Luke 15:11-32
June 17, 2012
Rev. William J. Kemp
I can't remember if it was in college or seminary, but one of the first things I learned about the Bible is that, contrary to common understanding, it is not a story about humanity searching for God. Rather, it is a story about God searching for us.
Yes there are many calls in the
Bible for us to seek out God:
"Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock,
and the door will be opened for you."[ii]
The fact remains, however, if all the seeking were left up to us, we and our Creator God would pass each other like the proverbial two ships in the night. When reading the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, there are times when you can feel God's frustration with us.
"I've made myself available to those who haven't bothered to
ask. I'm here, ready to be found by
those who haven't bothered to look. I
kept saying 'I'm here, I'm right here' to a nation that ignored me. I reached out day after day to a people who
turned their backs on me, people who make wrong turns, who insist on doing
things their own way. They get on my
nerves, are rude to my face day after day, make up their own kitchen religion,
a potluck religious stew."[iii]
Totally exasperated by Israel's
shepherd-leaders because taking care of themselves was a higher priority than
taking care of God's people, the Lord speaks through Ezekiel, "From now on, I myself am the shepherd.
I'm going looking for them ... I'll go after the lost, I'll collect the
strays, I'll doctor the injured, I'll build up the weak ones and oversee the
strong ones so they're not exploited."[iv]
The parable which is
traditionally called The Parable of the
Prodigal Son is preceded by two shorter parables, one about a shepherd who
leaves 99 sheep and searches for one lost sheep, until he finds it; and the other about a woman who turns her house
upside down looking for a lost coin, until
she finds it! And when the lost
sheep and coin are found, there is unbelievable joy in heaven. God is like that.
That God should seek us is a
major theme of the Bible. It is made
clear almost on the first page. We hear
the Lord pass in the rustling grass,[v]
calling out to each one of us, wherever we are:
"Adam! Adam!
Adam, where are you?" We
reply: "I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid."[vi] That's so like us, hiding from God, yea,
running away from God.
Once I grasped this as a major
theme of the Bible, a hymn I remember from growing up in the church suddenly
made sense:
I sought the Lord and
afterward I knew
He moved my soul to
seek him seeking me
It was not I that
found O Savior true,
No, I was found of
Thee.[vii]
Amazing Grace, how
sweet the sound
That saved a wretch
like me.
I once was lost, but
now am found,
was blind but now I
see.[viii]
Note the passive voice! The point is that God initiates our
relationship. “This is love: it is not that we loved God but that [God]
loved us..."[ix] It’s not that we find, but that we
have been found. "Our hearts are
restless till they find their rest in Thee," claimed St. Augustine. I also believe there is an even greater truth
when you invert that quote: "God's
heart is restless till we find our rest, our home, in God."
Love caused Your
incarnation,
Love brought You down
to me;
Your thirst for my
salvation
Procured my liberty.[x]
Which brings us to The
Prodigal Father. I like identifying
the parable that way because Jesus introduces it by saying, "There was a man who had two
sons." The Father clearly has
the lead role in this story. Also, not
only is the younger son a prodigal (wasteful, extravagant), so is the elder son
and so is the Father a prodigal (generous to a fault, extravagant, spendthrift).
Sometimes when burdened by life's
persistent questions, people will say, "When I get to heaven, I have a lot
of questions for God..." When I
get to heaven I'm going to ask, "When you consider the human race and how
we have thumbed our noses in your face and how we have defaced this beautiful
world you gave us to care for, why have you wasted your time and your very self
on us? Why didn't you just wash your
hands of us, as Pilate did of Jesus? I
suspect God's answer might be heard in the words of Hosea: "How
can I give you up ... My heart winces within me; my compassion grows warm and
tender ... I won't act on the heat of my anger ... for I am God and not a human
being, the holy one in your midst..."[xii]
So the Father in the parable does
not greet the younger son who wasted his inheritance on wild living with these
words: "You good for nothing blankety blank. How dare you spend your money like you
did. How dare you ask for your
inheritance, which really means you wished I were dead! Don't come around here looking for
forgiveness." Instead, the
Father leaves the house and runs down the path, makes a fool of himself in view
of the neighbors, embraces his son and orders his staff to prepare for a
welcome home party that makes Nik Wallenda's celebration pale in comparison.
Nor does the Father turn to his
elder son and say: "You self-righteous prig!
All this time I thought you served me out of love, but it was only out
of a sense of duty. You look down your
nose at everyone who doesn't see things as you do. You have no sense of joy. And why don't you?! The farm has been deeded over to you. I can't give you anything more me than I
already have." Instead, the
Father leaves the party to seek out the elder son, who was just as much a lost
soul as his brother, and begged him to swallow his pride and to come inside, to
join the party and discover how life was meant to be.
That's just how thirsty God is
for us and how persistent is God's pursuit of us. David Goldman's herculean effort to be
reunited with his son, Sean, reflects such thirst and persistence. The story unfolded nationally about two years
ago.
