A Heart That Big

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I must have read this story several hundred times. Re-told it myself at least a hundred.

It’s a classic.

And it’s one of those stories Jesus tells that absolutely gets you in your feelings. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a metaphor, many of us are going to find ourselves identifying with one of the characters as a person. And it’s absolutely meant to get us emotionally involved, not just to take a lesson from the story with our brains. 

 

You and I are supposed to get worried or uncomfortable or sympathetic or anxious when Jesus tells about a kid leaving home and squandering themselves and their resources. Supposed to feel the relief, the sadness, the shame or the hope as that kid remembers and realizes what’s at home; supposed to be upset or overjoyed when the wandering, foolish kid comes home. Supposed to react, with our hearts, when the other kid gets mad and spouts resentment about it all.

 

Maybe you’ve felt yourself, once or often, as the young adult determined to try your wings, making foolish decisions, getting in trouble, yearning for help.

Maybe you’ve been surprised by welcome and forgiveness, or you’ve known what it is to long for those things with all your heart. To feel hope for yourself when Jesus tells this story.

 

Maybe you’ve felt yourself, once or often, as the responsible one, the steady one, the one who gets the group project done when everyone else is blowing things off. Maybe you know exactly how it feels to watch others extravagantly welcomed and forgiven and made at home while you work and work and work.

Maybe you’ve felt all that stir up grief and longing in your relationship with God.

I’ve felt all that.

I’ve known this story inside and out, in my life, and in the book. 

And then it surprises me again.

 

This week, I sat down with this story, ready for all the welcome and forgiveness and resentment and anxiety and self-righteousness and hope lurking in it, ready for what’s familiar and expected,

and then I felt something new.

 

A yearning to be the parent in this story.

A yearning to discover in myself the heart bursting with love and joy that can give away, let go, hope at a distance, brim over with joy and forgiveness, give it all away again to the one who was lost and found, and still burst with love and pride and joy in the one who’s always been there.

 

I want to feel that way about my family, my friends.

I want to feel that way about strangers.

I want my heart to be that big.

 

And I think that’s what Jesus wants for us, too.

I think Jesus tells this story because he knows we’ve been one of the sons. We’ve been, we are, squanderers, mistake-makers, hurtful to others, selfish…sinners. And that we need to see the possibilities of repentance and forgiveness unfold in front of us when we remember love, remember that there is someone we can trust, even after we fail.

Jesus knows we’ve been, we are, the hard workers, narrowly focused, self-righteous, resentful, lonely…sinners. And that we need to be astonished, shocked into new perspective, by an exaggerated, over the top display of forgiveness, opportunity, love and joy – joy and love that want to draw us in, and share, when we don’t know how to feel that for ourselves.  

 

I believe Jesus knows we need to hear, to recognize, our own relationship to God, our own sin, our own invitation to be loved, in this story.

And that Jesus wants us to take up the invitation to bring our failures to God, discovering in this story that God runs to meet us, to embrace us before we confess, to pour abundance on us before we even begin to start anew.

 

And I suspect that Jesus also wants us to want more.

Wants us – eventually, if not the first time we hear this story – to want to be the ones pouring out abundance and love. Wants us to want to be overjoyed at welcoming the failures, loving the selfish, delighting in the resentful ones, until they each find the hope and trust that heals them. Wants you and me rejoicing in the generous work of putting the world back together, gleefully giving yourself away.

 

Jesus delights in all that himself, you know.

And when something is that good, that life-giving, you want the people you love to experience it, too.

 

So what failure would you love to be able to welcome home?

What foolish mistakes would you love to be “over”? Who do you miss, deeply, since they screwed something up that hurt you?

Maybe it’s something you yourself have failed at and need to forgive. 

 

What anxious, resentful relationships would you delight in reassuring? What would you love to be able to say to help someone who is trying to do it all themselves relax into love and confidence?

 

What parts of yourself – of your “wealth” of possessions or leadership or control – would you love to give away, so that someone else can find themselves?

 

What do you long to heal? What do you yearn to forgive?
What do you hunger to restore and renew?  

Who do you ache to build a home for, to welcome?

 

Me, I want to feel that generous love instead of resentment when I read the news or the internet about the way this pandemic gets handled.  I want to feel that generous love when someone tells me I’m wrong about masks or vaccines or social protections.

 

I want to delight in forgiving friends who’ve hurt me. To run and welcome home the person who took love from me for two years and never gave it back, instead of feeling the grief and the hurt all over again when they send me a tentative message.

 

I want to give you – you here and now – all the love and hope I feel when I read Jesus’ story this week, and keep giving it away and giving it away and keep discovering that it never actually runs out.

