Is this the idea that will make you rethink faith in God?

This morning I decided to go with a click bait title for the sermon:

Is this the idea that will make you rethink faith in God?

Faith involves doubt.

To increase the gift of faith you have received, no matter how small or large it might be, requires doubt because it is doubt that drove the disciples to ask Jesus to increase their faith.  Jesus had turned the disciples’ world upside down.  His stories and sayings challenged everything they believed and shook them to the core.  They were confused.  Following Jesus and believing in the God that he witnessed to left them floundering.  They asked him again and again to explain things, to show them, to help them understand and from the reading today “to increase their faith.” 

Faith involves doubt.  It is OK to have doubts.

Now some of you may have a strong faith, a faith that you feel is formed and shaped and grounded.  And some of you may feel that you have only a little faith, a faith that feels weak and unstable and unsure.  Yet, strong or weak, to nurture and grow the seeds of faith that you have been given requires you to doubt.  For it is in doubting that we question?  It is in questioning that we search?  It is the journey of a dynamic doubtful and searching faith that we grow?

As a follower of Jesus, as a baptised person and now as minister, my faith is driven by the constant clash of what I think I know and comprehend and what lies beyond my reach and experience.  It is my doubt that leads me to constantly rethink my faith and drives me to discovery.  It is my doubt that leads me to attend prayer retreats and conferences.  It is my doubt that inspires me to persist in my studies, and to read, and reflect.  It is my doubt that causes me to listen to the stories of your lives and your faith and to seek to know and understand.  It is doubt that inspires me to seek the wisdom and teaching of mentors and friends.

Faith is not an end point it is a starting point and I believe that without doubt faith sits and stagnates and does not grow but remains the same.

Faith involves doubt.  It allows questions.

Maybe it is the unspoken doubts and questions that you have that keep you coming back and searching for a rekindling of your faith week by week.  Maybe it is your doubts about your experience of life and what you see occurring in the world around you that has you coming here to find hope and to take confidence in God’s love and power.

I believe that doubt is usually seen as a negative thing, an impediment, but is having doubt the idea that might change and transform you as you grow in your relationship with God.

It is the midst of a faith filled with doubts that I found a way to cope with the words of the last words of Psalm 137. 

The words of this Psalm are written as a reflection on the sorrow of God’s people after they have been defeated and carried off as slaves to Babylon.  For most of us these concepts are beyond our comprehension: defeat, death, and utter disempowerment.

The response of the Psalmist though is more than a little disturbing:

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!

Can this be right?  The people of God will be happy when they are killing babies in retribution and revenge for what has been done to them.  As much as it was known to be a practice in ancient warfare to decimate an enemy, even to the point of killing children, is this realty a reflection of divine retribution that we should blithely and blindly accept?

These are the words of our Bible.  Are these words which reflect God’s will in any way shape or form?  Are God’s people meant to be happy as baby killers?

I doubt it and I doubt it deeply.

Without doubt as part of the makeup of my faith these words of the Psalmist could be taken to suggest that God affirms the violence and the revenge killing reflected in the Psalm.  Passages such as this one often drive people away from Christianity who perceive God as of being callous and cruel.  More disturbingly I have heard passages such as this one used to justify Christians perpetrating violence.

These words of the Psalmist do not reflect the God I have encountered in the New Testament.  God, who rather than respond to violence with violence submits to the violence of the cross in the person of Jesus.  The cycle is interrupted.

So what do we make of these words of the Psalm? Do they carry any authority and weight for us still? What do they do to my reading of the Bible?

In my mind the authority of these words of the Psalm is in exposing the fallibility and confusion of human beings in response to the violence we perpetuate against one another. 

Throughout all of history we humans have found constant ways and means of hurting each other and killing each other.  We have been great at portraying other people as our enemy. We have not learned to love our neighbour or our enemy who is different to us.  We have been good at ignoring the impacts of our behaviours on others, especially those who are distant from us.

Just as I have doubts in my faith which drive me to question and grow so too I would say that I have deep doubts about having any faith in humanity.

