Proper 17 :: Jeremiah 4: 11–12, 22–28
/ Psalm 51: 1–11 / I Timothy 1: 12–17 / Luke 15: 1–10
This is the homily given at St. John’s,
Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, September 15, 2019.
“G. I. PARTY”
(Homily
text: Luke 15: 1–10)
One
ritual which most anyone who’s ever served in the Army will remember is the “G.I.[1] Party”.
The “G.I. Party” can take many forms: For example, it can involve scrubbing
down the shower in the barracks, even to the point of getting down on hands and
knees to scrub the floor; or using old toothbrushes to clean the edges of the
tiles. Or, it can involve cleaning out one’s locker to the point of making sure
that the corners inside (yes, at the bottom of the locker, but also at the top
inside) and the top outside are completely clean, so that when the Sergeant
comes to inspect, those white gloves will come away clean when the corners and
the tops are wiped. In a ”G.I. Party”, nothing gets overlooked.
In
today’s Gospel, we read that the scribes and the Pharisees are grumbling
because Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them.
In
the society of that day, one didn’t associate – much less eat with –
undesirable people, people who were unclean, people who lived in the corners of
society.
Using
the image of a “G.I. Party”, we can contrast the attitudes of the scribes and
the Pharisees with our Lord’s approach by noticing that the scribes and the
Pharisees would rather ignore the unclean ones who lived at the edges of
society, those who couldn’t ever be scrubbed clean, no matter how much elbow
grease went into the process. Out of sight, out of mind, was their attitude. By contrast, Jesus ignores no one and, in fact, deliberately
gets into the corners of society to seek out those who were usually deemed to
be un-cleanable. He is engaging in a spiritual “G.I. Party”. No aspect of a
person’s life or past history made them unapproachable. Nothing they’d ever
done – or were currently doing – prevented Him from redeeming them, cleaning
them up, so that they might find favor with God.
In
Jesus’ actions, we find a basic, but profound, truth: No one of us can do the
cleaning that is necessary in order for us to find favor with God ourselves.
Here, we come to the blunt reality that we, who are born with the stain of
Original Sin, are helpless when it comes to the business of spiritual
cleansing. Surely, the fifth century Bishop and theologian St. Augustine of
Hippo would agree with this assessment. For Augustine, in his ministry, had to
confront the heresy known as Pelagianism. Pelagianism maintained that we human
beings don’t need God’s help in order to be redeemed. We can do it on our own
merits, that way of thinking believed. The spirit of Pelagianism is alive and
well today. We encounter it whenever we meet up with the idea that a person
finds favor with God by being a “good” person. We encounter it whenever we
might tend to believe that the “good stuff” we do will earn us a favored place
with God.
Just
as the notorious sinners in the day of our Lord’s earthly ministry were unable
to help themselves out of their predicament, so too are we totally unable to
help ourselves in a quest to find favor with God. We need help. We need someone
to come and apply some “G. I.” elbow grease so that, through the efforts of our
Lord Jesus, we can be made clean and whole and acceptable to God. There is no
other way to pass God’s inspection.
AMEN.
[1] G. I. comes from “government issue”, and the
term can refer to people (soldiers, members of the Army, specifically), or it
can be used as a verb, as in our homily today, where it means to thoroughly
clean something.