At the age of 4
Sean was abducted by his mother and taken to her native Brazil where she
remarried and tried to erase the Goldman lineage from her son. Thinking that his wife and son were on a
short visit to be with her family, David received a phone call to say that they
arrived safely and everything was fine.
Then David received a second phone call, on Father’s Day no less, saying
that their life together was over. Even
though she admitted that David was a great father for Sean, she said she met
someone else and was going to begin a new life in Brazil and would keep Sean
with her.
Time
does not allow more details, but if you are interested, you can Google the
story. When Bruna died while giving
birth to another child, her family still laid claim to Sean and tried all sorts
of legal shenanigans to keep him there.
As you might expect, the whole experience left David Goldman emotionally
and financially drained. But David never
gave up and he succeeded in bringing Sean back home to New Jersey just in time
for Christmas 2009.
A few weeks ago, a month before
Sean's 12th birthday, Meredith Viera interviewed him on Dateline.[xiii] During the five years he lived in Brazil,
Sean said he was confused. "Where's
my dad?" he wondered, often to himself, lest he make his Brazilian family
angry at him. Yet he never forgot his
dad. Meredith talked to him about the
nice life he had in Brazil (the family was quite wealthy) but Sean replied,
"but I didn't have my Dad."
When he and his father finally were allowed to meet, he admitted
wondering where his Dad had been for four years. He never knew his dad was looking for
him. "How did you feel when you
saw your Dad?" Meredith asked.
"Just joy and happiness."
If only he knew that his dad was looking for him, perhaps he would have
been less anxious during those five years he had to wait.
I deliver Meals on Wheels once a
week. One of my clients has had a
particularly hard life. She's quite
infirm and gets out of her chair only with great difficulty. She is divorced and finances are always an
issue. She has two daughters. One lives in the area but they often don't
get along. The other lives up
north. She also lost a 3-month-old and
a 10-year-old at some earlier time in her life.
A couple of weeks ago she told me
that her daughter in the north was diagnosed with breast cancer. That was not good news, but cancer is not
necessarily the death sentence that it once was. Last week, however, she told me that the bad
got worse and the prognosis for her daughter was about a year and a half at
best. Life sure has dumped on this
woman.
I was caught off-guard, however,
by what she expressed as her major concern.
"I don't think my daughter has found the Lord," she said. "I know where my younger children are
because they died before the age of responsibility, but I'm not so sure about
my daughter."
Why, I thought to myself, of all
the burdens she had to carry, why did religion have to be one of them? She needed a word from Jesus: "Come
to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give
you rest."[xiv] If only she could know that God was on
the lookout for her daughter. Since
there were 17 hot meals in the trunk waiting to be delivered, I only had time
to say, "I believe God will never stop looking for your daughter until he
finds her, if not in this life, then surely in the next."
One of the most insightful
meditations on any passage of scripture is Henri Nouwen's, Return of the Prodigal Son: A
Story of Homecoming. His
reflections were motivated by his study of Rembrandt's painting of the same
name at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. The book was published twenty years ago and tells
a most poignant spiritual journey. “Here
is the God I want to believe in,” says Nouwen,
a Father who, from
the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing,
never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms
droop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that
he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their
shoulders. His only desire is to bless.[xv]
Nouwen emphasizes that this is no
story of cheap grace or easy forgiveness.
What I am called to
make true is that whether I am the younger or the elder son, I am the child of
my compassionate Father. I am an heir
... Indeed, as child and heir I am to become successor. I am destined to step into my Father's place
and offer to others the same compassion that he has offered me. The return to the Father is ultimately the
challenge to become the Father.[xvi]
We are called "to be merciful, just as our Father is
merciful."[xvii] That's no call for cheap grace and easy
forgiveness, but neither is it a turn to burdensome religion with all its
infinite rules and regulations, doctrines and dogmas. It is clearly a call to life, "a more and better life than [we] ever
dreamed of." [xviii]
[i]
Isaiah 55:6
[ii]
Matthew 7:7
[iii]
Isaiah 65:1-3, The Message
[iv]
Portions of Ezekiel 34:11-16, The Message
[v]
See the hymn, This Is My Father's World
[vi]
Genesis 3:10, The Message
[vii]
Author unknown; Tune: Peace
[viii]
Hymn #280, The Presbyterian
Hymnal, 1990
[ix]
1 John 4:10
[x]
Paul Gerhardt, 1653; Hymn #11, The
Presbyterian Hymnal, 1990
[xi]
See Psalm 42
[xii]
See Hosea 11, Common English Bible
[xiii]
April 27, 2012
[xiv]
Matthew 11:28
[xv]
Henry J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son,
(Doubleday, 1992), p. 95-96.
[xvi]
Ibid. p. 123
[xvii]
Luke 6:36
[xviii]
John 10:10, see The Message
