s mission for him. Even a sinner like Moses was loved by God so much that God would use him to save others.
Sin is a transgression. When we sin against God, we’re choosing to do our will instead of his. When we transgress others in positions of authority, how do they react?
“Officer, I was driving 90 miles an hour because your speed limits are just old rules that don’t apply in these modern times…” See how far that will get you next time you’re pulled over by the highway patrol.
Or see how long you’ll last at your job doing what you want to do instead of what your boss wants you to do. At least in these examples you’ll only get a ticket or lose your job. Transgressions against authority back in the first century came with a much heavier price.
The first part of our Gospel today mentions Pilate mixing the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices. What happened was that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of the region, decided to build an aqueduct to bring water into the area. He also decided to take the money from the Jewish temple to pay for it. Not surprisingly, the Jews were unhappy about that and a large crowd of them gathered in protest.
Pilate ordered his soldiers to dress like the civilian mob and mingle into it. The soldiers carried concealed daggers with them. The first-century writer Josephus describes the crowd as at least 10,000 people. On Pilate’s signal, the soldiers slaughtered a large number of unarmed Israelites in the crowd.
Josef Stalin murdered about 43 million of his own people. Overall, in the past 100 years, governments have killed about 119 million of their own people. Human rulers don’t seem to respond to transgression very hospitably.
But how does God respond to our transgressions? We do some pretty vile things and God still lets us live. He even tries to bring us closer to him. In fact, no matter what we’ve done, he’s willing to forgive us, if we’ll just repent and come back to him. And he keeps giving us another chance, and another, and another…
There’s a country song by Vince Gill that has the perfect title to describe our relationship with God, even though that’s not what the song’s about. Gill is writing about staying out late, partying with the boys, even though his wife has told him many times that she won’t take it anymore. In the chorus he pleads with her, saying “Give me just one more last chance before you say we’re through.”
You see, at some point, even though it breaks God’s heart, he’ll have to say we’re through if we don’t return to him. And we don’t know when that point is. For the other Galileans in today’s Gospel reading, the ones who were killed unexpectedly by a falling tower, we don’t know if they turned their hearts to God before their time was up.
What about us? How many times do we ask God to forgive us for something and then turn right around and do it again? Repentance requires turning away from our transgression, not repeating it.
But while we want God to continually give us another last chance, we don’t like it when he does it for others. We don’t like to think of Moses as a murderer, so we make excuses for him: he was defending a slave who was being beaten, or he didn’t mean it.
But how about King David, whom God called “a man after my own heart”? David had an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his own soldiers. When he got her pregnant, David had her husband killed in battle to compound his sin. Yet “Son of David” was the term used to refer to the promised Messiah. Paul held coats for the people who stoned Steven to death, making him at least an accomplice. Yet Paul is one of the heroes of our faith.
What happens when we learn about a really bad guy repenting? It happens all the time in prison ministry, yet many of us think those people aren’t worth saving. They had more chances than most of us are willing to give them, yet God hasn’t given up on them.
Jeffrey Dahmer was a convicted murderer and cannibal who cooked and ate his victims. You don’t really get much more heinous than that. He was awarded 16 life sentences. While in prison, Dahmer met with Roy Ratcliff, a minister with the Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin, and turned his life over to Jesus Christ. He was baptized in prison, knowing that he would never leave prison alive. He had nothing to gain in this life, but everything to gain in the next.
We may scoff at jailhouse conversions, but within months of Dahmer’s baptism, people noticed a Christian spirit in him. His father and pen pals noticed the difference, and his father, who had left the church, has since been restored as a faithful member. Dahmer’s younger brother also had a conversion experience of his own.
Dahmer was killed in prison by a fellow inmate a few months after his baptism. At his memorial service, along with his own family and several Christians, two sisters of one of his victims attended, having grown close to Dahmer’s family after their brother’s death.
That may have been Dahmer’s last chance for repentance, and he took it. But many of us think he shouldn’t have been given another chance. He didn’t deserve it. And that’s true. He didn’t deserve another chance. But neither do we.
