Guide Our Steps: Jesus as the One Who Reaches Out
Luke 15:11-32
A
Sermon Preached by
4th in a Lenten Preaching Series on Meeting Jesus
University
Congregational United
God,
we stretch out our hands towards you. We
are like dry, waterless ground.
Bring
to us news of your love every morning.
Amen.
In her novel, The Lost Garden, Helen Humphreys writes,
“Every
story is a story about death.
But
perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”
Every story is a story about death. Every story has at the core an ending, a loss, a grief that propels the story forth to its completion.
The scripture today is one of the best known parables or stories Jesus told.
And it is a story about death.
In it, a younger son asks his father for his inheritance - something that will only come to him when his father is dead. Asking for his inheritance while his father is alive is like telling his father that he wishes he were dead.
The younger son goes and wastes his money in “scandalous” living, in ways of death.
And on the point of starvation and death itself, the young man who has abandoned his family, now abandons his faith. He breaks the Jewish moral law which forbids a Jew to have anything to do with pigs. Desperate, the younger son gets a job working with pigs and even hungers for their food.
Death is there in the father as well.
This father who sits alone in a broken home looking out the window, waiting for his younger son’s return who never seems to come.
Humiliation and shame are there in the ways the father reaches out to his children. When his younger son returns, the father humiliates himself by running out of the house to greet him – something no self-respecting Jewish man would do – run in public. And he kisses his son in public – something a mother but never a father would do.
Later he risks humiliation and mockery again as he goes out of the house to entreat his older son to come in. He bears his son’s scoffing in public.
And death is there in the older son as well. This son who refuses to go into the celebration. He violates the 4th commandment to honor his parents. And he addresses his father not as “Father” but disrespectfully as “You”.
The ways of death – denial, desertion, shame, scandal – run through our story.
But it seems we are in luck.
For our story about death is also a story about love.
The younger son “comes to himself” and turns to home.
His father keeping watch for him sees him coming and runs to meet him.
Running down all walls that would say this is not the proper way to behave.
And the father goes out to his elder son, in the middle of a party, bearing the shame of his guests to meet and entreat his son to come in.
He extends one hand to his elder son, “Son, though you scoff me, everything I have is yours.”
And another hand to his younger son inside, “But it was right that we celebrate, for this brother of yours was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.”
This story, like many great stories, is unfinished for the hearer to complete.
How will the story end?
Will the two brothers be reconciled?
Will home be restored?
Will the story of death finally be a story about love?
When I have read and heard this story before, I must admit that I have often sided with the ways of death in the story.
I have stood there with the younger son and his way I know all too well. His way of death that seeks to escape from his life, to get away, get out, forget it all, and to care less what happens to anyone else. I know his way well and often have stood there with him.
And I have stood with the older brother as well. With my arms self-righteously crossed, standing out there in the field. Justifiably angry. An injustice is being done. I am the faithful one. I have done nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong with me.
I have often stood with the ways of death in the story.
But it is the father’s outstretched arms that haunt me and that I cannot escape.
A kind of love that reaches out and sweeps up a younger son in his embrace.
A kind of love that reaches out with outstretched arms, wanting to gather his elder son in his embrace if he would but let him.
A father that shows the way of God and God’s extravagant love.
A way I see in the way of Jesus who shows us this face of God, and God’s way of love sweeping up in love sinner, outcast, stranger, enemy in one great embrace.
Do you know this Jesus?
This Jesus who reaches out to you and sweeps you up in his arms? Calling you into the party, to love, to life? Do you know this Jesus?
Do you know this Jesus?
Listen…..
Do you hear him running across the field to meet you as you turn from death to home – to life, to the way of restoration and healing?
Do you feel his arms gather you close around you?
Listen…..
Do you hear him whispering in your ear?
You, who thought that there was nothing wrong with you.
Whispers to you to seek a deeper life and way.
To not settle for less.
To pay attention to that which is within you. You, like a precious bulb planted in this spring soil, are called to take root, break through the cold March ground and flower.
Do you know this running, whispering Jesus who reaches out to you?
In order to speak of Jesus, we need to risk speaking personally, and I do so with you today.
I do know this running, whispering Jesus who reaches out to me, to us all.
I do. And I have puzzled over why.
I have been fortunate. When I have turned from ways of death to home, I have had real people run out to meet me and hold me. People who have made this Jesus who reaches out real to me.
When I have been standing out, alone in the field, self-righteous and alone, believing there is nothing wrong with me, I have had others stand beside me. I have heard them whispering in my ear, calling me to a deeper life and way. Calling me to come home.
Some of you have been fortunate to have had the running, whispering Jesus made real in your own lives. And some of you have not.
