Soul Repair: Nourished by Unconditional Love and Forgiveness

 

The service starts about 18 minutes in.  

Today, our soul food is God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, as shown in our Gospel reading. Also because it’s Mothering Sunday, which I’ll talk more about in a bit. But first, let’s have a look at our familiar, and, I suspect much-loved, Gospel story.

We don't know why the younger son got fed up with his comfortable life on the farm;
Jesus didn't go into details about his family background, or, if he did, Luke didn't record them!
Perhaps he was being asked to marry a girl he really disliked –
or perhaps he'd fallen in love with the wrong girl.
Or perhaps he just found farm work boring,
and the lights of the big city more attractive.
Whatever, he goes to his father and asks for his share of his inheritance, and takes off.

Now, it was really awful of him to ask that –
he was more or less saying “I can't wait until you're dead!”.
And, of course, it wasn't a matter of going to the bank and writing a cheque –
it was a matter of ­dividing up the farm,
letting the younger son have a certain number of fields and buildings,
and a certain amount of stock.
But this story is taking place in God's country,
where the rules are not the same as ours,
so the farmer does just that,
and a few days later, when the son has sold all this –
I wonder if he sold it back to his father, I wouldn't put it past him –
he lets his son go with his blessing.

And the son goes off to seek his fortune in the big city.

But, like so many of us, he doesn't make a fortune.
Instead, he wastes what he has on what the Bible calls “Dissolute living”.
You know the kind of thing –
fashionable clothes,
champagne,
caviar,
top-of-the-range smartphones,
expensive callgirls,
fast cars,
cocaine,
and so on and so forth.

They perhaps didn't have quite those things in his day, but very similar!
And he almost definitely gambled,
and may even have taken drugs as well.

And, inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong and he wakes up one morning with no money and with his creditors ringing the doorbell.
And he is forced to earn his living as best he can.

I don't think we Christians can ever quite realise the absolute horror of what happened next.
We don't have the utter horror of pigs that the Jews had and have.
We think of pigs, we think of bacon and sausages and roast pork with crispy crackling;
for the Jews –
and, I gather, for Muslims, too –
it was more like taking a job on a rat farm.
In terms of actual work,
it probably wasn't much different from the work he'd been used to,
but he would be an outcast among his own kind,
and we gather from the story that he wasn't paid very well, either.
He was hungry, to the point where even the pigs' food looked good.
I wonder if he was working for one of his creditors?

Anyway, one morning he wakes up and thinks to himself, “What on earth am I doing?
Even my father treats his people better than this –
maybe he'd take me on as a farm worker.”

You notice, perhaps, that he doesn't actually say he's sorry.
He doesn't appear to regret having left home,
only finding himself in this fix.
And yes, he would be better off working for his father than he is here.
He does say he’ll admit he has sinned, and is not worthy to be his father’s son any more, but there doesn’t seem to be any regret….
I wonder if those few years of squandering it all still felt worth it?

Well, we all know what happened next.
Father rushes out to greet him –
and men simply never ran in that place and time,
but remember that this story takes place in God's country,
and anything can happen there.
The celebrations go on and on.

Elder brother is most put out.
He has been working hard all the time,
and nobody ever gave him a party, did they?
And this wastrel, who has caused so much grief, is being treated like a prince.
What's all that about?

Well, the elder brother could have had a party any day in the week, if he'd wanted one.
He'd never said, had he?
He'd seemed quite content with his lifestyle.
Perhaps underneath, though, he was seriously jealous of his brother.
No, not jealous, that's the wrong word.
Envious.
Perhaps he wish he had had the guts to cut loose and make a life of
his own.
We don't know.

But whatever, Father's reaction seemed to him to be well out of order.
He wished his Father had said, “Get out –
how dare you show your face around here!”

Or that Father had said “Well, I suppose you can be a servant,
but no way are you coming back into this family.”

Or, perhaps, “Well, if you work really hard and prove to me you're really sorry, I might be prepared to forgive you –
in about ten years' time and providing you are absolutely perfect during that time!”