Jeffrey Dahmer was like that fig tree that provided no fruit during his life. But he was given one more last chance to repent, and he took it. The fruit of Dahmer’s repentance included bringing at least two people to Jesus and helping to heal the painful wounds left by his transgressions.
How many of us can claim the same? God chose to work through him. God chose to work through David Berkowitz as well. The Son of Sam killer who murdered six people in New York City in the late 1970s was involved in the occult and Satan worship.
Ten years into his prison sentence, Berkowitz met a man named Rick in the prison yard who told him about Jesus. He explained that no matter what a person did, Christ was ready to forgive him if he would turn away from the wrong things he was doing and put his faith in Jesus. Rick gave him a Gideon’s Pocket Testament and Berkowitz prayed to Jesus later in his cell, pouring out his heart to Jesus.
This was in 1987. Since then, Berkowitz has refused to be considered for parole, works as a chaplain’s clerk, and assists in the Special Needs Unit of the prison where men with various emotional needs are housed. He lives each day now to serve Christ.
If these men were not too far gone for Jesus to reunite them with the Father, then none of us are. Although we tend to distrust that anyone really bad has actually changed, it happens much more frequently than we’re willing to admit. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and venture to say that the reason we distrust the true conversion of people we consider worse than us is that we ourselves may not feel Christ’s healing presence in our own lives, and knowing how much better we are than those other people, we decide that since God hasn’t called us, he hasn’t called them either.
Otherwise, they would be closer to God than we are. And we just couldn’t tolerate that.
Henry Moorhouse preached one evening on the love of God. In the meeting was a rough, wicked coal miner who had a vile temper, was a heavy drinker, and mistreated his wife and children when he’d been drinking. His name was Ike Miller.
Moorhouse was told that Ike Miller was at the meeting and that many were praying that he would be saved. Moorhouse preached his heart out but Ike Miller didn’t respond. Instead he went straight out the door after the meeting and disappeared.
Those who were anxious for Miller’s salvation told Moorhouse that he had failed to touch the town’s biggest sinner. But what those men did not know — and what Moorhouse learned later — was that Ike Miller had gone straight home. He had kissed his wife and tenderly gathered his two children into his arms — something he had not done for years — and sobbing, he prayed a prayer that his mother had taught him:
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to thee.”
It’s not too late for any of us. But we can’t guarantee that for even the next few seconds. When God gives us the one more last chance we ask for, it may really be the last one he plans to give us.
Charlene Cothran is the publisher of Venus Magazine, which is a periodical for lesbians of African descent. She recently announced on the magazine’s web site that she has become a Christian and has rejected the lesbian lifestyle she had been living.
Cothran said that as a magazine publisher she has had the opportunity to address thousands of people publicly, influencing homosexuals to come out of the closet. Now, she says, she must come out of the closet again.
She said, “The spirit of God spoke directly into my soul and said you will choose this day who you will serve and if you make the wrong choice, I will allow you to drift so far away from me that you will never hear my voice again. I gave God my heart and soul in the parking lot of the mall, right there in my car. A river of tears flowed as Jesus washed me and forgave me and redeemed me for His work.”
Cothran will continue her work in the homosexual community, but she has changed her mission.
She said, “I intend be just as ‘out’ about my transformation as I was about my lesbian life. I have given every gift I have back to God, including VENUS Magazine. The target audience will remain the same but the mission has been renewed. Our new mission is to encourage, educate and assist those in the [homosexual] life who want change but can’t find a way out.”
Lent is about repentance. Drawing closer to Jesus by turning away from our own transgressions and trusting him to reunite us with the Father. Our creator, our Father in Heaven, wants to restore the loving relationship he intended for us to share with Him.
The story is told (by Ernest Hemingway) of a father and his teenage son who had a relationship that had become strained to the point of breaking. Finally the son ran away from home. His father, however, began a journey in search of his rebellious son.
Finally, in Madrid, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in the newspaper.
The ad read:
“Dear Paco, meet me in front of the newspaper office at noon. All is forgiven. I love you. Your father.”
The next day at noon in front of the newspaper office, 800 “Pacos” showed up....
God is giving us, like the fig tree, one more last chance to bear fruit. But after that, it will be too late.
God Bless You.
