Sermon 3/18/07 YEAR C LENT IV
This past week was a very emotional one for me. I met and fell in love with Alexandra, my new grandchild.
She is lovely.
Of course.
Talented?
Would you have any question about that?
Sensitive and loving?
Indeed. She allowed me the honor of holding her in my arms and saying a silent prayer of thanksgiving for this newest member of God’s creation.
What's ahead for Alex?
What sort of a world do I hope she will live in?
I don't have any magic crystals that will predict what is to come, but I do know something from the past that tells me that she will find in the future what God has prepared from before the first day of creation. She will find a time and a place where she can be at home with God and with all of God’s other children who are coming into the world.
One of our younger and newer members of this congregation named, Elizabeth, asked her grandmother:
“Where is God?”
Well, Grandmother Sandie suggested Elizabeth ask her newest friend, Father Bob this important question. I wrote a response to Elizabeth that I hope I will be able to explain more completely in person if she does, in fact, ask me this question.
I am thankful for Elizabeth’s question because all of us need to ask ourselves such questions as we continue to live into what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Where is God in all of this?
Where does God live?
Where does God abide?
I think, if you listen carefully to what I wrote to Elizabeth, you will discover why the unknowable future is really just the final act of something which we call the past, but which God calls our present.
It is the future that lives in our worship, but more importantly, in our daily lives.
Dear Elizabeth:
Your question is exactly the same question that the first disciples asked Jesus even before they were friends. That seems pretty amazing that you and the disciples who ended up following Jesus would have the same question just as they, too, were meeting him.
Elizabeth, your question also asks that I admit a certain way of looking at Jesus that not everyone will necessarily agree with. I believe that Jesus is God, the best and truest experience of God that I have ever found in my lifetime. So, wherever we find Jesus, I would say that we have found where God is.
Did you know that one of the names or titles that was given to Jesus was Immanuel. That word simply means "God is with us."
So, I guess I could ask you the same question about yourself:
"Elizabeth, where are you?"
If you told me to come and follow you around all day and night, week after week, month after month, and year after year, you would be asking me to do what Jesus told his early followers to do. "Come and see."
If I followed you around all of the time, I would really get to know you, wouldn't I? I would really know all about you which is another way of knowing where you live. What makes you happy; what makes you sad; how you treat other people and how other people treat you. I would get to know about your friends, your family, what is important to you, and who you love.
Imagine if I got to know you that well? If I did, than I would be able to come close to answering someone else's question about you: "Where is Elizabeth?"
So, I will offer to you the answer I have been able to come up with so far in my following Jesus and just trying to see where he is. In the beginning, since I was not around when Jesus was born or lived his life, I depended upon hearing the stories about him that were told by those early friends and followers.
I heard the stories in church, but my grandmother also told me these stories from her memory. When she told these stories, I somehow thought that she had actually been there with Jesus and his friends. I wasn't sure, but finally I realized that she, too, had followed Jesus as his early friends had done and added her feelings about Jesus to her telling about him.
Elizabeth, I continue to hear these stories told by his friends, but I am also learning to look for God in the same places his friends had found him.
Wherever someone is hurting, God is there.
Wherever someone is hungry, God is there.
Wherever someone is thirsty, God is there.
Wherever someone is lonely, God is there.
Wherever someone is sad, God is there.
Wherever someone is seeking to ease the pain of someone who is hurting, God is there.
Wherever someone is seeking to feed the hungry, God is there.
Wherever someone is seeking to give a cool drink of water to someone who is thirsty, God is there.
Wherever someone is seeking to comfort those who are sad and broken hearted, God is there.
Wherever someone is loving, forgiving, and caring for someone else, God is there.
Wherever someone is seeking to make peace without hurting any of God's children, God is there.
Wherever someone doesn't see or hear or touch or smell or imagine such a God, God is there.
Wherever someone either calls him or refuses to call him to be with them, God is there.
God seems to be nowhere, but is really always, now here with us.
I have followed Jesus other places too, but I find these places, in these conditions of life is where I have most often found God, because that is where I found Jesus in the stories told about him. Now I am finding him on my own and telling those stories to others.
Do you want to follow Jesus too? As you do, you will add more answers to the ones I have offered because Jesus continues to be with us. God is where we are. Come and see.
Your Friend,
Father Bob
What does this letter have to do with our Gospel story today about a Father whose two sons seem to be at odds with one another? Well, I would suggest that wherever people are at odds with each other like these two brothers, God is there too.