 

I want my heart to be that big.

I want that for you, too. I want your heart to feel that free and open, to rejoice that much in one another.

 

I’m pretty sure that’s what Jesus wants from us, for us, when he tells this story to the selfish, lonely, reckless, resentful, mistake-making, self-righteous “two sons” in each of us, and we recognize the love that’s waiting to welcome us home – home we left long ago, or home we’ve forgotten we’re in the middle of all along.

Wants us to come home, to know ourselves forgiven,

and then long to pour that out on everyone else,

to be so full of prodigal joy and hope and love that we can’t contain it, 

and we run to meet every child of God coming home to us.

Uncomfortable Care

1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

You don’t want to be like those sinners. They died.

Paul’s comparing his church in Corinth to the people of Israel out in the wilderness with God – remembering all the things that went wrong then, when the people didn’t fully trust in God, giving examples and asking: “You don’t want to die for your sins, do you?”

 

No, of course not.

You and I might add: God wouldn’t do that nowadays anyway, right? Didn’t Jesus change that?

 

Jesus does have some thoughts about that, which we heard today.

As people tell him about a group of Galileans slaughtered by Romans when they came to worship in Jerusalem, Jesus specifically says, No, they didn’t die for their sins.

They’re no worse sinners than the rest of us. God didn’t smite them for being bad.

 

That part should be pretty comfortable for us. Our modern theologies and ideologies reject the idea that collapsing walls or hurricanes or other disasters are God’s punishment for sin. 

But the human tendency to blame the victim hasn’t quite faded out in our society.  We still ask questions or make unconscious assumptions about what a person was doing “wrong” when they get assaulted; still talk about a pandemic virus and protective measures as if the moral rightness and wrongness of our choices determine our fate, even if we know differently from personal experience.

 

We probably do that because we want to protect ourselves. We want to know that we can avert disaster by doing the “right thing”.  It’s a natural, human thing to want that kind of control, but Jesus is having none of it:

Those folks didn’t bring it on themselves, he says.

But if you don’t repent, you’ll perish the same way.

 

You’re just as much at risk.

And - you can do something about it.

Repent.

Turn toward God.

 

We can’t protect ourselves from disaster and death by making ourselves more righteous (or at least “less bad” than the “worst sinners”). We can’t control fate that way.

But we can embrace God’s control of our fate.

We can accept and respond to God’s care.

 

The idolatry Paul is warning against, the habit Jesus is urging us to change, is an indifference or resistance to God’s care; to God’s working in and around us to heal us and the world. 

 

We resist, most likely, because God’s care isn’t always comfortable or comforting.

God’s care is aimed at our growth, at our becoming vibrant and life-giving, bearing fruit for the healing and nurture of the world, being more whole than we ever dream we could be.

And that’s glorious, but rarely restful. It usually involves unanticipated change and disturbing our comfort zones.

 

Jesus tells us a story about a fig tree that’s failing to produce fruit. 

The logical thing, of course, is to get rid of that tree.

But the gardener says, Wait. Let me care for the tree a bit more. Dig around and fertilize it.

Which suggests that perhaps God’s care for us, God’s loving work to nourish us, may often feel like digging up and disturbing all the solid ground around us.  And piling up a lot of …manure on us.

 

It’s not always easy, or comfortable, to be cared for in that way.

In a way that’s all about our fruitfulness, increasing our strength and abundance and vitality.

 

I’ve been through plenty of uncomfortable growth experiences in my life, and I bet you have, too. Experiences where it felt like the people who were supposed to be caring for me – parents, teachers, friends, pastors – stirred up things I didn’t want to change, brought me face to face with a lot of …manure in my life that I didn’t want to confront, or learn from, but nonetheless contained what I needed to grow stronger, more faithful, more generous, more vital, more whole.

 

A teacher who told me the truth about why I was about to fail their class. Friends who were honest about how I was hurting our relationship. A friend who backed me kicking and muttering into therapy I truly needed.

People who brought me face-to-face with the ways in which I had to admit that I had no power in myself to help myself, as we prayed at the beginning of this service – so that I could discover that I needed, and wanted, the care that God and my friends offered to me. And discover that each of those people disturbing me were holding all my discomfort and growth in strong protection and generous love. And I just needed to trust that care, and respond.

 

I suspect you also have had at least some experience of unwanted insight, disruptive change; of uncomfortable growth, and life-giving care that didn’t quite feel like care. 

After all, all of us go through adolescence.

That time when everything changes, nothing is comfortable, and in a lot of cases, care feels like punishment.  Perhaps you remember how malicious it felt when your parents tried to get you off the phone so that you’d get enough sleep?  Or how punitive it felt when parents or teachers or coaches took choices away from you, and told you you’d regret what you wanted to do? 

