He died in prison eight years ago. The awful things he did happened now almost
thirty years ago. But still to this
day, what he did still stuns me, even sends shudders through me.
Maybe it’s because it happened just twenty-five
minutes from where I lived, in a church that I had already come to know. But to this day, I can’t get what Dr. Robert
Reza did out of my head.
Dr. Reza, an accomplished physician, taught on the
faculty at the medical school at Stony Brook University. He had two beautiful teenage daughters; a
marriage that looked well pretty close to perfect. Each Sunday the family went to church
literally morning and night. His wife
sang in the choir. He served as an elder on the church’s
board.
Then one morning, two weeks before Christmas, while Dr.
Reza was attending a medical conference in D.C., someone brutally murdered his
wife, Marilyn. When he returned and
discovered the body, distraught and in tears, he called the police. But that tragic story soon unraveled, and
the real story came out.
Dr. Reza had been attending that conference yes, but
in the middle of it, he flew back home and killed his wife. First. he shot her as she lay sleeping. When that didn’t do the job, he literally
choked the life out of her. And then he
hopped back on a plane back to the medical conference. Why did he do it? He was having an affair with the church choir
director and wanted to start a new life with her.
Now this guy had never done anything wrong. He was an outstanding doctor, a loving dad,
and for the twenty plus years before had been, by all accounts, a loving and
faithful husband. But on one morning,
two weeks before Christmas of all times, he blew all that up in a way so brutal
and cold, I still remember the story to this day.
How can that happen?
How can someone be, one year such a seemingly virtuous man and then the next, avicious killer? In this famous story,
Jesus is addressing just that question.
You may think this story only tells about one lost son. But it doesn’t. It tells of two lost sons. And in that second lost son, Jesus points
the way to a truth, a shocking reality that everyone needs to hear. Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to
say.
How does a seemingly good person, even a righteous
one, like Robert Reza appeared to be, do something so horrible? In
this story, Jesus points the way to answering that question. But Jesus does
more than that. Jesus is showing you how
a person can be truly good in any number of ways, and yet still be tragically
lost, can still be tragically disconnected from God. How does that happen? It happens when instead of loving God for
God. You love God for the things.
You see. In life, folks generally end up going in one
of two different directions. They either
move towards the freedom or they move towards the rules. And in this story, Jesus illustrates these
two directions. In one brother, you see someone who wants
radical freedom. He wants to live his
life on his terms, and he’ll do anything to get it, even if it means humiliating
his father and ripping apart his family.
Now, folks may not want to go as
far as this guy went, but they still lean towards the freedom side. They don’t want to live by some sort of
predefined rules. They want to live life
on their own terms. And while this way
of living life looks appealing, here’s the problem. It doesn’t really lead to freedom at all. And next week, we’ll dig more into why that
is.
But that’s not the bigger problem. And what is that? It’s that too often folks, especially
religious folks miss the whole point of the story. Yes, what the younger brother did, did lead
him into a very lost place. But too often, folks think that the older
brother must then be the good guy. After
all, he’s the one who stayed, who did the right things. He obeyed the rules. You may even feel sympathy when he gets angry
at his dad for welcoming his younger brother back with no strings
attached.
But do you get what Jesus is saying? Neither of these
two directions, moving toward the rules or moving towards the freedom gives you
life. They both get you lost. Neither of these brothers, the younger or the
older, are right. Both are wrong. How is
that?
Th older brother may be keeping the rules. But he’s making the exact same mistake his younger
brother did. Neither are loving Dad for
Dad. They’re only loving Dad for Dad’s stuff. That’s
easier to see with his younger sibling.
When the younger son asks for his inheritance, he is basically telling
his dad. I wish you were dead. But since you’re not, can I at least have
what is mine when you do eventually kick the bucket? He makes it brutally clear to his dad. I don’t love you for you. I love you only for what you can give me.
But the elder son feels the same way. He just figures he has a better method. If I keep my nose clean, do the right things,
then eventually all the stuff my dad has will be mine. And we know he feels this way because of how
he reacts to his younger brother’s return.
He knows. His younger brother’s loss wrecked his dad. His father yearned daily for that son to return.
But when the younger brother does
return, does he rejoice? Does he feel happy
for this answer to his father’s prayers.