As people who live after the age of enlightenment there was great hope in humanity to mature and respond to crises as they arose.  That we would shrug off the anachronism of religion and actual care for one another and the world in a much better way.  We thought our wisdom and advancement as human beings would bring us peace and security.

Beyond the obvious violent conflicts that continue to unfold across the globe, beyond the clear inequality and exploitation between the extremely wealthy and those in poverty, it was yet another climate milestone that pricked up my ears this week as I contemplated increasing my faith.  

This week I read that the atmosphere has passed a saturation point of carbon dioxide 400 parts per million and that it is not expected to drop below this bench mark again.  Whether or not you have doubts about climate science and the contribution of humanity to global warming, this figure is significant.  Human made or not we are on a trajectory that could see warming, accompanied by sea level rises, which may result in the collapse of society as we know it.

One of the most popular genre’s at the moment for young people are books and movies which look to societies in a not too distant post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which human beings have to cope in a world which has collapsed in on itself.  One of the constant themes in these novels is the violence of that future.  Movies and books like the Hunger Games and Divergent have echoes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as community breaks down.

If doubt drives my faith in God to go deeper ironically it is my doubts about human behaviour that leads me to lose my faith in humanity.

If the human response to bad stuff is more bad stuff – to kill the babies, then I am lead to look elsewhere.  I am lead to look again to God.

Is this the idea that will make you rethink faith in God?

That faith involves doubt.  Doubt can drive you deeper into your faith or it can cause us to lose your faith.  For me the faith that is deepening through doubt is my faith in God. 

Faith in God who rather than stay aloof and distant shares in our created existence.

Faith in God who rather than continue the cycles of violence submits to death on the cross in Jesus.

Faith in God who says to us in the resurrection that death is not the last word.

Faith in God who walks alongside us through our own questions, confusion and fears.

Faith is not about having all the answers.  Faith is not about what we can prove by our experience or argue through our knowledge.  Faith is a journey responding to doubt and gaining wisdom, strength and hope from the relationship.

When Paul writes to Timothy he encourages the community to rekindle their faith by the laying on of hands.  So on this day let us share in this moment, let us rekindle our faith and let us give strength to one another.

Amen.

The rich man & Lazarus

Most of us make assumptions.  We make assumptions about what we are, where we are going and how other people perceive us.  We make assumptions about other people and what they are and where they are going.  Some of our assumptions come from educated guesses, others from pure ignorance, whilst others from information that has been passed onto us in one form or another.

Many of Jesus parables are all about blowing apart assumptions and deconstructing religious myths.  They are about reorganising people’s hearts and minds and souls through challenging their world view.  Today’s parable is one such example and in it Jesus attacks the wealthy.

Now here is an assumption that we all make about ourselves.  Are you wealthy or not?  And if consider yourself to be wealthy is this an indication that you are a good person or, well, otherwise?  Most of you along with me would probably think that we are not that wealthy.  For example if you read the figures in the Business Review Weekly’s top 50 entrepreneurs you would be staggered at how much some people earn.  But all things are relative. 

As I was preparing for today I stumbled upon an interesting website that allowed me to find out how rich I am on a world scale.  I entered my yearly income and I was told exactly where I fitted in.  To give you a rough idea I am richer than around 5.4 billion people and there are around 600 million richer than me.  That means I am in the world’s top 11% of rich people.  Now I do not know what you earn but to give you more of an idea if you earn more than $10 000 a year you are still in the top 14% of the world’s richest people.  In our society we all know $10 000 doesn’t seem to go far at all.

Now I don’t know how all this makes you feel, but listening to the parable and Jesus attack on wealthy last week, “you cannot serve two master, God and money”; it makes me sit up and take notice.

Now when Jesus told this story Luke clearly indicates that he was attacking the Pharisees who loved money but we should not slip into any sort self-righteous Pharisee bashing.  Whilst the Pharisees might have been a convenient target Jesus’ real concern is to expose the problems that lie behind the love of money.

Looking to the parable, we are told of two men, a rich man and Lazarus, a beggar.  The story at face value does not tell us too much about these men and their morality and their way of life but there are some indicators.