Perhaps you also know how punishingly painful it sometimes feels to be the one holding the boundaries of protection and love and care – to try to get an adolescent you love to get enough sleep, or help them make wise choices? 

 

You don’t have to be an adolescent to experience that.

The whole people of Israel went through that – as Paul reminds the church at Corinth – when God plucked them out of the limiting, oppressing, comfort zone of Egypt so that they could grow into a mature chosen people, and surrounded them in the wilderness with rules and resources meant to keep them safe and healthy and growing and vibrant, and Israel felt scared and vulnerable and resentful of the new rules.

 

You don’t have to be an adolescent, or a notorious sinner, or anything other than human to have had one or more experiences of how terrifying – and yet encouraging – it is to be forced or led to confront your fears, your inadequacies, your failings – to have the solid ground around you dug up, by someone who has your best interest at heart.

 

You don’t have to be an adolescent, or a fig tree, to grow stronger, healthier, more faithful from being held in a loving care that won’t let us be comfortable with less than wholeness, however much the process of growth disturbs us.

 

That’s what Jesus is telling us.

Today, and over and over again.

He’s inviting us, Paul’s reminding us, to look for, to recognize, to turn toward and embrace and trust the loving care that won’t let us be comfortable with idleness and complaint, that won’t let us stay lonely, hopeless, or limited, no matter how uncomfortable it is to become vibrant, fruitful, joyous, and beloved.

 

The season of Lent is a good one in which to look for and respond to the evidence of God’s care – for you, for me, for others. To watch for the moments or hours when we feel God bringing us air and nutrients and loving attention, even just a little, and to embrace those changes. To watch for moments or days when we feel God forcing us to grow stronger, deeper, wiser; disturbing the earth around us, and stirring up the …fertilizer we might not want, but need, and to practice trust as that happens.

 

A friend reminded me recently of studies that show that the practice of keeping a “gratitude journal” – of simply noting down each day one thing to be thankful for – like the taste of a favorite food, sunlight, life itself, the continued global availability of chocolate – noting down one thing a day makes us measurably healthier, happier, stronger people.  

 

I expect, too, that if you or I made it a habit, every day, to notice one thing about God’s care, we might become stronger, more faithful, loving and joyful, life-giving and vibrant people.

 

So will you watch with me, this Lent, for those signs of God’s care? Keep a “fertilizer” journal, maybe?

Look for God digging you free of where the world’s gotten too packed down around you, fertilizing your growth? For where God is spending time with us; nourishing and disturbing and nurturing you; or holding the world together when it’s too much for me, or you, or all of us? 

Will you watch with me for God’s deep, unshakable faithful care, and give thanks, and see what we grow into, together?

To Defeat the Devil

Luke 4:1-13; Deuteronomy 26:1-11

It doesn’t take much to defeat the devil. 

By the evidence in this story, all it takes to defeat the devil is a bit of quoting scripture.

Jesus doesn’t say a single word in this entire story that isn’t a specific quote or paraphrase from scripture. 

“One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus quotes.

“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” 

And “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” 

Each of those comes from the remembrance of Israel’s years in the wilderness. And for those steeped in the holy story of Israel’s scripture, and our own, each statement resonates with God’s faithfulness in the face of human need, anxiety, and even complaint.

And the devil departs.

Even when the devil can quote scripture’s promises, a few fragments of the story of God’s faithfulness is enough to silence the devil.

That’s great news.

It may not be simple news.

Because what sends the devil away, what defeats every test, isn’t the ability to quote from memory, nor a specific set of magic scriptural words, but the whole story, and how deeply Jesus is living in that story.  A story of God’s faithfulness rooted so deep it doesn’t need to be said explicitly; what Jesus quotes is our response to that faithfulness.

When Jesus says “Worship and serve only the Lord your God” he’s offering not a rule to follow, but a whole testimony of what God has done for us.  Jesus draws that reference from a place in the story where Moses is telling God’s people to actively remember how God brought us out of slavery and to a land of abundance; how God chose us and our ancestors long before we were born.  

That “commandment” is a declaration of God’s care and love and power and faithfulness.  Which is the only antidote to the constant nagging forces of anxiety, pressure to perform, the demands of self-interest, the noise of the world – in other words, to the devil nudging at us, day after day.

You and I, in our own moments of test, in our own lonely wilderness times, also need that deep internal knowledge of God’s faithfulness. Not just to know scripture or quote it, but to know scripture as our own story, our own experience of God’s faithfulness from creation to the end of time.

