Praise the Lord for this new day. The North East of America the beautiful is
blanketed by snow. Snow has fallen in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and
Washington, DC, where our daughters and their families live. Micah and Simeon
in Boston have no school for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. Micah, Simeon,
and Ada love snow; they are like polar bear cubs. They will have great snow
days. Alice and I walked around the church parsonage grounds yesterday evening on
the fresh snow, gazing at the some of the evergreen trees in the grounds. One
of them is very tall much taller than the one that they place at the Rockefeller
Center in NY City. We had planted a Christmas tree sapling almost 25 years ago.
It is still growing. Fruit trees we have planted are ready to blossom again
as Spring is only seven weeks away.
It is written that soon after His baptism and
expectation and the victory over the adversary our Lord went out fearlessly
preaching, teaching, and healing. Our Lord was a wonderful story teller. He
told one of the immortal parables that is recorded in Luke 15. It is the
parable of the prodigal son.
Philip Yancey tells about the young woman who
grew up on a cherry orchard farm just above Traverse, Michigan. Her parents
were a bit old fashioned and gave her a hard time about her nose ring and her
music and the length of her skirts. They grounded her a few times. In the
middle of one argument she screamed at them, “I hate you!” T hat night she ran
away from home. She had visited Detroit only once before on a bus trip with her
youth group to watch the Tigers play baseball, but she decided to hide there
because it would be the last place her parents would look for her.
Her second day there she met a man who drove
the biggest car she had ever seen. He gave her a ride, bought her lunch,
arranged a place for her to stay, and gave her some pills that made her feel
better than she had ever felt. She decided she was right all along -- her
parents were keeping her from all the fun. Her “good life” continued for a year or so. After a year some signs of disease appeared. As winter came she found
herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. Dark bands
encircled her eyes and her cough worsened.
She no longer felt like a woman of the world but, rather, like a little girl lost and
frightened in a big city. She started to cry and whimper. For just a moment
she had a memory of May in Traverse City when a million cherry trees blossom at
once and her golden retriever dashes along chasing a tennis ball. She
questioned why she left home and thought to herself, “My dog back home eats
better than I do now.” She began to think that more than anything else
she would like to go home, so she found a
phone booth and made three straight phone calls to an answering machine. She
immediately hung up the first two times, but left a message the third time
saying, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m
catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If
you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits
Canada.”
It took seven hours on the bus to make all the
stops between Detroit and Traverse City. She wondered if they got the message.
She went over what she would say to them: “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong.
It’s not your fault; it’s mine. Dad, can you forgive me?”
The bus finally rolled into the station with
air brakes hissing. The driver said, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we
have here.” She thought to herself: "fifteen minutes to decide my life".
As she walked into the terminal, the scene was
not one of the many she had thought about as she was riding on the bus. There,
among the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs terminal stands a group of forty --
brothers, sisters, great aunts, uncles, cousins, a grandmother, and a great
grandmother to boot. They are wore goofy party hats, and were blowing noise
makers. Taped across the wall of the terminal was a computer-generated banner
which said, “Welcome home.”
Out of the crowd came her dad. Through the
tears she began her speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know . . .” But then he
interrupted her to say, “Hush, child. We have no time for that. No time for
apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet is waiting for you at
home.”
When we return to this familiar part about the
prodigal we realize how hopeful the story is, that we can go home again! As we
focus on the father we recognize this God of amazing grace revealed by Jesus.
In the hymn “He Looked Beyond my Fault and Saw my Need,
”Amazing
grace shall always be my song of praise
For it was grace that brought me
liberty.
I do not know just why Christ came to love me so
He
looked beyond my fault and saw my need.
Praise the Lord God that we love worship and
serve, revealed in Jesus our Lord. This God celebrates when the lost are found
and come home. We turn around and celebrate such an incredible God of grace.
This is not merely the cool abstraction of “the Unmoved Mover” of the
philosopher Aristotle nor the impersonal “Force” in Star Wars. We stand in
amazement at this God of grace. We can meet a
God even better than we expected. We overturn with this parable any childhood
pictures of God as a vengeful deity, a domineering God that crowds us, a
heavenly policeman, a harsh parent.
If we stumble into God’s presence carrying an
intolerable burden from a misspent past, the barriers that we erect to talk
ourselves out of coming to God can tumble down. We can approach our Loving
Father even after we have messed up. The Lord says" Welcome Home". Let us
party. Let's dance. WOW!
In Jesus,
Brown
http://youtu.be/RGRCjWNwAg0
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