For instance we must consider that rhe rich man is really very rich.  He wears purple every day and those of you who know your ancient fabrics would know that purple was the most expensive dye.  It was, and still is, associated with royalty.  Not only does the man wear purple the cloth is of the finest linen and we are told he feast sumptuously everyday.   

We are not told how this man came by this wealth and there is nothing to lead us to suspect him of any dishonesty, in fact for all we know he could have inherited the lot or maybe just been a good businessman.  So we should not be leaping to any quick conclusions.

Jesus audience, including the Pharisees, who loved their money, may have thought that this rich man was OK.  And according to some readings of the Old Testament one could argue that this man’s wealth stemmed from God and therefore indicated that God favoured him.  This is an assumption that Jesus is about challenge and he was certainly not the first to do so.

The other man, Lazarus, is a beggar and he lay at the gate of the rich man.  Now we do not pick the nuance up in the English but in the Greek the sense of the word is that man was laid there.  By whom we do not know, but we might assume that whoever has done it has done so because there is a hope that the rich man or one of his guest might show mercy to Lazarus.

We are told that this man longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table but this is not happening. We are also told that the dogs came to lick his sores.

This is an interesting aside.  Usually it was the dogs that ate the scraps underneath the table and by inserting the dogs into the story at this point it is possible that Jesus is implying that the rich man saw Lazarus as lower than dogs. 

This vision of the dogs licking Lazarus sores may appear to us to be the final indignity.  But there is another possibility.  It could infer that that the dogs are more compassionate than the rich man.  Dogs lick their own wounds and there is some evidence from the ancient world that the saliva of dogs was consider medicinal.  In other words Jesus is reversing the assumptions and judgements of the crowd.  It is not Lazarus who is lower than the dogs but the rich man, because the dogs act compassionately towards Lazarus whilst the rich man does not.

The parable then takes a fascinating turn as both men die.  Lazarus ascends with the angels to be with father Abraham whilst the rich man is tormented in Hades.  This would have been a huge shock to Jesus’ listeners who probably subscribed to the particular view that the rich are blessed by God and the poor cursed.  This is a view that we can find in the Old Testament but we also find other views about wealth and righteousness in the Old Testament. The most obvious of these views is found in Job.

Back in the parable, the rich man looks up to Father Abraham and sees Lazarus by his side.  Appealing to Abraham he calls for Abraham to send Lazarus to his aid.  The irony is clear and one can but wonder or not whether the rich man still perceives that Lazarus is lower than he because he expects him to serve him by bringing him water.

The refusal of Abraham is resolute, as resolute as was the rich man’s inability to respond to Lazarus predicament in life.  Abraham points out that between you and us a great chasm has been fixed so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so and no one can cross from there to us.

The rich man in his woe begs that someone be sent to his father’s home to tell his five brothers so they do not end up in the same place.  Abraham refuses and says if they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets then they will not be convinced if someone rises from the dead.

I am not about to buy into an interpretation that suggests that all rich people go to Hades, do not pass go do not collect hundred dollars!  Yet you and I should listen for the tensions that this sets up for us.

Just because someone turns up on Sunday, even as the minister, and sings the hymns or songs and prays the prayers, or at least has someone out the front do it for them, and listens to the sermon or parts of it not at all, and partakes of the bread and wine, and so on and so forth, this does not necessarily mean that this person really participates in what it means to be a part of the coming kingdom.  If we put aside the issue of wealth, and of heaven and hell, and look directly at what it means to be a part of kingdom life now then there are some serious questions as to how all of us live our lifestyle. 

How do we use the gifts that we have been given? Our wealth? Our time? Our intellect? Our practical abilities? Where is Lazarus at our gate?  Possibly half way around the globe? Or maybe in a detention centre? Or maybe even living under the bridges that cross the river?

The gospel imperative reminds us that Christ died for us and for this world, yet participating in his coming kingdom now involves the necessary reflection and response to those in need around us, regardless of whether we think they deserve their predicament or not.