That’s what God’s people are practicing in the story from Deuteronomy we heard this morning. Bringing the first fruits of their harvest to God, each household recites the story of God’s faithfulness:
A wandering Aramean was my ancestor. When the Egyptians treated us harshly, God heard us, God brought us out of Egypt; gave us this land and its abundance. This happened to us, to me, and I bring this offering as a declaration that God’s promise has been faithfully fulfilled.

The story of God’s people is my story, they say. Each of God’s people proclaims every year, probably several times a year, that God’s faithfulness has brought me to this place; this time.

Jesus grew up steeped in that story; absorbed it from his human community of God’s people; along with other practices of remembering God’s faithfulness, at the door of every house, woven into clothing, told and retold to children and one another, ritually remembered in acts of worship.

Just like you and I are supposed to grow up, to live our adulthood, steeped in that same story of God’s faithfulness. Steeped in the story of Jesus’ faithfulness.
And we, too, are supposed to make it our own.

Because that is our armor against “temptation” – against all the ways the devil or simply the world around us works to draw our focus away from God, works to focus us on ourselves, our wants and fears, instead of on the rich, deep experience of God’s faithful care.

It is what we turn to sustain us in the wilderness of a long, ever-changing pandemic; to keep us balanced and grounded as the edges and horror of war in the world reach into our lives and community; to keep us focused on, and ready to share, God’s faithful love just as Jesus himself did and does, when our wilderness and “tests” don’t necessarily feel like “temptations”. 

That’s how scripture stops the devil.

When it expresses our confidence that we ourselves are part of the story of God’s faithfulness, both in our moments of abundance and happiness and in our times of test and stress and grief and pain.

That assurance that this story of God’s faithfulness is Jesus’ own; our own story is the difference between Jesus quoting scripture and the devil quoting it, too.

So what’s your story of God’s faithfulness?

You and I don’t bring the first tomatoes of our gardens – or the first paycheck of the year – to a priest and recite the story of Israel’s rescue from wandering, slavery, and need.

But we have – we must have – our own story of God’s faithfulness, and we need to repeat it, enter into it, tell ourselves into the whole of God’s story.

Maybe there’s a time when you were lost and found yourself in God; when you were broken or abused, and God’s strength brought you healing and freedom.

Your story may not have the sweep of the Exodus from Egypt, of course – one of my own stories is about finding a parking place right where I needed it, late on a night of grief and uncertainty, and feeling that little moment wrap around me as assurance of God’s faithful presence and care.  Every time I remember that moment, tell that story to myself or someone else, I’m wrapped again in that vivid assurance of faithful love.

Or maybe it’s a family story, generations back, of emigrating to a new land to find freedom and abundance; maybe it’s how your grandfather’s law practice or your great-aunt’s bakery quietly provided services or food to those who couldn’t pay, to the point where it could ruin the business, and yet the family always had enough. 

And even without naming God, your heart and your history knows this as an experience of God’s faithfulness.

Maybe it’s a story of a community you’ve been part of, like the congregation that sponsored me for ordination, who told the story of being on the brink of closure, being reminded that death leads to resurrection, and becoming a whole new congregation focused on giving away abundance and welcoming the outcast – so often and compellingly that it was all of our own story, each of us who hadn’t been there.

Maybe your story isn’t precisely a story. Maybe it’s the words of a prayer, or a hymn, or a pattern of scripture, worn smooth with repetition and time --- 

Now I lay me down to sleep…I once was lost, but now am found…. give us this day our daily bread…though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil… all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well… Here I am, Lord… the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus…

words that started as a stranger’s expression of God’s faithfulness, and have worked their way into your heart, to be your own truth, your own story.

This Lent, this season of renewal and reflection, make it a practice to tell this story of God’s faithfulness – from your own experience, from your family, from scripture or the traditions of the church – at least once a day, to yourself. Tell it to others as often as you can. Tell it as your own story, your offering to God.

And if you don’t know your story yet, this season of prayer and study and reflection can be the time to find it: to sort through your personal experience, the well-worn stories of your family, to read a bit more scripture, and find what resonates with you, what you would like to tell as your own story – and repeat that. Re-read that story. Say that prayer again, and again. Tell the oft-repeated story with your father when it’s the four-hundredth time you’ve heard it this visit.

And listen to our prayers, as we gather. Listen for your story as we tell our shared stories of God’s faithfulness Sunday after Sunday in the scripture we read, in the Creed we repeat, in the consecrating prayers of communion, [in the hymns we sing].

Because all it takes to defeat the devil is the story of God’s faithfulness, which is truly our own story, yours and mine and Jesus’.