I have always loved the way Jesus tries to show us who his Father is. In this story, the loving Father does not take sides in the things that each brother dislikes about the other. The elder brother sees his younger brother as disrespectful, lazy, in need of a good whipping by his Father. I detect jealousy coming from this man. Maybe he wishes he could be as free as his brother, but his sense of identity was tied to his being right.
The younger brother, for his part, is not perfect. He has boldly gone to his Father and demanded an inheritance that one would normally only receive on the death of the parent. By asking for it in advance, he seems to be saying that he no longer considers his Father to be alive. Maybe Dad is just too nice; maybe he thinks his Dad is an easy touch or is a pushover; or maybe he reads the Father’s love as really not caring about how he leads his life. Maybe Dad has no boundaries or standards for his children.
Of course, the eldest son more than makes up for the Father’s loving and lenient ways and so the rift grew. The younger brother may just have decided his Dad’s house wasn’t big enough for him and his brother any longer. It seems certain to me that the elder son, despite his criticism of his brother, was not too sorry to see that punk brother of his walk out the door and into his irresponsible ways.
When Junior returns, his Father welcomes him home. He does not seem to be too concerned about the son’s previous behavior. His love for his son leads him to embrace him and to welcome him home with a party.
When the elder brother objects to his Father, his Father extends this same love to him, but the old resentments and rivalries with his brother leave this story stuck without anything more than the younger son being welcomed home and the eldest son sulking and perhaps trying to figure out a way to get even with his brother.
The Bible is filled with stories about brothers and others whose hatred for each other lead one to kill another. Remember the story of Cain and Abel. There are some striking similarities between that older story and the one Jesus is telling.
So, where does that leave us on this fourth Sunday in Lent?
Loved.
Forgiven.
Perhaps settling for these gifts for ourselves, but not offering them to others.
Or resenting them while refusing to sit down and celebrate with each other our common loving Father's all embracing love and forgiveness that gives us time to change.
We sang a wonderful Easter hymn today before the Gospel (The Strife is o'er). We heard alleluias during this otherwise alleluia-less season of Lent. Why?
Because this hymn proclaims that the real deal that will move us beyond just experiencing God’s love and forgiveness has already happened. It says the party and shouts of joy are not anticipating a future that is uncertain, but a reality that we can begin to celebrate without anxiety or fear.
Because the future has been shown to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The reconciling love of God has shown us the future. It is a future in which we will know where God is and who God is. We will no longer, as Paul says, "see one another from a human point of view," like Cain saw Abel; like the elder and younger brother saw one another and even their Father.
We do not need to stage any theatrical build up to convince ourselves that the reconciling presence of Jesus is where God is. God is here in our reaching beyond what separates us like the Father, that Jesus tells us, did in our story today.
Do we want to know where God is?
If we follow him;
watch him,
do his work;
hear his stories and the stories of those who have left behind their need
to see other people as rivals for affection, status, wealth, power, or expensive toys,
we will be in good company with Peter and the other disciples,
with Paul,
our young sister, Elizabeth,
and all of the other of God’s older brothers and sisters and
our younger brothers and sisters
who are joining the party for the future that God has already planned, paid for, and secured for all of his children.
As one of the characters in the film, from the 1980s called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, says:
“Be excellent to one another and party on, dudes!”
Easter is now.
The party has started;
don’t waste your time and energy maintaining old resentments and fanning envy-driven rivalries.
Be excellent to one another, even as your Heavenly Father is excellent to you and party on, my brothers and sisters.
Accept God’s love, forgiveness and mercy and then love one another.
Be reconciled to one another. See one another through the eyes of God, not through the eyes of those who live in fear and who feel embattled as rivals in a war.
It is a done deal.
Life is too short to drink bad wine!
This is the future my new grandchild, Alexandra, will be a part of and there is where she will find, with my new young friend, Elizabeth, where God is. Immanuel. God with us.
Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
The Strife is O'er
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
1. The strife is o'er, the battle done—
The victory of life is won.
The song of triumph has begun.
Alleluia!
2. The pow'rs of death have done their worst,
But Christ their legions has dispersed.
Let shouts of holy joy outburst!
Alleluia!
3. The three sad days have quickly sped;
He rises glorious from the dead.
All glory to our risen Head!
Alleluia!
4. He closed the yawning gates of Hell;
The bars from heav'n's high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise His triumphs tell.
Alleluia!
5. Lord, by the stripes which wounded thee,
From death's dread sting thy servants free,
That we may live and sing to Thee!
Alleluia!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
