God in the End
In the last weeks of my dad’s life, he and I engaged in a written dialogue, sometimes in email (from his JUNO account – remember those?), sometimes in typed letters, his signed “dad-y-o” and mine signed “with much love.”
You see, my dad was a PK, a preacher’s kid, who left the church as soon as he was an adult because he had witnessed firsthand how the church as an institution misrepresented God with its most basic actions. And I was a seminarian, realizing somewhat late in life that I was called into the church in a very specific way. And I was definitely trying to sort out his feelings and my feelings about God, about salvation, about church.
For him, it mattered that in the days of his childhood, the days of occupying a parsonage with his family, churches failed to pay a living wage to the preacher. It mattered that a church that claimed Jesus was loving and forgiving would keep certain races and classes of people in certain seats or suggest they not be in the building at all. He routinely experienced judgment and harsh criticism instead of a big loving family of God within the walls of the churches his father served.
We had a saying in our house as I grew up…little pitchers have big ears. (Little did my mother know that when she said that to another adult, it was a clue to me to pay attention because there was something I might learn from the conversation at hand.) In his childhood, my dad experienced some of the worst of people in the church firsthand…even when the adults didn’t know he was listening.
My dad knew and loved God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He just rejected the church. In his own words…
“So here I am, a human that believes in a kindly God who grants us free rein in honoring him/her. I believe we honor him (sic) best by emulating the kindly freedom he (sic) grants us. I believe we are directed by an ethos of Christ, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Shalom. But I reject The Church as a traitor to those ideals.”
Woof. The church as a traitor to ideals that Christ calls us to.
All of that didn’t keep him from putting himself before God in his own way. He was diagnosed with cancer when I was 15. He felt the need to survive for his wife and for me, his last daughter still in high school. He felt called to provide security and stability.
He knew prayer wasn’t a slot machine or a way of bargaining with God. But he knew that God knew him and he knew God, he knew there were connections beyond his human understanding, and through meditation, he was able find some peace with his body and his heart and his faith to fight back cancer – a battle that started in 1985 continued on and off in fits and starts and highs and lows until 2010.
Why am I sharing this story today?
Why, in the 52nd week of a year-long series in which we’ve explored the bigness of God’s family, am I talking about a man who rejected the church?
Because I think it matters.
I don’t tell my dad’s story as an example of how faith heals. I tell this story as an example of how people stay connected to God even when they can no longer believe the church has good news for them. In a society where 89% of folks claim to believe a higher power but only about 1/3 regularly participate in religious services, I think it is safe to say there is a disconnect between what churches are doing and the people who believe God is real and moving.
In many ways, the journey of this past year with the book We Make the Road by Walking with Brian McLaren has been about reclaiming the wideness of God’s story, the spaciousness of God’s story, the fullness of God’s story, the inclusivity of God’s story.
It has been about reclaiming the unimaginable bigness of God’s embrace.
It has been about
…seeing the power of love moving through creation of place and people and source,
…seeing the power of love expressed through the miracle of incarnation, healing, death and resurrection, and
…seeing the power of love expressed by the Holy Spirit that moves boldly with and through and among us all, working to bring people together through time and space to taste and to hear and to share the good news.
The good news of God’s love for each one of us. And for every other person created. Good news that is about what GOD can do, not about what we can do.
And as we were driven out of our buildings and into a season of some sort of exile from what we knew, this book, this journey through scripture held the promise of expanding our understanding of who God is and how we are called by God into life-giving disciplines of devotion and service, love and justice. I have big hopes for how we might move forward from this story of God BECAUSE of these weeks of journeying together.
Because there is work to be done and the church’s reputation in the world is rightfully tarnished. We have the opportunity to do the work of reclamation, restoration and revitalization so that we can tell the story of God’s love but also LIVE INTO the kind of love that God shares with all of creation.
In our scripture from Luke’s gospel today, you have heard again one of the most familiar and recognizable parables. It is brilliantly written, a story of a father and two sons. And often we “hear” it as a story about how a “lost son” returns home.
But it is also a story about a loyal son that feels slighted by his father’s embrace of the lost son. It is the story of a son who has resentment because he’s followed all the rules and his brother seems to have broken them all.
And it is a story of a father who loves BOTH of his sons so much that he reaches out to gather them both at a table set with all of the abundance he can muster.
The father reaches out to his lost son, welcoming him just as soon as he is spotted returning home. And then, when the other son has distanced himself to pout about the welcome his brother has received, the father reaches out to that son, encouraging him to join the feast. The father extends extravagance to both sons – one is lavished with love upon his return to the home, the other is has both received over time and is promised as much going forward.
There is enough for both the sons. Despite their disconnections. Despite their resentments. Despite greed. Despite disappointment.
There is enough – and more than enough. There is a feast for both.
And both are wanted at the table.
Welcomed.
Together they make the picture whole.
Why is this the culminating story in our year-long journey?
I fear that as the church – as the global institution that claims to represent Christ, over time and distance, we’ve made God smaller.
The church has often been been more exclusive than invitational.
The church has sought to filter who’s in and who’s out rather than throwing open wide the doors.
The church asks people to cross the threshold more often than leaving the building to be love out in the world.
The church has made it about what happens for an hour on Sunday more important than about how every hour of every day is lived in the world.
And Brian McLaren’s work over the past 52 weeks has been to tease out the truth of scripture in ways that make it relevant and livable to us in our 24/7 lives, but also to make it relevant and livable to those who aren’t necessarily “into” the current expression of church – like this one right here.
As we move forward from this year-long study, how have our eyes and hearts been opened anew and how might we tell that story in the world?
Do we really understand how God is like the father in this story – receiving both sons?
I wonder….How is it that we might shape our shared life as Faith Church with the sure knowledge that God is God and we are not, that God is Love and we are called to Love, that we are called to work with those who have not yet heard that for themselves…whether or not they ever set foot in our building and conform to our habits and preferences?
McLaren says, “We can boast of knowing the “right” name and still have the wrong understanding. But if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, the great, big, beautiful, wonderful, holy, mysterious, reconciling heart of God waits to be discovered and experienced.” (262)
I wonder…how our hearts might open differently if we breathe in the amazing love that God has for all of creation and breathe out that love as we choose our path together as the body of Christ in the world.
I wonder what happens when we let go of our various needs to be right, to control the outcome, to elevate what we do over what another does?
In the end, no matter what we do, God is God and we are not. All will be well. You need to know that, I need to know that, the world needs to know that…and it needs to be the hope and the promise and the call whose energy carries us out into the world. There are many things we cannot do, but we can love abundantly. Just as God loves.
“I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Good news is only good news if you receive it…and pass it on.
May it be so.
Amen.
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