It is confronting stuff for all of us.  Jesus last line sounds a bit like an addition by Luke.  If someone rises from the dead the brothers may still not believe.  Reading this I wonder whether there was an issue for the community that Luke writing for in terms of those who followed Jesus and those who refused to believe that Jesus had truly risen. 

The issue stays with us.  Do we really believe in God’s call in Christ who died and rose and again and has ascended?  Someone has come back from the dead and his coming back will draw us with him when he returns, but in the meantime we are called to be part of Jesus life and ministry now. 

Ultimately, I do not believe that we save ourselves. Grace is God’s sovereign gift.  The gulf between the rich man and Lazarus cannot be bridged by what we do only by God’s unconditional and compassionate decision.  Nevertheless, we as Christians are called to take seriously Jesus words if we are to be his disciples and to live our lives responding to his love.  Paul in his letter to Timothy gave him an idea of what this might mean and I want to conclude today by reading you a portion of that passage:

Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

But as for you, man [or woman] of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

Half empty to overflowing

More often than not the Bible can feel like a bit of a glass half empty experience.  A downer. A depression.   We have been dwelling over the past four weeks on the prophecy of Jeremiah and from today’s reading we hear these words of condemnation.

21How long must I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet? 22“For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.”

As if to twist the knife in the wound the people who chose the readings for today pair up this saying of Jeremiah with a parallel from Psalm 14.

2The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. 3They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.

There is no one who does good, not one! Not you, not me, not mother Theresa, not Martin Luther King Junior, not anyone. 

Now a central conviction that came out of reformed theology which developed through the 1500s was the notion of the “total depravity” of humanity.  It is based on passages just like these – as human beings we are constantly turning away.  Turning from god and each other.

This week I read yet another “dear church” letter.  A letter explaining why the pews are empty and people are leaving the church. “Dear church this is why I am leaving you.”  Amongst all of its rantings the letter only briefly touched on the issue of the confronting images of the scriptures that tell us we are doing living in the world wrong: that we lack wisdom; that we are skilled in doing evil; that we are sinners.

Speaking about sin is both jargon and unpopular these days. 

Yet as a student of history and society I have not needed the scriptures to know of the depravity of humanity.

Even within my life I know my own failings and if you are honest with yourself you know this to be true too. On a personal level we all know that we have limitations and fallibility. We know that there are some people we cannot love no matter how hard we try.  But more than this individual conundrum in Jeremiah, the Psalms, and the scriptures generally, the movement and the judgement that comes is also about who we are collectively: as communities, as ancient Israel, as the church, and as humanity.  It is not just about whether I can be right with God but how the very society in which I am embedded is behaving.

Now the author of the dear church letter did say that we tend to speak in a dead and dusty language that has no relevance to our lives.  Words that have no bearing on our reality.  So, let us think on this notion of the evil of humanity for a moment or two, the heavy handed judgement that the scriptures seem to bringing, and let us bring it into a more contemporary picture.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the attack on the twin towers in New York.  It doesn’t feel like 15 years has passed but there it is.  15 years of what has become known as the war on terror.  A conflict that still rages in the Middle East and in different ways across the globe.  The atrocities continue and just this week we heard about the dropping of barrel bombs containing chlorine in Syria. In Australia this conflict is expressed daily in our anxiety, suspicion and prejudice against particular people within our community and by our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. 

Of course this conflict is not the only game in town when it comes to violence and hatred and hurt but it has flow on consequences around the globe especially in raising the question how do we as humanity really care for one another.  The response of humanity to those who are fleeing these regions beset by terror is suspicion and anxiety at best and full blown fear and rejection at its worst. 

It is so easy to be inoculated against the travesties that are occurring in the world by our wealth and our access to entertainment but this inoculation of affluence may just be part of the problem.

 In the book Affluenza Clive Hamilton explores our obsession as culture with consumption and owning more.  He suggests that “We have grown fat but we persist in the belief that we are thin and must consume more.”  And whilst we live in a society in which we constantly seek to express our identity through what we own other cultures inadvertently become the prop for our idol of wealth and affluence.  The consequences as we should know are insidious.  A colleague of mine is the CEO of the organisation Stop the Traffik which seeks to intervene in the culture of the exploitation and trade of human lives so that in some cases goods might be produced cheaply for us. 

