God is reconciling the world in Christ, in God’s way, not ours, and if we are ambassadors of this reconciliation we need to bear it fully and truly in our lives.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year C
   texts: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Does God get to be who God wants to be? Can God do what God wants?

Obviously, yes. The Triune God created the heavens and the earth, galaxies and mitochondria, all things. God can be and do whatever God pleases.

But the Triune God is mostly hidden from view in our world. We don’t see God directly. How people see God depends upon interpreters of God.

So: does God get to be and do what God wants? Yes. Does the world get to see the truth about who God is and what God wants? That depends.

This matters, because we are called to speak for God. Paul says that, baptized into Christ, we are ambassadors for Christ, through us God is making an appeal to the world. If we won’t accept who God is and what God does on God’s terms, we’ll deliver the world a misleading and untrue appeal.

As Paul says in another letter, we’ll misrepresent God.

Since we’re not comfortable with who God is in Jesus’ parable today, we may have a big problem.

Wait, you say, isn’t this our favorite parable? We love the story of the prodigal father who freely loves and forgives, who welcomes us when we’re lost.

Maybe. We like to think God will do that for us. Judging from the way Christians, even Lutherans, speak of God’s grace and forgiveness in the world, though, we’ve got serious problems with God’s approach.

This parable is a poor example of parenting, we think. The father enables the younger son’s misbehavior, foolishly giving him his inheritance without strings attached and welcoming him back without strings attached after he wasted it all. He overlooks that his younger son wants him dead and doesn’t care about the shame this puts on him. He doesn’t care about losing face with his older son, and lets him painfully insult and criticize him, responding in love and welcome. He’s never heard of our concept of “tough love.”

When Christians speak of God’s grace, it’s rarely with this fullness. We speak of God needing satisfaction for our sins, of the wrath of God that only Jesus can appease by his death. We threaten people that they can’t expect to be forgiven if they keep on sinning. To hear most Christians, God is nothing like this father.

But if Jesus is the Son of God, the face of the Trinity for us, and this is how Jesus says the Triune God acts, does Jesus get to be right? Or do we get to impose our indignation, our suspicion, our conditional grace on God?

Does the Triune God get to be like this father? Or will we speak and act as if God is different?

If we could, we’d have some criticisms to make to God.

We’d say, look, there are problems with your approach. If you offer grace freely, like this story, you’re going to get taken advantage of. People will sin and ask forgiveness, and go and sin again. They’ll get away with anything, knowing you’re a soft touch. No one will respect you if you don’t defend what’s right.

But the Triune God’s answer is, “what’s your point? Just what do you think happened on the cross, anyway? Don’t you see that taking on your flesh, living among you, I embodied this unconditional love and forgiveness and because it didn’t fit your world view, your sense of justice, your need to earn things, you killed me for it?”

Of course God will be taken advantage of if God acts like this father. Christ Jesus proved that. Even risen from the dead, he didn’t punish his faithless followers, he still loved them, and invited them once more to be people bearing his love in the world.

We may not parent in this way. We may not love in this way. But this is the way that God is. Like it or not. God is not made in our image. As God says in Hosea 11, “I’m God, not human. I don’t have to be like you.”

In this parable, Jesus only gives us one relevant thing: God’s love is unstoppable.

We who need accountability get no answers here we really want. Does the younger son straighten up after this? Does the elder son come into the party? Are he and his brother reconciled? Who knows?

All of that is irrelevant to Jesus’ point. Why the younger son wanted to leave, why he wasted his inheritance, is irrelevant to the story. Why the older son felt left out, and didn’t realize how much his father loved him, is irrelevant. Jesus gives us only enough to fill out the story.

What we get clearly is the unconditional, unassailable, foolish, self-giving love of the father for his sons. This parable says one thing: God will deal with human sin by loving us out of it, into new life. Remember, this is Jesus’ response to the criticism that he spends his time with sinners.

We might think it’s inadequate. That doesn’t matter to God. This is who God is.