But for Father to rush up and hug Little Brother, and to be calling for champagne and throwing a party –
well, that was definitely out of order, as far as Big Brother was concerned.
His only hope was that Little Brother would insist on being treated as a servant:
“No, no, you can't give me a party!
I don't deserve it.
I'm going to live above the stables with the other workers,
and behave like a worker, not your son!”

You know, that's what I think I would have done.
I don't know about you, but I find being forgiven the hardest thing there is.
Responding to God's love is really hard.
I want to earn my forgiveness, earn God's love, God's approval.

But it doesn't work like that, does it?
The bit of Luke Chapter 15 that we didn't read was the other two “lost” stories –
the lost sheep and the lost coin.
We don't blame the coin for getting lost;
we know how easy it is to drop something, or to put it down in a safe place, and we can't find it.
If you knew how many time Robert mislays the keys to one church building or another….
And when we find whatever it was we have mislaid – usually when we’re looking for something else, we do rejoice!
We don't really blame the sheep for wandering off, either.
Sheep are dumb animals –
well, noisy ones, really, but stupid ones, whatever –
and if they can get into trouble, they will.
But the Good Shepherd isn't going to lose one if he can help it;
he'll be pulling on his coat and wellies as soon as he realises one has gone missing, and set off with his dogs to find it.

You might say that is over the top –
but again,
this is God's country, the Kingdom of Heaven,
and anything can happen there.
In God's country there is more joy over one lost sheep being found than over the 99 that stayed in their field.

But we can and we do blame the young man for running off.
Perhaps we would like to run off, who knows?
In any case, we can identify with him.
We know we can –
and maybe we have –
done dreadful things like that.
And we don't like it, like the big brother didn't like it,
when the Father forgives him so generously and open-heartedly,
even without his repenting properly.
He came home, he is here again, this calls for a drink!
No, we think, this won't do.
I can't be forgiven that easily.
It can't be that simple.
I need to earn it.

But we can't earn it.
We can't earn forgiveness.
We can't earn salvation.
Sometimes we speak as if, and maybe we even think,
that salvation is down to us,
that we need to say the special prayer so that God will save us.
No.
Salvation is all God's idea,
and God has a great deal more invested in the relationship than we do.
God pours out his love on us unconditionally, and all we need do is accept it.
God’s love and forgiveness are unconditional

This reading does fit in rather well with the fact that it’s Mothering Sunday. It’s also Mother’s Day, but they are two rather different things.

Mothering Sunday has roots way, way back in history, at a time when this mid-Lent Sunday was the time when servants would go home to visit their families
and, if possible, they would all visit the “mother church” of their area together.
One of the traditional readings for today is the one where Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem: “
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you.
I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen!
What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although them, too, but above all,
the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

We do give thanks for our mothers, of course we do.
But we have to remember, too, people whose Mums are no longer with us, and to remember that some people didn't have satisfactory relationships with their own Mums,
and some people have never known the joy of motherhood.
The Church used to be very tactless about this, and only give flowers to those women in the congregation who actually were mothers – quite ignoring those who would have loved to have had children.
And blithely glossing over the fact that for the rest of the year we were rather left to get on with it, and were told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!”
As if....
At least these days we give flowers to everybody in church!

But what I really want to leave with you this morning is God’s wonderful and unconditional love and forgiveness.
So much love, so much forgiveness – it could almost overwhelm us, which is probably why we hold back.
And we feel, rightly, that we don’t deserve it.
Well, of course we don’t – but who does?
I don’t know about you, but the first time I really realised the tiniest fraction of what God’s love is like was when they laid my newborn daughter in my arms.
Was this feeling, this love, this protectiveness, this –
this total overwhelmingness, was it really a picture of what God feels for me?
And for you?
And for each and every one of us?
I think it is.