More disturbing is the notion that the overpopulation of the planet is leading us towards a dire future.  Julian Cribb’s book “The Coming Famine” which was written just after the Global Financial Crisis indicates the disparity between rich and poor, the pressures on food systems and the availability of clean drinking water and points at the connection between famine and war.  There has been scholarly work done on the idea that drought was a key influence in the current Syrian crisis.  Cribb’s book sits alongside Paul Gildings more disturbing book “The Great Disruption” and Clive Hamilton’s depressingly titled “Requiem for a Species” as harbingers of doom.

The ancient and dusty words of Jeremiah tell us that God’s contention with Israel is not only that they have forgotten their God but that in forgetting God they have marginalised the poor and the widow, they have shown scant regard for those in need.  The poor are not to be blamed for their predicament by the rich, they are to be helped!

Do any have the wisdom to attend the problems of our era?  Did any have the wisdom in Jeremiah’s time?  Yes occasionally we see prophets and people who shine as examples swimming against the stream of what we are told is the norm but ultimately when it comes down to it I suspect most of us often feel lost.  The problems are too big. Changing ourselves personally is too hard.   And, even when we do make changes, how can we know now that the changes will have desired outcomes?

We are lost.  John Carroll declares our humanist culture dead. But we are not without hope. We are not left with a dark nihilism.  As Christians the beginning and ending of our understanding of our lives in this world is not simply within who humanity is.

For look and see that across the hillsides of life, through the dark ravines and dangerous places we go comes a shepherd searching and seeking us.  Coming down to be one of us, walking among us, sharing with us in our lostness – Jesus comes.

This is the promise and this is the hope as we name: amidst the reality of our brokenness, and as we come to the realisation that we are lost Jesus comes to bring us home.

Here in this place week by week we share a story that is the counterpoint of the suffering of life and the wayward ways of humanity.  In the midst our folly God does not despair.  God continues to love us, to seek us out and to give us new hope.  God gives us life.

The hope of the gospel expressed so distinctly and yet surprisingly in the letter to Timothy: But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, 14and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.

I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.

Beyond the systems and communities in which we find ourselves embedded God, the good shepherd, finds us and bears us up and brings us home even when we are unaware of just how lost we are.

In the face of the tragedy, the evil, the folly and the sin God makes space for the celebration of life to be reignited.  We live.  We see glimmers of life and light. We gather here Sunday by Sunday joining in the celebration of the lost sheep.  We come remembering the one who has carried us here and who invites us to live again as part of his flock.

More than that we are given the audacious task of carrying the invitation to come and celebrate out to others.

This is what strikes me most out of the readings today.  Whilst we cannot ignore the heavy and hard reality of the pervasiveness of our evil as humanity we know that God, who is the author of all things, has sought us out in Jesus and desires us to join in a celebration grounded in new life and hope.  It is a celebration bigger than our individual existence and experience but at the same time remains intensely and entirely personal.

Yes there are passages the rightly remind us to know that we as human beings fail miserably and the consequences can be dire.  Yet that is not the heart of the message of the scriptures.  The message is of God loving, seeking, finding, forgiving, saving, inviting and celebrating.  And life goes on, the creation continues because of God’s immense and immeasurable love for us and all things.

I began with the image of a half empty glass but by now we should know better for the glass is not half empty or half full but the cup of life which we are offered overflows with God’s love. 

This is indeed good news.  Take a few moments of silence to contemplate this news and its implications for your life.

Jeremiah 18: Unable to Change

We have been following the Book of Jerimiah over the last three weeks. 

We started in Chapter 1 and were challenged to listen to Jerimiah because God puts the words into his mouth.

Then last week in Chapter 2 we listened as Jerimiah set up the conditions for repentance.  He declared to the people that they has passed the wrong way go back sign – that they had done something wrong.  To use a colloquial expression he was naming the elephant in the room.  And I( emphasised last week that this is true for all of us – we all pass the wrong way go back sign.