God will heal us by unconditionally loving us into life. Nothing else matters.

Paul says in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. The Triune God comes among us in person, living unconditional love and grace, inviting us to live in that love by loving God and neighbor, to live and move and have our being in such foolish, unrestricted love.

It breaks all our rules. We resent that God offers love to people who are evil, people who don’t deserve it, people who don’t intend to change. God’s love as shown in this parable is the opposite of how the world works. So much so that Jesus was executed for living this. So much so that we crucify Jesus by killing this message and covering God’s grace with all our rules and restrictions.

What we do with this doesn’t change God. This is how God will save all things.

The only question is, will we faithfully carry this message to the world?

God will reconcile all things in Christ and bring a new thing into being, whether we like it or not. Of course it’s messy; remodeling something into new always is. Winning people back by love means a lot of pain and struggle and difficulty. The cross was only the beginning of that.

But this is the message we are called to speak, the ministry we are called to bear as ambassadors. Maybe we fear to admit the truth about God because we fear being taken advantage of, too. We’ll be as vulnerable and look as weak as God. We’ll risk being walked on, misused. That’s the deal.

We’re not as comfortable with this parable as we thought, and so we hesitate to follow Christ with our whole lives.

But remember what this parable is: a promise of welcome in the loving embrace of the Triune God that cannot be taken from us.

When we resent God loving others freely and unconditionally, we forget this: God’s throwing a party of love, a feast of grace, and we’re invited. We’re invited, even if we’ve wasted our inheritance, rejected God in our lives, and run away to do what we wanted. Even if we’ve seen God’s love as a duty and have been “good children”, slaving to be the best we can be, missing the joy of living in God’s love. Even if we haven’t figured out how to keep from sinning after being forgiven. Even if we resent others getting breaks from God that we don’t. We’re invited, period.

God gets to be and do what God wants to be and do. And what God wants to be and do is love.

Love the world, love us, love all, back into new life, love us out of our sin, love us into the image of God. The party is waiting, and it’s for the whole world.

This is what we get to live and tell in our lives. This is the message we get to bear as Christ’s ambassadors to the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Trees bear fruit for the sake of others; so we repent, return to God, that we might bear fruit for the sake of all and be a part of God’s extravagant satisfaction for all the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Third Sunday in Lent, year C
   texts: Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Why do you spend your money and labor for that which does not satisfy?

It’s a fair question. Are we getting value for our investment of time, energy, wealth? Are we satisfied with life?

Can we evaluate this? We can live unaware of how we spend our time and wealth and whether it brings us blessing or satisfies. We hear many messages promising satisfaction, from advertisers, from politicians, from entertainers, offering fulfilled lives if we only buy what they’re selling.

What if Isaiah’s right? What if we’re running through life following this whim and that trend, living without any attention to how our time spent and our lives lived really fill us? Can we say with confidence that the things we spend the most time or money or thought on are the things that can satisfy us?

If we aren’t sure we could ask our psalmist: when we wake in the midnight watches, do we find a content spirit, filled with God’s goodness as if with the richest of foods? Or when we wake in the night is our spirit filled with worry, discontent?

Maybe a sign of our dissatisfaction is that we’re here this morning. We’ve come away from our everyday life, looking for God, seeking answers, hoping for something that will address our deepest needs.

So, what are we missing that would truly satisfy us?

Jesus compares us to a tree today, so let’s consider plants.

Plants need certain things to flourish and grow, and produce the fruit or leaves or flowers they are meant to. Some people are really good at knowing what plants need. They can take a plant out of the ground, put it in a pot, care for it, and it will grow and bring delight. My Uncle Ray once grew an apricot tree out of an apricot pit, and it won a prize at the county fair.

I’m not one of these. I don’t know what it means when told, “don’t water it too much.” Is that once a week? Every day? Only when it’s wilting and near death?

Maybe we’re the same when it comes to the tree we each are. Some instinctively know the ways to life and growth in God. Some are clueless, until we get to a point in our lives where we’re wilted or dried up or starving and aren’t sure how we got there.

