March 21, 2004
By Jack Price

The noted Christian author C. S. Lewis writes that he was standing in a dark tool shed one day when he noticed the following:

The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the to of the door there came a sunbeam.  From where I stood, that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place.

      Then I moved, so that beam fell on my eyes.  Instantly the whole previous picture vanished.  Instead, I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun -- the difference between look at and looking along.

Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son provides an opportunity for us to look along beam of Jesus' insight, to glimpse the source of all light.  The   usual crowd seemed to gather whenever Jesus taught.  There were tax collectors and other assorted sinners.  There were also Pharisees grumbling about the tax collectors and sinners, and about the fact that Jesus was welcoming them.  In response, Jesus told three stories, three parables.  There were two short ones and then a long story about a loving father and his two sons.

Parables are teaching stories.  Unlike fables and allegories, they have one main point:  to reveal the nature of what God is doing through Jesus.  You find the true meaning of a parable when you enter the story and see yourself in it.

The tax collectors and sinners were invited to see themselves.  The Pharisees were invited to see themselves.  Jesus invited all of them to glimpse God's nature at the heart of the story.  The Spirit invites us to do the same and we will probably find ourselves lurking in the character of one of the brothers.  The power of this parable is to see God's nature and to respond to that nature.

The younger son is restless.  He is looking for a new start in life.   His actions are irresponsible and he finds himself lost, chasing his dream in distant land.  

The older brother stays at home with the father.  He plays it safe with the motto:  "Stay the course.  Collect the inheritance."  The older brother is also angry.  He feels cheated when the younger brother returns, cheated out of more than money.  He seems to feel that life has cheated him, that he is missing something even though he doesn't seem to know what.

The father loves both his sons without limit.  His love is not the suffocating kind.  It is not willful.  The younger son determines his path and the father gives him space to try.  He never stops loving the younger son, so he lets him go and doesn't rescue him.  At the same time, he never stops looking for him to come back.

The father loves the steady and reliable older son.  He denies this son nothing.  He only has to ask, but the father does wait for him to ask.

            A parable is a window, through which we can see ourselves and catch a glimpse of God.  Where are you?  Do you see yourself in this parable?  How are you represented by each character's choices? 

The younger brother is a risk-taker.  Is that who you are?  Are you willing to suffer the consequences of your choices? 

The older brother is stable and steady.  Is that you?  Do you recognize the dangers of playing it safe, of not taking chances?  Do you know risk in not trying new things and not thinking in new ways?  Are you stuck in a rut, wondering, "what am I missing in life?"

The father loves boundlessly and forgives without limitation.  There are no rules, no penalties attached to the father's forgiveness.  How does the "loving father" find an appropriate balance between love and forgiveness, on the one hand, and accountability and consequence on the other in relation to his sons?  If we read this parable honestly, there is no balance.  Forgiveness and reconciliation are given without cost.

What does this parable teach us today about God?  What do we learn that we can hold onto about who God is?  By the way, can you trust a God who loves boundlessly?

            Crossroads Church has a great interest in thinking theologically.  There have been half a dozen groups active this year trying to sort out understandings of what God is like, what Jesus really doing, and what all this means for us.  This searching reminds me of the apostle Paul's challenge to the first generation of Christians at Philippi to, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is at work in you" (Phil 2: 12-13).

There are many images for God.  In today's service, lots of images have been offered for who God is.  The parable of the Prodigal Son offers the image of God as loving father.  The writers of the Old Testament and the New Testament found images for God's nature in the context of their own culture.

Jesus, a particularized expression of God's nature, lived in the context of his specific culture, with its own language, preconceptions, and concepts.  He found images for God's nature in the context of that culture.  Today's parable is an example.  The generations that followed him found images to describe Jesus' life and the meaning of his death and abiding presence in the context of their own language and culture. 