But finally, though such experiences are great gifts, they are, I have realized, not enough to sustain me day to day. For these stories, experiences are always in the past and fade in memory. They are not enough to hold me up this day, and tomorrow. I need a living relationship with the Jesus who reaches out to me, to us, to do that.
And I have realized that I have come to know this Jesus, meet this Jesus, more than anyplace else, in the church.
I have been gifted in that I have spent most of my life in church. Yes, dragged there at times as a child and youth! And I have been blessed to have worshipped in churches that have embodied and proclaimed the extravagant love of Jesus that we hear in this parable.
But it is not the length of time in church that has made this Jesus so alive to me. It is the consistency of my practice. I need each week to come and hear this Jesus reaching out to me. This Jesus who does that in no clearer way than through the worship life of the church.
I need to hear Jesus calling out to me each week to turn around. For I too often get caught up in my own way. We live in a world that is too often caught up in its own way. I would squander my life in a far country far from God if it were only up to me. I need to hear Jesus reaching out to me in the prayer of confession. And before I am even done emptying myself out one more time, I need to hear Jesus’ footsteps running across to embrace me in the words of assurance. Words that give me the courage, the grace, to step out anew as an instrument of healing and love.
I need to hear Jesus whispering in my ear in scripture, sermon, prayers, anthem, hymns. Whispering, calling me to pay attention to a need I didn’t even know I had. To something more. To a deeper, fuller life.
And I need to hear Jesus calling me to offer myself to and for others.
I need to hear Jesus speaking to me in the call to offering, reminding me of the very generosity of God in which we live. Calling me to life in God which is a life lived in generosity. To give generously of my money, time, gifts for the work of the church. For how can I say I believe in a generous God if I do not share abundantly, generously of myself?
I need to hear Jesus calling me to walk in covenant with others. To remind me that I do not walk alone. But that there are people I am accountable to. People who are there to remind me if I wander off in my own way.
And people I can call on when the going gets hard – who I can ask to be a physical sign and presence for me of the love and presence of Jesus.
It is in church that the Jesus who reaches out comes alive for me.
And tt happened in church today. As I heard our preschoolers sing, “I want to follow Jesus” I heard Jesus singing out to me through them. And their song filled me with renewed conviction and hope that I really do seek and want to follow.
I need these rhythms of weekly worship in my daily life.
To take time each day for prayer.
For reading of scripture.
For challenging myself to offer myself, give of myself, each day to those in need, to the stranger.
I need a small group to be part of that I am accountable to, and they to me, with whom I can learn what life in community, life in Jesus, is all about.
It is because of the living relationship with Jesus that I am nurtured in through worship and daily practice, that I believe that the stories of death of which our lives are full are finally, stories of love.
And I want more than anything for you to know that.
The stories of our individual lives are full of death. Of endings, betrayal, desertion, grief, sorrow, and loss of many kinds.
The stories of our world are likewise the same.
This past week we marked the one year anniversary of being a people at war.
At war that has gotten into all of us.
We have grieved the death of over 568 American soldiers, and over 3,273 wounded.
I have not seen the charts for the dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians and yet these deaths are deep in us as well.
A war of rending that has taken loved ones from many of us to service and soldiering in a far away land.
A war that has gotten into us all in places of anxiety, and fear.
A war that has divided our nation.
Robbed us of resources – over $4 billion a month is spent on this war.
A way of death in us all.
A way of death there in other stories of our world.
A world where 9,000 people today will die of AIDS and 14,000 will be infected with HIV.
A world where thousands die of hunger.
And ways of greed and deception take life and hope from us all.
The stories of our own lives and the stories of our world are full of death.
And I, we, can be tempted to take the easy way, the way of death.
A way where we join with a younger brother and seek to escape our life, to run away, get away from it all.
Or where we stand with an elder brother in the field, arms crossed and defiant knowing there is nothing wrong with us and we do not need to change anything.
But to us has been given a story, a story of another way:
Jesus who shows us the very face of God’s extravagant love.
A kind of extravagant love we see in this parable.
A Jesus who is reaching out to us, seeking to sweep us off our feet, whisper to us of a fuller, deeper life.
A Jesus who wants us to become people through whom resurrection happens to others.
So let us, in the midst of the stories of death, be drawn back to the heart of the story, the heart of love.
Let us quiet ourselves, to hear Jesus running across the fields to meet us, embrace us.
Let us silence ourselves to hear him whispering to us of a deeper life and another way.
Let us hear him calling us to take him by the hand, to come back home again.
Come, let us follow.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Lost Garden, Helen Humphreys, p. 182
I recommend this short, poetic novel highly. A beautiful meditation on love, gardening, and the costs of war.