Isaiah has wisdom for all of us, however we are: God knows what we need. If we’re seeking to be a fruitful tree, a flourishing plant, turn to God.

Or, as Jesus would say, “repent.” Turn around, and come back to the One who gives life.

But we’ve got a problem: Trees don’t bear fruit for themselves.

We look at Jesus’ parable today and think we want to be a tree bearing fruit. Why wouldn’t we?

But do we want it only because we don’t want to be cut down? When John or Jesus talk of fruitful trees and vines, lurking behind is always the idea of the dried up, unfruitful branch that feeds the fire. We may only want to be fruitful to avoid destruction.

Because there’s little self-interest found in bearing fruit. A tree doesn’t bear fruit for itself. Even if an apple falls uneaten, rots, and the seeds within begin to grow, that’s another tree reaping the benefit.

Do we avoid repentance because there’s no self-incentive for bearing fruit? Do we run after all sorts of things seeking satisfaction for ourselves rather than turning to God because God will only create gifts in us that will help others?

We make repentance a personal thing, a spiritual exercise God needs us to do because we’re sinful people. It’s all about us and our private, personal salvation.

But that doesn’t seem to be what our Lord means.

The turning around of repentance Jesus invites is for the sake of all, because it is meant to bear fruit.

This tree in the parable is meant to give to others, be a blessing. The problem of the owner of the tree is he isn’t getting any blessing from it.

John the Baptist invited his hearers to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” But what was that fruit? If you have two coats, give one to someone who doesn’t have one. If you have more food than you need, share it. If you’re cheating someone, stop it. Don’t extort from others, and be satisfied with what you have. Fruit of repentance is for others.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways,” God says. Maybe we’re not satisfied deep within our spirits because we’ve been mistaken all along thinking our faith was all for our sake. That we needed to repent because otherwise we’d be punished. Instead, we repent so we can be a blessing to others. That’s God’s way.

What if God’s way is really better for us?

Isaiah begs us to see where our life is truly found.

Four times he invites: come to God. God’s arms are open wide with blessing and grace that can truly satisfy us and give us life.

If we’re afraid of being cut down as unfruitful, Isaiah says, “don’t be.” Return to the Lord, who will abundantly pardon; return to God, that God might have mercy. Whatever the result of our repentance, we have the promise of welcome and forgiveness when we turn.

And in that turning, we find life, because we become the fruitful tree we are meant to be. We find what satisfies, because we are living as we were made to live. The One who truly knows what makes us grow and flourish is the one who made us. And in Jesus’ parable, that One has grace prepared for us.

Whoever the owner is in this parable, it’s clear it is the Triune God who is the gardener: the Father created the tree and loves it enough to give it time, the Son cares for and prunes the tree, and the Spirit nurtures and feeds the tree, and in the patience of God the tree is given time to grow, deepen, and finally bear fruit.

And in that fruit, given away to others, we find true satisfaction.

This is the mystery of God’s way: all are satisfied when each bears fruit for another’s well-being.

This happens when we don’t look for God’s mercy and healing to benefit ourselves, or understand repentance as a path to personal salvation, and rather see the grace of a God who would have all people bear fruit for the sake of others, and will take all the time necessary to see it happen. Will dig around us, fertilize us, bless us, so we become what we’re meant to be.

This is how there’s wine and milk and bread and satisfaction and joy enough for all: when all are bearing fruit for others, there is more than enough to satisfy the whole world.

When we find the joy of this repentance we can wake in the midnight watches and, with the psalmist, say, “my spirit is content as with the richest of foods.”

No longer motivated to help ourselves, we turn to God so we are fruitful for others, and strangely enough, we are satisfied. In the middle of the night or the bright sunshine, we are satisfied.

There is grace today in God’s generous patience and willingness to help us turn and bear fruit. There is even more grace in the fruit we bear for the world.

Come, let us return to the Lord, who has mercy and abundant pardon, enough to satisfy all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen