Only Then

Only Then

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 6, 2016

Scripture:
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

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.