Several years ago I was walking along one of the trail at Southern Illinois Univ. at Edwardsville.  People were warming up for an international boomerang competition.  I didn’t get to stay for the competition, but was impressed that such an international event be held on an athletic field in Edwardsville, Il.

On Sunday pastor Bronner used the joke about an aborigine who got a new boomerang and spent the rest of his life trying to get rid of the old one.  To paraphrase an old pop song, “Like a boomerang sin comes flying back to me.”  You would think we would learn better.  At the beginning of the day we emerge from the waters of baptism a new person, and by the end we have ample proof that once more we have to drown our old person in the waters of that baptism.  Like a boomerang sin keeps coming back to us.

There was a little phrase in the epistle lesson from James that caught my attention yesterday.  James 3:6, “But he gives more grace.  Therefore it say, ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”  There we stand every day before God, our boomerangs in hand.  God might well say to us, “You mean you still haven’t gotten rid of those things?  What’s the matter with you?”  And we cannot help but say, “I’m sorry to say that I’m in need of your grace again today, as I have been every day of my life.”  And once more, God cleanses our hands, and purifies our hearts, that we humbled by our wayward ways and by his way of constantly forgiving us in Christ find reason to “Delight ourselves in the Lord, commit ours ways to the Lord and trust in him.” (Ps. 37:4&5)