Only
Then
Rev.
Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 6, 2016
March 6, 2016
Let
us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our
hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
Some
weeks it’s not like that, but this week reading the lectionary
selections for today was for me a pure delight, for they contain two
of my absolute favorite passages in all of Scripture. The parable of
the prodigal son has long been my favorite out of all of Jesus’
parables. It is such a powerful statement of God’s unshakable love
for all of us no matter what we might have done in our lives that I
can hardly read it or talk about it without choking up a bit. It
really tells us as lot of what our faith is all about. Then there’s
the passage we heard from Paul’s second letter to the church at
Corinth. It contains the wonderful, foundational line: "In
Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their
trespasses against them." Like Jesus’ parable of the prodigal
son, this verse tells us what our faith is really all about.
There
are at least a couple of things that I want to draw out of these
wonderful readings for us this morning. The first has to do with
repentance. The issue of the necessity of repentance before
forgiveness is a really big one in Christian theology. The most
common understanding in our tradition is that God forgives those who
repent and, by implication at least, does not forgive those who do
not. I’ll be blunt here. I don’t see it that way. I believe that
repentance is a way in which we can make God’s forgiveness real in
our lives but that forgiveness itself does not depend on repentance.
I find powerful support for that position in the Parable of the
Prodigal Son. What happens? The younger son of a man with a
considerable estate took his share of the estate early, went away,
squandered it, and ended up envying the pigs he was reduced to
tending the slop they were given to eat. Then it occurred to him that
he could go back to his father and ask to be taken on as a hired
hand. Surely that would be better than envying pigs in a foreign
land. But he, like so many of us, thinks that there is no way his
father will take him back unless he repents first. So he rehearses
his repentance speech: "I will get up and go to my father, and I
will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against
you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’" I don’t
really doubt that his repentance was sincere, although it was rather
motivated by self-interest. Still, he was prepared to repent, and he
thought repentance was necessary.
So
he set out to return to his father, all prepared to grovel and to
call himself a sinner. And what happened? As Jesus tells the story,
"while he was still a long way off, his father saw him...."
The father sees him coming. He hasn’t yet heard the son say
anything. He as yet has no idea what is in his son’s heart. He
hasn’t heard a single word of repentance. Nonetheless, Jesus says,
the father "was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his
son, threw arms around him and kissed him." The father extended
the arms of love, grace, and forgiveness before the son had said a
single word! Before a single iota of repentance had been expressed!
The father didn’t care about that. All he cared about was that his
son had returned.
The
father says as much at the end of the parable. Responding to the
faithful older son’s grumbling about the extravagant welcome the
father had given the prodigal, the father says: "We had to
celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is
alive again; he was lost and is found." Luke 15:32 Not: It’s
OK to welcome him back because he has repented. Not, I have forgiven
him because he’s really sorry, he feels really bad about what he
did. No. All that matters here is that the son who was lost has been
found, the son who left has come back. When he came back no questions
were asked, no explanation was demanded. Oh, sure. The prodigal
delivers his little speech about having sinned. I mean, he’d
rehearsed it and all. He was going to give it no matter what. The
speech, however, isn’t what produced the father’s grace. All that
was needed there was the son’s presence, his return. The father was
there all the time the son was gone, watching, keeping a look out,
longing for the return of the prodigal. The father embraced the son,
and only then, as far as the father knew, did the son repent. Only
then.
You
see, this story is about reconciliation, about closing the gap
between people and the gap between people and God. I suppose it’s
obvious that the father represents God here, and the way the father
is in this story truly is the way God is with us. God is already
reconciled with us. God is there all the time, watching for us,
keeping a look out for us, longing to throw a big party for us if we
will only give God the chance. There is a place for our repentance,
but God doesn’t require it any more than the father in Jesus’
greatest parable required it. All God requires is that we show up,
and really, I think there’s a sense in which God doesn’t even
require that. The prodigal’s father was reconciled with him while,
as we are told, the son was still far off. The reconciliation was
were there. It’s just that the son didn’t know it until he came
home.
That’s
what Jesus has done for us. In Jesus we are reconciled with God. Paul
knew it and said so: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself." That’s what Jesus is all about. Our faith is all
about our reconciliation with God, about the world’s reconciliation
with God. In Christ, the entire world is reconciled with God. And not
just the world but each and every person living in it or whoever has
lived in it. The problem is not that we are separated from God. The
problem is that we don’t know that no matter how separated we may
feel from God, God never feels separated from us. Or at least, God
longs not to be separated from us and, as far as God is concerned,
any separation has already been healed. All we have to do to make
that healing real in our lives is wake up and realize that God’s
healing is already there, just waiting for us to figure it out.
Paul
knows that, but Paul tells us something else that is worth paying
attention to. In this wonderful passage from 2 Corinthians Paul
doesn’t stop with telling us that in Christ God was reconciling the
world to Godself. He goes on to draw out the implications of that
statement for us. In Christ God was not only reconciling the world to
Godself, God has "committed to us the message of
reconciliation." That’s our mission, folks. That’s the
church’s mission. Reconciliation. Reconciliation pure and simple.
We are called to bring the good news that God is reconciled with the
world and everyone in it to the world and everyone in it. And
especially to those who don’t know it, those who think God rejects
them, or who think that Christians think God rejects them.
Reconciliation. Not judgment. Not demands for repentance. We are
called to Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. Can we do it? Will
we do it? With the help of God I trust that we can and we will. Amen.
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