But the awful thing we also have to remember is that this love is for everybody!
It’s not just for those who have “accepted Christ as their personal Saviour”;
it’s not just for those who conform to what we believe a Christian must be.
It’s everybody.
It’s the muggers, the phone snatchers, the bank robbers, the traffikers, the slavers, the rapists –
and yes, even the politicians!
God might –
and probably does –
hate the things they do, hate the things they say –
but God doesn’t hate them!
On the contrary, God loves each and every one of them as much as he loves you and me.
And each and every one of us is loved with all of God’s love, because God is love, and “when we are still far off” God comes running to rejoice with us that we are home at last! Amen!

Glimpses of Glory

 

Do you ever watch sport on television?
It doesn’t really matter which sport –
football, rugby, athletics, gymnastics, cycling, ice-skating –
whatever it is you enjoy,
the point I’m about to make is the same.

What we see on television is just the tip of the iceberg, the pinnacle of the sport.
They show you the very best athletes at the peak of their game.
What they don’t show you is the endless hours of practice every single one of those athletes puts in,
often training at unearthly hours of the morning to fit in with the day’s work, grinding along,
day after day after day,
getting injured,
recovering,
plodding on.
And then, every once in awhile, realising how much they’ve improved,
how much they are “getting it”.
Suddenly, all the hard work has paid off –
they’ve been selected for their team, or their club, or even their country!
Or perhaps they’re finding a certain aspect of the skill easy that six months before they could barely do.
A glimpse of the glory of what they’ve been working so hard for.

Perhaps you’ve taken a sport fairly seriously in your time, so you know what I’m talking about.
But even if you haven’t, isn’t it the same with our Christian lives, too?
We plod on, dutifully using what John Wesley called “The means of grace”,
that is, the Sacrament,
public worship,
the Scriptures,
prayer and so on,
and yet nothing seems to happen. 
Sometimes it feels as though our relationship with God is all down to us, not to God,
and doubts set in. 
But then, just sometimes, God breaks in and we get a glimpse of his glory. 
I know that has happened to me, and I hope it has happened to you.
 
In our readings today, various people get glimpses of God’s glory.
 
Firstly, Moses and the Israelites. 
Moses is spending time in the mountains with God. 
This passage is set shortly after that infamous episode with the golden calf,
and I think the authors are trying to emphasize that it is God, Yahweh, who is in charge,
not Moses, not a golden calf, nor anybody else. 
So Moses’ face shines when he has been in God’s presence,
as he is speaking with God’s authority. 
The Israelites caught a glimpse of God’s glory. 
And we are told that Moses did, too;
he was allowed to see just the tiniest shadow of the back of God –
as though God had a human form, but then, he was told,
he couldn’t see the face of God as he wouldn’t live through the experience. 
Nobody can, nobody except Jesus. 
We can only come to God through Jesus;
more of that in a minute. 
The Israelites could only see God’s glory reflected in Moses’ face, and it scared them. 
Moses, who hadn’t at all realised anything was different,
had to put a veil over his face while he was among them, so as not to scare them.
 
The New Testament reading set for today, which we didn’t read,
points out that Moses was able to take the veil off, eventually, because the glory faded. 
Moses was back among the people, involved in the every-day tasks of running the Exodus,
and gradually the glimpse of glory that he had had,
and that he had passed on to the Israelites,
faded.
 
Okay, fast-forward several hundred years to the time of Christ.
This time, it is Jesus who is going up the mountain and he asks his friends James, Peter and John to go with him.
I don't know whether Jesus knew what was going to happen,
only that it was going to be something rather different and special,
and he wanted some moral support!
And so the four friends go up the mountain –
and suddenly things get rather confused for a time,
and when it stops being confused,
there is Jesus in shining white robes talking to Moses and Elijah.
 
Peter, of course, babbles on about building shelters,
but more to reassure himself that he exists, I think, than for any other reason.
And then the voice from heaven saying "This is my Son, listen to Him".
In other words, Jesus is more important than either Moses or Elijah, who were the two main people, apart from God, in the Jewish faith.
To good Jews, as James, Peter and John were, this must have almost felt like blasphemy.
No wonder Jesus told them to keep their big mouths shut until the time was right,
or he'd have been stoned for a blasphemer forthwith.

