• 2 Kings 5:14-17
• Psalm 98:1-4
• 2 Timothy 2:8-13
• Luke 17:11-19

How much money do you need to receive the gift that God offers? Put the question like that, and we can immediately see how absurd it is; God’s love for us is so overwhelming that he longs to give the gift, and there is nothing that we can do to buy it, still less to deserve it. Nevertheless, we still persist in thinking that we must somehow earn it, or can write a cheque for it.

• Amos 6:1a, 4-7
• Psalm 146:7-10
• 1 Timothy 6:11-16
• Luke 16:19-31

We shall not get our Christianity right unless we recognise that there is a profound contrast between the way we look at things and the way God sees them. To us, if we are unreflective, it can seem all too obvious that what we most need is a comfortable existence, and a few simple pleasures. God, it seems from next Sunday’s readings, does not quite see it that way. The first reading has Amos in a mood for some uncomfortably sharp political satire, well suited to a consumerist society such as our own. “Woe to those who are at ease in Sion”, he bellows. Then he describes their “ease”: “those who lie on couches of ivory”, which sounds like materialist extravagance to rival anything in our culture. They have a diet of lamb and veal, and even idle their time away with playing the guitar! They “improvise to the sound of the harp”, he says, darkly. And that is not all, for “they drink wine by the basinful, and with first-rate oils they anoint themselves”. And all this means they don’t care for the things that really matter: “They do not grieve over the fall of Joseph”. The result is chilling: ‘they shall be first-rate in exile, and they shall leave their wines of revelry”.

• Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14
• Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 17, 19
• 1 Timothy 1:12-17
• Luke 15:1-32

What is God’s attitude to sin? Well, he is against it, naturally, but God knows better than we do the frailty and ambiguity of our human condition; and next Sunday’s readings seem to be saying that our sinfulness is actually, mysteriously, an opening up to the divine love and mercy. The first reading is a slightly comical battle between Moses and God, which Moses wins. If the battle is comical, however, the subject of it is intensely serious. For Moses has been a long time up Mount Sinai with God, who has delivered his people from Egypt; and, bored with the delay, the people have built themselves a golden calf, and proclaimed that, after all, it was this Golden Calf that brought them out of Egypt. This is a self-evidently absurd proposition; but it is no more absurd than all the other stratagems that you and I employ to avoid listening to God’s invitation. The tussle that ensues between God and Moses is over whose people Israel actually is. God starts the debate by instructing Moses, “Go – go down to your people, whom you brought up from the land of Egypt, with mighty power and a strong hand”. Moses employs two arguments: first, what will the Egyptians say? Second, “remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel your servants, to whom you swore on oath”. The surprising result? “And YHWH changed his mind”.