Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 21, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Some weeks, when I read the lectionary selections for a coming Sunday, I can’t help but exclaim: Who dealt this mess! I mean, some weeks the passages seem so obscure, or so unpreachable for one reason or another, that I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say out of them. This week, I didn’t have that problem. This week reading the lectionary selections was pure delight, for they contain two of my absolute favorite passages in all of Scripture. The parable of the prodigal son has long been my favorite out of all of Jesus’ parables. It is such a powerful statement of God’s unshakable love for all of us no matter what we might have done in our lives that I can hardly read it or talk about it without choking up a bit. It really tells us what our faith is all about.

Then there’s the passage that Manny read from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth. It contains the wonderful, foundational line: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them." If I were of a mind to hold up signs with Scripture cites in football stadium end zones, which I’m not, I would hold up not John 3:16--for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life--but 2 Corinthians 19a: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself...." For me, this verse ranks right up there with Romans 8:38--For I am convinced that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord--as the greatest of all of the sayings of the Apostle Paul. Like Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, this verse tells us what our faith is really all about.

These passages are so powerful that when Jane and I were talking about them this week--that’s one of the great things about being engaged to a like-minded UCC pastor, we can be our own little lectionary study group--we both said that the passages essentially preach themselves, that there really isn’t much more that can or needs to be said about them. We joked that maybe we’d just read them, then sit down. But as much as some of you might be delighted if I did that, I’m not going to. There are at least a couple of things that I want to draw out of these wonderful readings for us this morning.

The first has to do with repentance. Those of you attend the Sunday morning adult education series know (and more of you would know if more of you attended, hint, hint) that we’ve had discussions on several occasions about the necessity of repentance in order to receive God’s grace. The most common understanding in our tradition is that God forgives those who repent and, by implication at least, does not forgive those who do not. In those discussions, I have argued that God’s grace and forgiveness precede even our repentance, that repentance is a way in which we can make God’s forgiveness real in our lives but that forgiveness itself does not depend on repentance. Several of the adult ed. regulars--our esteemed lay leader this morning among them--have disagreed with me on that point, often quite energetically. That’s as it should be, but maybe it’s this ongoing discussion with that truly remarkable and delightful group of people that gathers so faithfully at 9:00 on Sunday morning that made a feature of the prodigal son parable that I hadn’t noticed before so striking to me when I read it this time. What happens? The younger son of a man with a considerable estate took his share of the estate early, went away, squandered it, and ended up envying the pigs the slop they were given to eat. Then it occurred to him that he could go back to his father and ask to be taken on as a hired hand. Surely that would be better than envying pigs in a foreign land. But he, like so many of us, thinks that there is no way his father will take him back unless he repents first. So he rehearses his repentance speech: "I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’" Luke 15 18-19a I have no reason to doubt that his repentance was sincere, although it was rather motivated by self-interest. Still, he was prepared to repent, and he thought repentance was necessary.

So he set out to return to his father, all prepared to grovel and to call himself a sinner. And what happened? As Jesus told the story, "while he was still far off, his father saw him...." The father saw him coming. He hasn’t yet heard the son say anything. He as yet has no idea what is in his son’s heart. He hasn’t heard a single word of repentance. Nonetheless, Jesus says, the father "was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him." The father extended the arms of love, grace, and forgiveness before the son had said a single word! Before a single iota of repentance had been expressed! The father didn’t care about that. All he cared about was that his son had returned.

The father says as much at the end of the parable. Responding to the faithful older son’s grumbling about the extravagant welcome the father had give the prodigal, the father says: "We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found." Luke 15:32 Not: It’s OK to welcome him back because he has repented. Not, I have forgiven him because he’s really sorry, he feels really bad about what he did. No. All that matters here is that the son who was lost has been found, the son who left has come back. When he came back no questions were asked, no explanation was demanded. Oh, sure. The prodigal delivers his little speech about having sinned. I mean, he’d rehearsed it and all. He was going to give it no matter what. The speech, however, isn’t what produced the father’s grace. All that was needed there was the son’s presence, his return. The father was there all the time the son was gone, watching, keeping a look out, longing for the return of the prodigal, keeping a fatted calf for the feast that he would throw if his son one day returned.

You see, this story is about reconciliation, about closing the gap between people and between God and people. I suppose it’s obvious that the father represents God here, and the way the father is in this story truly is the way God is with us. God is already reconciled with us. God is there all the time, watching for us, keeping a look out for us, longing to throw a big party for us if we will only give God the chance. There is a place for our repentance, but God doesn’t require it any more than the father in Jesus’ greatest parable required it. All God requires is that we show up, and really, I think there’s a sense in which God doesn’t even require that. The prodigal’s father was reconciled with him while, as we are told, the son was still far off. The reconciliation, the grace, were there. It’s just that the son didn’t know it until he came home.

That’s what Jesus has done for us. In Jesus we are reconciled with God. Paul knew it and said so: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself." That’s what Jesus is all about. Our faith is all about our reconciliation with God, about the world’s reconciliation with God. In Christ, the entire world is reconciled with God. And not just the world but each and every person living in it or who ever has lived in it. The problem is not that we are separated from God. The problem is that we don’t know that no matter how separated we may feel from God, God never feels separated from us. Or at least, God longs not to be separated from us and, as far as God has concerned, has already healed the separation. All we have to do to make that healing real in your lives is wake up and realize that God’s healing is already there, just waiting for us to figure it out.

Paul knows that, but Paul tells us something else that is worth paying attention to, especially on this day when we will, this afternoon, welcome guests who some people say God is not reconciled with because of one part of their God-given humanity. In this wonderful passage from 2 Corinthians doesn’t stop with telling us that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. He goes on to draw out the implications of that statement for us. In Christ God was not only reconciling the world to himself, God was "entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." That’s our mission, folks. That’s the church’s mission. Reconciliation. Reconciliation pure and simple. We are called to bring the good news that God is reconciled with the world and everyone in it to the world and everyone in it. And especially to those who don’t know it, those who think God rejects them, or who think that Christians think God rejects them. Reconciliation. Not judgment. Not demands for repentance. Especially not demands for repentance from things that aren’t sins, things that are nothing to repent of. We are called to Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. We’ve made a good start. Let’s keep it up.

And if you want to know what reconciliation looks like, come to our ONA session this afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00. Unfortunately, I learned yesterday that one of our anticipated speakers, Rev. Peter Ilgenfritz, has taken ill and won’t be here; but his partner--partner in ministry and partner in life--Rev. David Shull will be here to share his story, and Peter’s. You will hear of a man who left the Presbyterian church because he could not longer live a lie, who has done many kinds of ministry but who feels called most of all to parish ministry, who, with Peter, struggled for many years to find a call, receiving rejections from churches they hadn’t even applied to. All because the Christian church called him a sinner. All because the Christian church could not see that God’s reconciliation extends to all people, that God loves all of God’s children, that human sexuality comes in various flavors and that God loves all of the flavors when they are lived with love and responsibility. Friends, when I hear someone object to the ordination of gay people, the one thing I want to say to them is: Please go spend five minutes with Dave Shull. You’ll change your mind. We get to spend two hours with him this afternoon. I pray that you will not miss that opportunity.