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From March 18, 2007 More and more I have come to see how our ideas about God and God's love look like the horses in our lives, that is, the people around us. Especially impactful in shaping our notions of God are those who have influence over us: parents, spouses, teachers, bosses, and such. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, not if the people in your life are magnificently compassionate, exquisitely forgiving, and profoundly loving. If that's the case, then the God of your imagining is most likely a God you want to cozy up to and call upon, a God who listens and loves well. But if the important, influential people in your life are punitive, suspicious, if they are inconsistent and capricious, then the God you're inclined to imagine isn't one you want to hang out with very much, isn't one you're apt to trust very much, isn't one you can easily love or feel loved by. I think this is why so much damaging, damning theology is being served up these days. And why it largely goes unquestioned. More people know limited love than they do the unlimited kind. When this is the case, it's hard for anything to make a dent in our image of a God whose love isn't really all that loving. Jesus knew this. Jesus knew how human relationships can color our thinking about and relating to God. Jesus also knew, and wisely, that the best way to help people grasp God's true nature wasn't to dish out elaborate explanations or engage them in long, drawn out debates. No. Jesus appealed to our imaginations, that realm far more powerful than the reasoning mind. To do this, he used a two-pronged approach. First, by what Jesus did and said, by where he went and who he spent time with, Jesus simply showed people what God was like, what God's love felt like. Because people's sense of God comes out of their contact with others, Jesus let his life do the speaking. Left to their own devices people couldn't enough imagine a God of mercy and compassion, of justice and reconciliation. So Jesus showed them. This made Jesus enormously compelling and also hugely dangerous, depending on who you were, how you had come to think of God, and how invested you were in being right. Schoolteachers know what Rabbi Jesus knew: show, don't tell. Jesus showed us God and God's love. This was the first prong of Jesus' two-pronged approach in helping us better envision who God is. The second prong was the telling of parables. Colorful, vivid, compelling ones that people couldn't help but be drawn into. Enormously memorable, these parables bounced around inside people's imaginations and took hold in ways no logic ever could. We see Jesus using both tactics in this morning's gospel. Luke tells us today that Jesus has surrounded himself with tax collectors and sinners. Not because it was the nice thing to do. But because the God in him couldn't resist drawing near to those everyone else backed away from. Unlike most humans, the God in Jesus didn't need people to be like him in order to love them. He didn't need them to be presentable, to have their act together, to be anything other than they were. Jesus didn't even need them to want to change. He simply loved people as-is and trusted that this love had the power to turn them around. Turn them toward God. Turn them toward new life. When the Pharisees and scribes took issue with Jesus for his choice of dinner companions and traveling partners, when their imaginations failed them and they just couldn't picture God overlooking important things like purity and righteousness, in favor of extending compassion and forgiveness, Jesus told these religious authorities a story. A story about a man who had two sons. If your house was hit by a tornado and managed to blow away everything, everything but this one story, it would be enough to build a relationship with the God Jesus knew: the one whose choice, no matter what, is always love. A man had two sons. The older one made all the right choices, as older sons so often do. "Yes, father. No, father." Obedience to his father was this son's everything. It didn't hurt, though, that he stood to inherit the bulk of his father's estate. Now if the older son was the perfect son,
and he was, the younger son was the perfectly awful one.
This son took great pleasure in questioning his father,
pushing his buttons, testing And so it was inevitable. The day came when the younger son went to his father and asked for his portion of the inheritance. "You're dead to me, Father," his demand strongly implied. And yet despite the profound insult and the wound to his heart, the father complied. The father could easily have argued with his son about the folly of his request. He could have flown into a rage because of his son's profound insult. He could have begged and pleaded, hoping for talk sense into his son. He could have let his feelings take the place of pure love. Instead, the father trusted that the love he had for his son would see him through the worst of his son's bad choices. He trusted that this love would speak in the end. And so he let his son go. All the way to into the hell of his son's bad, badder, baddest choices. Love does not insist. It does not control. It does not micromanage. It does not threaten. Love waits for us by the window every night we're away. It prays for us. It waits on us to change our minds. Love trusts its power to turn things around, even as there are no guarantees. You know what happened. Living in hell, in
the outer darkness of his horrible choices, He turned toward home, the son did, so contrite that he was willing to have his father demote him. He was willing to give up his identity as the second born male child and be just one more hired hand. Even that, even that would be a huge grace, given how hateful the son had been to his father and all the incredibly unwise choices he had made. But the son didn't get a demotion. Instead, he got a promotion. Love made it so. The minute the father spied his son on the horizon, he chucked convention and propriety; he hitched up his robe and raced down the long, winding road that had carried his son away. Now they would all be carried away, the father insisted. Carried away in lavish celebration. Carried away by complete forgiveness. Carried away by joy. Carried away by the heaven that it is when love is at last accepted and new beginnings are born. This is all God wants. All God wants is for us to turn toward home, so that God can race toward us with arms wide open and meet us in a cloud of wild dust and even wilder love and forgiveness. All God wants is to have us back home again. Back in God's arms. Back in God's heart. Back in God's life. Back in the heaven of relationship with God. But God does not insist. God does not demand. God does not threaten us with damnation as a way to coax us into relationship. Where is the love in that? Although the sons were so very different in their temperaments and choices, what the father wanted to give one, he also wanted to give the other: pure love. When the perfect brother became perfectly angry over his father's lavish display, when the party for his recently wayward brother made his blood boil because it seemed so inappropriate, so indulgent, the father sought him out. And yet he insisted on nothing. He only invited his son to turn away from his resentment and self-imposed separation and turn toward home, turn toward the heavenly celebrating his brother's homecoming had spawned. The father in our parable only invites his first born to a new way of being; he doesn't insist. He doesn't berate or lecture or scold. He doesn't threaten to withhold his love or his son's inheritance. The father only points the way to the loving choice but that's as far as he will go. Anything more is unloving. "Son," the father says to this son lost in anger, "you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. If a tornado came and blew away every page of your Bible but the one with this gospel story, you would have the Good News, you'd have everything you need to imagine who God is and what God's love looks and feels like. What you did with that, with this, well - like the younger brother, like the older brother - well, that choice would be yours. You already know God's. Amen. © 2007 Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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