Peter, for one, remembered this momentous day until the end of his life.
Years and years later, he –
or someone writing in his name –
was to write:
"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For he received honour and glory from God the Father
when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, `This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven,
while we were with him on the holy mountain."
 
For Peter, James and John, it was to be proof that Jesus is the Messiah, and through all the turbulent times that followed they must have held on to the memory of that tremendous day, when they saw a glimpse of God’s glory in Jesus.
 
But they, too, had to come down from the mountainside and carry on,
and immediately they are confronted with a crisis:
a child who has been brought to the disciples for healing, but nothing has happened. 
In this version of the story, Jesus sounds almost cross –
well, you can’t blame him, can you? 
He was probably tired after being on the mountain,
and rather wanting a quiet supper and his bed,
and now the disciples were all talking at once, explaining how they’d tried to cast out this demon,
and the boy’s father is adding to the confusion, and yadda, yadda, yadda….. 
Basically, back to normal! 
We know from other accounts of this story that afterwards Jesus tells the disciples that they can only cast out that sort of demon with prayer and possibly fasting. 
 
So it seems that glimpses of God’s glory are very rare, and the normal gritty, hum-drum, everyday life is the norm. 
And that’s as it should be. 
You can’t live on a mountain-top all the time, you’d get altitude sickness! 
If you were on holiday all the time, you wouldn’t appreciate the rest and relaxation that being on holiday brings. 
It’s not much fun waking up and knowing you have no work to go to and, when you get up, the big excitement of the day will be deciding what to have for supper! 
We are never quite sure where God is in all of this. 
 
But God is there. 
Those very special glimpses of his glory, such as Moses saw,
such as Peter, James and John saw, are just that:
special. 
They happen maybe once or twice in a lifetime, if that. 
But God is there, acting, working in our lives, even if we don’t always recognise Him.

There are a couple of stories about this, which you may or may not have heard. In the first, two men are talking in the pub, and the first is telling of an adventure he’s recently had in North Africa. He got lost in the desert, and ran out of water, and quite thought his last hour had come, so he prayed out loud to God to come and save him.
“And what did God do?” asked his friend, realising that something must have happened as there he was, large as life and twice as natural, in the pub enjoying his pint.
“Oh,” said the first man, “God didn’t need to do anything, as just then a caravan came along, and I was able to go on with them to safety.”
 
The second story tells of the time there was a big flood, and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape.
One person – let’s make it a woman this time, as we had a man in the last story, but it doesn’t really matter – one woman thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so she thought, God’s power, so she prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said “Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend, “I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And she carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for her to jump in, but she sent them away, too, and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but she still refused,
claiming that she was relying on God to save her.

And half an hour later, she was swept away and drowned.

So, because she was a Christian, as you can imagine, she ended up in Heaven,
and the first thing she did when he got there
was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God,
“What do you mean by letting me down like this?
I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter –
what more did you want?”
 
When we pray for someone to be healed, quite often we want to see God intervening spectacularly, like the disciples expected to see with the boy with a demon from today’s reading. 
After all, if you think of it, there’s a limit to what medicine can do. 

When you have an operation, the surgeons can cut you open and do what needs to be done inside you, and then they can stitch you up again – but they can’t make that cut heal up!

They can, of course, do all sorts of things to encourage it to heal –
they can’t actually make the flesh grow back together again.
That has to be left to natural processes –
or is it God? 
 
I believe God is involved in healing, whether it is by direct, supernatural intervention,
or, more usually, through the normal processes of one’s immune system,
aided by medical or surgical intervention when necessary. 
But those glimpses of glory that I started with –
when you realise that you are making progress in your chosen sport or hobby, or perhaps when you are out there competing –
I believe those times, too, are from God.
 
I think, then, that what I want to leave with you today is this:
as we go into Lent,
which is a time when we are apt to think about God, and our relationship with Him,
perhaps a little more deeply than at other times of the year,
let’s be on the lookout for touches of God in our everyday lives. 
They don’t have to be spectacular, they probably won’t be. 
But each of them is a little glimpse of glory.  Amen.