No, he gets angry, really angry.
Why? He’s thinking. Shouldn’t I
be getting the party? I did all the
right things, not my bozo of a brother. And
this money Dad’s spending on this party, that’s my money. That’s my inheritance
he’s spending. So, in his anger, he
refuses to go and also humiliates his father.
Why? Because deep within, he wasn’t
so much obeying his father for his father’s sake. He was obeying his father for the things it
would get him.
And too many people obey God for that same reason. They think.
If I obey God, go to church, give generously, keep my nose clean, then
God will give me a good life. But don’t
you get it? You’re not loving God for
God. You’re loving God for the stuff. You’re not looking to God for a
relationship. You’re looking to God for
a deal.
And Jesus is saying, if you’re doing that, you’re lost
too. In fact, Jesus is telling this
story because the religious people criticized him for hanging out with the
younger brothers of the world, people who definitely were not obeying all the
religious rules. He is telling the story
to tell them a shocking truth. Yes,
these younger brothers are lost, you’re right.
But you are lost too, maybe even more than them. After all, at the end of the story, who gets
found? The younger brother. Who stays lost? The older one.
You see, the question everyone has to ask is this
one? Are you loving God for God? Or are you loving God for the stuff? And how do you know the answer to those questions? You answer this one. When your life doesn’t
go well, when something bad happens, how do you react? Do you get angry? Do you think this shouldn’t
be happening to me? Or maybe you get
scared. You think. Did I screw up? Is God mad at me, getting back at me in some
way?
If those answers feel familiar, then you’re not loving
God for God. You’re loving God for the
stuff, the things loving God gets you. And who wants to be loved like that?
Today in our church, a couple, Lenny and Pilar brought their daughter, Gianna
for baptism. But why did they have
Gianna in the first place? Was Gianna
along with his brother and sister, part of Lenny and Pilar’s retirement
plan?
Okay, listen kids, here’s the deal. We’re going to feed you, house you, take care
of you, but in return, when we get old you gotta take care of us. That’s the
deal. Ok? Sure, you hope, if you need them, your kids
will be there. But hopefully that’s not
the reason you have them. That’s certainly not the reason Lenny and Pilar had
Gianna. They brought Gianna into the
world out of love. She doesn’t have to
do anything. Her very existence brings them
joy.
That’s the way it is with parents who love their
kids. The kids don’t have to do
anything to get their parents’ love. They have it.
Heck, if they did have to do something to get the love, would that even
be love? I don’t think so.
And if you come to God, just to work out a deal, how
can that be love? More painfully, if you
come to God looking for a deal, how can you really think God loves you? I don’t know what happened with Dr. Reza to
move him to do such a horrendous thing.
But I wonder. Maybe he thought of
his good life as a deal, and when the deal wasn’t working, when his wife wasn’t
all she once was to him, well then it was time to break the deal. He never got the point. That it was never about a deal. It was all about the love.
And that’s what Jesus is trying to tell us. It is all about the love. And love means, yes, when you’re doing right,
God loves you. But even when you break God’s heart, like the
younger brother did, God loves you just as much then. God may not like you that much. But God never
stops loving you.
That’s why Jesus talks about God as a parent, because
God loves you like that. In fact, God
loves you even more than that. And when
you realize that, that’s what brings the change. That’s
what saves you. Trusting in that
love.
And when you do that changes everything. So, yes,
you strive to do what God wants as best you can. But you don’t do it because of a deal or
because you’re scared, but because you trust.
You trust that God wants the best for you. Even when obeying God doesn’t seem to make sense,
you still trust that love. And you trust that love, because you know. That
very love lives within you. That very
love is saving you from yourself, from your own fears and insecurities, your
own dark places, and we all have them.
And how do you know that love? You look to the cross, to this God who in
Jesus not only became one of you, but gave up everything, even life for you. And the more you open yourself to that love,
the less lost you become. And you find a
life richer, deeper, more wonderful then you could have dreamed, not because it’s
always perfect. It’s not, often far from
it. But because you realize, you haven’t
so much found God as God has found you.
And you realize he even went to death and beyond to do it. Do you know God loves you like that? Have you opened yourself to that love,
really opened yourself to it? If not,
make today the day you do.
No comments:
Post a Comment