What is your favorite VERBAL image of God?  When you describe God – what words do you use?

Now that I am 50, I figure it is okay for me to use the phrase: “In my younger days.”   So, in my younger days, my favorite verbal image of God was inspired from the book of Genesis – specifically the stories of creation.  In Genesis, God’s “Spirit” hovered over the primal chaos, gradually brought forth light and order and love.  From the abyss of chaos, God’s brought goodness and love and light.  God saw that what he had done with the chaos was good.  So my verbal image is of a God who did good things with chaos.   And no matter how turbulent the seas or the gunk or the mess that I or others had gotten themselves into, God could bring about Good from chaos.  In the New Testament, that image finds its high point on the Cross of Jesus, which told me there was no choice, no chaos unable to be transformed.  That is still one of my favorite images of God.  But it is being supplanted, I think, by the one inspired by today’s Gospel. 
In the three readings today and then in the three stories that comprise this ‘gospel within the gospel’ of St. Luke – there is this consistent image of God.  God is a God of New Beginnings, not a God of endings.  God is a God of new beginnings.

He lets Moses begin anew with the Hebrew people even after they turned to idolatry.  Paul tells Timothy in our second reading how he had been a blasphemer, arrogant, and a persecutor of the Lord's presence in the Church.  But God began again with him.  The gospel reading presents three parables of God's beginning again.  Jesus tells about the shepherd who rejoices at finding a lost sheep. He talks about the woman who finds the lost silver peace. He tells about the Father who takes back the lost son; and a Father who invites the other son to begin anew with his kid brother.  That is the image that has captured my heart and prayer these days.  Perhaps because I can now say: in my younger days’ – I am also aware of how much I need new beginnings.

You see, Jesus relates these parables at a dinner as he sits and eats with tax collectors, common thieves who used the Roman soldiers to help them steal from their own countrymen. The holier-than-thou-Pharisees and Scribes ask him how he would dare make friends with people like this. Jesus' parable presents a simple answer to this question: God has not given up on them or on any of us. The God of beginnings gives us an opportunity to start new.
Yet, how often have I heard lines like this in my priesthood.

• "But Father, I have really done some low down things. I am in my second (or third) marriage, and I really bear a deep responsibility for what happened in the disastrous first marriage.
• I did things when I was young that I am ashamed to even think about. How can God forgive me for my past?"
• I’ve made such a mess of my family by my selfish, drug addicted life.  I can’t start again…

And if God is a God of judgment and wrath, you’d be correct.  Pack it in, throw in the towel.  You are finished.  But that is not what Jesus knows about his Father.  God can forgive you and me because it is God’s nature to let us begin again and again and again.  The entire Old Testament is a tribute to that quality of God.  Israel goofs up.  God forgives them.  They goof up again.  God forgives again.  And again. And again. God can and does forgive you and me because He is the God of beginnings who sees all we can be, not just all we could have been. And God values the results of new beginnings.

Let me end with a true story.  In 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Pope.  He served for only five years, but he transformed the world with his openness to God's love.  Politically, he was most probably elected to keep the status quo in the Church.  But God used him to renew the Church.  What the Cardinals who elected him may not have known was that John XXIII had a personal motto that he took with him to the papacy and shared with the rest of the world.  His motto was simple: Now I begin.  He sought forgiveness for the past each day. He renewed his personal life every day.  His determination to entrust his life to the God of new beginnings resulted in the transformation of the Church, notably in his calling the Second Vatican Council.