When God Ran

child running

I’ve heard this sermon (Prodigal Son Luke 15) so often I always gave it a twist when I preach it, focusing on the “lostness” of the older son, a little eye opener for many and kudos point for me as an original thinker. Of course, it is absolutely unoriginal because the context clearly emphasizes this point, that the older son refused to join the father and got himself lost in his own home because he hated the fact that the younger returned to a fan fare and not a well-deserved whipping.

But the point is not even the older son. It is the father, his prodigal heart, running to the son that ran with his inheritance. The image of that running father captures God’s heart which is the real point of the parable. Jesus was trying to tenderize the heart of the Pharisees by scandalizing them with a God who would lose so recklessly.

It is an image hard for us to see because we hardly see it in the real world. God is more humane than humans. But few days ago as I was preaching it, I saw it, the stirred dust, the wind flapping through the folds of the robe getting tattered at the hem, the arms flailing wildly, the Father running to us. And in that moment, when the father is being a father and not a keeper of civility, a guardian of morality, a protector of social systems, but just a father who is running to his son seen as a toddler who just scraped his knees and crying, in that moment when the father is being just a father, he also ceases to be a father and becomes a child, running without care in the world, running just because his heart said “go.” And a child meets a child.

Stronger

kid flexing

“Perhaps I am stronger than I think. Perhaps I am even afraid of my strength, and turn it against myself, thus making myself weak. Marking myself secure. Making myself guilty. Perhaps I am most afraid othe strength of God in me. Perhaps I would rather be guilty and weak in myself, than strong in Him whom I cannot understand.” -Thomas Merton Conjecturesd of a Guilty Bystander (135)

Our potential greatness is the monster in our closet? The unnameable fear which can either cripple or motivate us.

Perhaps what keeps us awake is not the devil in me living in the murky waters of the basest of my instincts, but the angel, that glorious divine being who massive wings are beating against the confines of our trembling chest.

We are afraid of our weakness the way we might be afraid of a doberman with a bark and an accompanying ferocious fang. But it is purely a physical fear, and they are fleeting. You turn the corner and the bark is gone and so is the fear.

But if I were to see an angel, I would tremble in a more terrible way. That fear is not tied to my survival. Fear as survival reaction is ready to flee because it has good hope for escape. I would tremble before an angel because I know I cannot escape.

We cannot escape God, or the strong being God wants to make of us, so we pretend we have not seen God or what God has made of us already in Christ. We pretend we are still weak.