The Prodigal, the Father, and the Tooth Fairy – 9/16/09

Tim:

I’m going to mix it up a little bit today and put my contribution first, for no apparent reason. Also, we tried to keep this one shorter because we realize no one wants to read pages and pages of our ramblings every day. So here it is, hopefully we weren’t too long-winded…

I didn’t have super high expectations for chapel today, and they were met. Matt Runion spoke about the prodigal son. Now, I like Matt, and I’m pretty sure he’s the coolest guy in the Campus Ministries office. I have to say, though, his talks don’t generally do much for me. But, he always shows pictures of his family and tells stories about his kids and they are so great! My favorite part of today’s message was his story about his son and the tooth fairy, which was awesome. I’m not really sure how it connected to his topic, but I’m delighted to have heard the story.

Speaking of the topic, it was again supposedly the Trinity. But again, it didn’t really fit. This seems to be becoming a theme. After telling us how we can’t separate Father, Son and Holy Spirit and talk about any of them without the other, he set out to do so. His goal was to talk about the Father, in particular. He did so through the story of the prodigal son. According to Matt, the main idea that Jesus is trying to portray about the Father through this story is that of waiting. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of this, and I don’t think he was either, because by the end the message had changed to “God is enough.”  Mostly, it was just a rehashing of the story, with Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son looming in the background.

In his review of the story, he said something that I’m pretty sure I have heard before, but doesn’t often emerge beyond my subconscious. We don’t generally understand the how drastic the son’s request to have his inheritance was. In fact, to make this demand was tantamount to wishing his father dead. The appropriate response would be for the father to slap the son across the face backhanded with his left hand – the most humiliating possible way. Instead, the father in this story grants his son’s request. To me, the use of this metaphor in the parable speaks to the relationship God envisions between himself and his people. And if this is the metaphor is the one he chooses to portray Israel’s rejection, how painful must it be for him to be rejected by the ones he loves!

That brings me to something else Matt said, which is that when a parent chooses to love, that parent chooses pain. And it’s true. I know I’ve given my poor parents their fair share of heartache! Anyway, I immediately thought of creation. I have had more discussions than I can count regarding why God created if he knew it would result in suffering and pain. It’s hard to comprehend, but I see the something similar even in the decision of parents to have children. You know you are choosing pain, hard work, anger, rejection, worry and fear. But still, people invariably make that choice. Apparently something about the relationship makes it worthwhile. I don’t know how well that applies to creation, but maybe it does. I tend to think it might.

He concluded by claiming that the ultimate thing Jesus is saying about the Father is that God is enough. The Father is always there waiting for us and he is all we need, we just have to come back to him, even if we’ve “left home” like the prodigal. Or, he said, even if we’ve left home, but no one knows. That struck me, because I think that is what we do more than anything else. We not only wander from God, but from our own parents and family. Not only have we left and found ourselves alone, but this is compounded by the fact that we have to pretend we never left.  At Bethel we hear a lot about how the tendency to put on a happy Christian face and not let anyone see what goes on other than that. Maybe we should focus not just on “going home,” but on letting those with whom we supposedly live in community help us come home.

In the end, I got the feeling the whole thing was all too lovey-dovey. There was lots of talk about how God loves us so much, he’ll always take us back, and so on. While that’s true, I think what he was trying to get at was the parent-child love, specifically. We can’t really understand that, I think, until we are parents. But we can imagine it. If God’s love looks like a dad who sits on the couch fretting over whether the boy his precious daughter is seeing will treat her right, or like a weeping mother having her infant torn from her arms, I see something a lot more meaningful than “God loves you, no matter what.” What has always struck me about the prodigal son story, at least as it relates to the Father, is the image of him as an actual parent. I think we’d do well to occasionally think of God the Father as, well, a father.

Peter:

Did you know that you need to re-orient your understanding of the Father?  More importantly, did you know that you are a bastion of darkness?  You probably think God is ‘distant and removed from your comings and goings on this earth’, and you should realize the incredibly novel and revolutionary idea that God not only accepts us, that he loves us.  You definitely need to return to and accept God’s loving embrace, or if that doesn’t exactly apply, you definitely need to stop thinking that God’s love is finite, and that he only loves some people, that’s a terrible thing to think… and if you do neither of these, by all means feel free to reject God, break His heart.  You have the freedom to do so, and, well, if you don’t restructure your views on God, or don’t return from your lost and immoral debauchery, rejecting God is the only option open for you.  Gee willikers, I’m sure glad Matt told me God the Father loves me, all this time I thought God was just toying with me, and He really hates me deep down.
            So maybe sarcasm is a little harsh, I apologize.  To be wholly honest I deeply appreciated Matt’s talk, especially considering the previous times I’ve heard him.  He has a tendency to get off topic, but today he actually stayed, for the most part, on topic, and was very coherent.  Moreover, he spoke on perhaps my favorite thing about the Bible: its message of the enduring love of God.  I once had a debate with a group of my high school classmates in Bible class as to what the penultimate goal of God’s kingdom was.  Actually the prompt was if the concept of ‘shalom,’ or peace of God in a utopian kingdom, was the utmost thing Christians should work to, but it escalated, mostly because I disagreed and believe that Love is the ultimate end of Christians, and that it is our duty to see the love of God regardless of whether or not it brings about shalom.  Now, this was a wholly irrelevant debate, because let’s be honest, you can’t separate God’s kingdom, his good and perfect peace, from love.  But hypothetically speaking if you could have God’s love on earth or God’s peace on earth I would say that love is more important, namely because God is love. Besides, God’s peace emanates from His love; therefore His love is not the means to an end, but rather an end in and of itself.  So in the sense that Matt expressed God’s ultimate, good, and perfect love I really appreciated today’s talk, which was based around God the Father.

            The part that made me cringe was the part which is so common among evangelical Christianity.  The assumption that everything about us is wrong: our views, our lives, our nature.  Why is it that speakers say ‘we should do this’, not ‘we should be thankful for this’?  What’s wrong with saying, ‘Thank you God, for your Love that you lavish upon us’?  I mean, I’m not ruling out the possibility that one or two, maybe even a few more people hearing that chapel talk were perhaps going through a bit of rebellion, but it being a Baptist school, with the students have an overwhelmingly Christian background I don’t think anything was convincing, because we were already convinced that God loves us.  I really take issue with people when they say that we have to change our view of God, because they usually go on to say we should change our views to what we already held to be true in the first place.  I don’t agree with the negative rap Christians get from Christians.  Nobody’s perfect, but really?  Not all Christians are spiritually dead hypocrites in need of a speaker to come along and reconvict them of the Bible’s message of love.  This negativity towards all that is human, even in a Christian environment was epitomized in his closing prayer where Runion uttered the phrase: “send your light to fill our darkness,” as if we were the problem with the world.  No, we are salt and light to the world, perhaps an unfinished lamp, but a lamp nonetheless, we should thank God for making us light, perhaps ask him to bless that light, but not ask him to burn a fire.