May your grace, O God, overflow for us and in us and change us through the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Amen.

One of the questions we always ask ourselves at Bible Study on Wednesday afternoons is this: "What word or sentence jumps out at me in this passage?" In the first reading today, the story of the Golden Calf, I didn't have to think long and hard about the answer to that question. The sentence that jumps right off the page at me are the brief words which conclude the reading from Exodus: "The LORD changed his mind." Yup! We heard it correctly: God changed his mind. We hear the same words in Moses' petition to God, who was provoked to a white-hot rage at the Golden Calf, what we might consider to be the Dow-Jones of antiquity. God is furious that the people have put their trust in this base, metal thing, this crass symbol of wealth and power, and God's wrath "waxes hot against them" as the King James Version puts it. Speaking of which: we don't read "God changed his mind" in the KJV. We read there this: "The Lord repented of the evil." But that, too, is a rather jarring statement. We humans are the ones, are we not, who need to repent. Since when does God need to repent? Whichever translation we use, the same words dressed in contemporary or Elizabethan English, give pause for reflection.

God changed his mind, the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people. We don't normally think that God could - or perhaps even - that God should change his mind! How, dear friends, can we talk about eternity with the vocabulary of time? Is not God the same, yesterday, today and forever? Do we not pray in the liturgy of Compline that we may "rest in God's eternal changelessness?" Indeed we do. And yet today we hear it in all its irritating and upsetting non-conformity with "the tradition" that God changed his mind. The possible repercussions of that thought are startling: If God blesses America - and who among us is not convinced that God has and does bless America? - then isn't it a scary thought that God could change his mind in that regard? Hmmm! We believe that God's love is unchanging to be sure. But surely every parent, every child, knows that love sometimes must be tough love which may not even look like love at all. God changed his mind. That pesky sentence keeps asserting itself when we think about it. If the opposite of change is consistency then must we not charge God with being inconsistent? Perhaps. Do you know what Oscar Wilde said about consistency? "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Or Ralph Waldo Emerson's bonmot, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." At the very least we cannot say that God lacks imagination or has a small mind. Perhaps it's only small minds that never change. Be that as it may. This troublesome sentence about God changing his mind won't let us go, won't let me go. Let's just put that thought away for the moment and take a look at the second reading from Paul's first letter to Timothy. There we find another instance of someone changing his mind. Paul recounts how he went from persecutor to persecuted, how he "changed his mind" about Jesus. If Paul had not changed his mind about Jesus, we, dear friends, would not be sitting here and I would not be preaching this sermon! Paul's change of mind and heart was profound to say the least; without it we would not be remembering what Jesus said and did. Paul changed his mind. And thank God he did.

The Gospel today doesn't seem to have anything to do with "changing one's mind," we changing ours or God changing his. At least not directly. Not until we observe the behavior of Jesus who "welcomes sinners and eats with them." The tradition that Jesus lived with stated quite frankly: Do not welcome sinners and do not eat with them. We hear it again and again in the psalms and in other passages of the Old Testament. Obviously there's a change of mind and heart here. And it was not a change that provoked an unqualified halleluja from Jesus' contemporaries. Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them. Thank God for that change of mind, otherwise we could not be here nor could we hope to approach this table.

Sitting at table with those with whom sacred tradition has said one should not sit: there Jesus is as he tells his two wonderful, pithy parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin in today's Gospel. The sayings of Jesus on repentence are in tension with these parables. Repentence suggests turning back, returning, conversion, but neither the lost sheep nor the lost coin can do anything but get lost. Here in these stories we see clearly: repentence has more to do with being found by God than with anything that we can do. Jesus' parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are little gems of wisdom. God seeks (and finds) us before we can even think of turning to God. I am reminded of the magnificent poem, The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson. Perhaps you remember it as well. It starts out:

I fled him down the nights and down the days
I fled him down the arches of the years
I fled him, down labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
and shot precipitated adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong feet that followed after.
But with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, they beat
More insistant than the Feet - "All things betray Thee, who betrayest Me."

Our God is a Finder and a Keeper, dear friends. Thank God, God has "found" us and finds us again and again whenever we lose our way. And when God finds us, we are not left unchanged even as it is not us who does the changing. God changes not only his mind but us as well. Thanks be to God! Amen.