Now today we have jumped ahead to Chapter 18.  This is not to suggest that the previous chapters are not worth reading and I would encourage you that you might take the time as I preach this series on Jeremiah to read the whole book.

Nonetheless, today we find ourselves in Chapter 18 and Jeremiah goes down into the potter’s house to watch the potter at work.  Whenever I have heard this passage I have heard it as a fairly positive message.  God is moulding and shaping our lives like a potter at a wheel. 

Christian teachers often speak about Christian formation.  God’s hands upon us moulding and shaping us and if God is not happy with the shape of what is emerging God can change the shape.

As nice as this image is and as helpful as it can be to speak about Christian formation the imagery is a bit jarring as the passage goes on because as the scene is explained further it appears that God is calling the clay to change itself, for Israel to change itself: to turn away from doing evil and to turn toward the good.  In Christian jargon we call this repentance.

What God appears to be shaping as God works with the clay is not an individual but a consequence to come against the nation.  Will God shape destruction or will God shape life and peace.

The ideas contained here about God’s character are difficult.  Is God like a puppeteer determining everything? Is God like the God in the cartoon on the screen? Is God shaping consequences for people’s lives essentially punishing the bad and rewarding the good?  It can be easy to stumble and get caught on these questions and so ignore the fundamental problem that Jeremiah has been naming for the last 18 chapters and what he is calling the people to now

The people have turned away from God, they have ignored those who need help in their midst, they have become violent, they have declared that there is peace when there is none and so they have deluded themselves.  Through Jeremiah God is holding up a mirror which shows what the people are up to and having exposed the wrong is inviting a response: turn away from evil and turn towards the good.

God was inviting the people to re-engage – to turn back to God and allow God’s love and mercy into their hearts to reshape their lives.

You and I should hear this message as well.  That when we have done wrong or when we have failed to do the right thing all is not lost because God is still working the clay. 

So, having established the condition for repentance by exposing the wrong Jerimiah indicated that turning back to God would change the trajectory that Israel was on.

This is one of those situations in following the set readings that I wonder why the next verse was not included because in the next verse we hear what we might think is shocking response:

But they say, “It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will.”

The people are heading for disaster, pretty much shaped by their own violence and disregard for those who are marginalised, but God can change the outcome.  Yet the people say no!

It is one of the points at which we could sit back and think about how foolish the ancient Israelites were but I always see the people of God in the Old Testament and the people of God since Christ’s coming as two sides of the one coin.

Change is difficult.  None of us like change that much.  And when we have to make changes often we need a heck of a lot of support.

Think about changes you have had to make or tried to make.  Establishing a new routine like a daily devotional time, going on a diet, beginning an exercise regime, stopping smoking, going to church more, stopping swearing, giving time to serve the poor.  And think about changes that you have sought to be part of in a community or even a whole society.  Change is not easy.

Today we heard what I think is possibly one of the most confronting passages in the New Testament.  It began with these words:

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

And finished with these ones:

“None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

If turning back to God means following Jesus then in these matters I think it could be argued most of us fail miserably.  Sell all your possessions!

But we say, “It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will.”

We will not sell all of our possessions.  We will make our own plans.  We will build our nest eggs and protect our wealth.

So where does this leave us?  Is the potter still at the wheel?  Can a different future be formed for us as well?

The indication of Jeremiah to the people is yes.  The promise of God to us is yes! As we try to navigate through our lives God’s promises to keep working the clay.  

Ultimately, we believe the shape the clay takes is Jesus presence with us and when we fail to respond and repent as we should, when we fail to sell all our possessions or follow Jesus wholeheartedly, just as the rich young man who came to Jesus did, Jesus declares the hope of us all, “with God all things are possible”.

This is the good news:  With God all things are possible and the faithfulness of Jesus himself carries us back even when we fail to change.  So we gather, we listen, we hear the conditions for repentance and sometimes we respond well and sometimes not so much but here at the table this day we will recall that however well or badly we have responded God is for us  and God is with us in Christ and there is always hope.