Our task is to do the same in our time and place, with our language, and try not to get lost in translation.  We seek to find correspondingly meaningful images in our own cultural context.  With our knowledge limited as it is, we seek and find images for God's nature, for Jesus as an expression of God's nature within our limited world today, and for our experience of God today.  We are searching for containers in which to place our faith and interpret our experience of God as a witness to others.

The fundamental truth of the New Testament is what biblical scholars call the kerygma.  This truth is summarized in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5: 19):  "In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, .entrusting the message of reconciliation to us."  My seminary mentor, Dr. C. S. Mann, reminded us virtually at every class meeting that this is the core teaching of New Testament.  Everything else is commentary on this truth.  It is still true for us. 

God is love because God loves us.  This is an image to help us understand God's actions toward us through Jesus - the image of a Loving Father.  Julian of Norwich, a 14^th century Christian mystic, writes in Revelations of Divine Love),

You would know our Lord's meaning? 

Know it well. 

Love was his meaning. 

Who showed it you?  Love

What did he show you?  Love

Why did he show it?  for love 

Hold on to this,

and you will know and understand love more and more. 

Our beginning was when we were made,

but the love in which he made us

never had beginning. 

In it we have our beginning

Who is God?  How can we know?  We are barely scratching the surface in our knowledge of this universe we acknowledge as God's handiwork.  The deeper and farther we look, the more faith allows us to wonder at the nature of the Creator.  In our wonder, we occasionally glimpse an insight that we recognize clearly as God's footprint.  In these moments, we are forced to admit that God is so much more than the sum of all creation.  We see and fail to see.  We look, think, and theologize until our heads hurt.  Then, we sit down in humility and praise the One who is above all, beyond all, the source of all, and the end of all - the One who loves us with a great and abiding love and who, at the end, is the One Truth Thing.  We joyfully confess, "This is who we serve."

            What does that tell us about who we are?  God loves boundlessly and forgives wastefully.  God doesn't seem to care how stupid we have been.  God doesn't seem to count how many wrong choices we make.  The Holy One only seems to desire that we turn around and come back home; that we change, turn around, and embrace the One who waits for us with open arms.  The Blessed One desires that we in turn embrace our wandering sister or brother with the same joy.

Henri Nouwen, in his inspirational book Life of the Beloved, writes: 

There is the voice that speaks from above and from within

and that whispers softly or declares loudly: 

'You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' 

It certainly is not easy to hear that voice

in a world filled with voices that shout,

'You are no good. 

You are ugly. 

You are worthless. 

You are despicable. 

You are nobody

unless you can demonstrate the opposite." 

These negative voices are so persistent

that it is easy to believe them. 

When we have come to believe

in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable,

then success, popularity, and power

are easily perceived as attractive solutions. 

But the real trap is self-rejection. 

As soon as someone accuses me

or criticizes me or rejects me or leaves me,

I find myself thinking,

"Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." 

And arrogance is just the other side of self-rejection -

putting yourself on a pedestal

to avoid being seen as you see yourself.

What does the Father do?  He forgets the arrogance of the younger son who takes the Father's money and walks away -- rejecting home, family, and tradition -- to find life's meaning in a distant land.  He ignores the pitiful self-rejection of his broken son who returns home a failure.  He embraces him, restores him, and celebrates his return. 

The loving Father looks past the arrogance of the older son - his judgmental arrogance.  He ignores the self-judgment and self-rejection seen in his cries of "poor me!"  "You never loved me"  He sees past all that, and offers him full son-ship, blessing, and complete acceptance.  He expects them to do the same for each other.

Who, then, is God?  God is the One who looks past our arrogance and our self-rejection.  God is the One Who restores us fully in the family as beloved children.

Who, then, are we?  We are the ones who are loved.  We are the ones who are forgiven and made whole in Christ.  God has reconciled us to himself by love and "has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation'. 

"Dear Ones, God has so loved you and me, should we not also love one another"?  We are loved into wholeness to love others, to restore all people as God's children.  This is our identity.  This is our direction.  So be it.  Amen.