It all started out so normal that Saturday. I woke up
late like most teenagers do. I wandered
into the kitchen, but nobody was there.
I looked in my sisters’ rooms. No one there either. I went everywhere. I could find no one. I feared that the unthinkable had happened. I had been left behind.
Do you know that term?
Years ago, a guy named Tim LaHaye wrote a bunch of best-selling novels
based on those two scary words, left behind.
And I grew up in a church that believed in those words too. Here’s the idea. A time will come when things will get
really, really bad, the time of tribulation (dum de dum dum!) But if you’re a Christian, don’t worry. Jesus is going to beam you up to heaven
before all the bad stuff happens. But
the bad people, they’ll all get left behind.
And that morning, I wondered. Maybe I had been left behind. Maybe Jesus had not deemed me worthy of the
beam up. I thought to myself. What
lustful thought, what unkind deed, what disrespectful word has led to
this? But then deliverance came! I heard the garage door opening. I heard my family coming up the stairs. The only thing I had been left behind for was
a trip to the grocery store! Hallelujah!
Now why do I tell you that story? I tell it because it shows you just how
clueless I was about what this whole Jesus thing even meant. Instead of getting captured by the love, I was
captured by the fear. And fear has
nothing to do with the good news of Jesus.
In fact, the more you experience the love that Jesus brings, the more it
frees your life from fear.
And in days like now just turning on the news can fill
you with fear and anxiety. How do you
find freedom from fear in the days of Covid-19, when so much feels uncertain,
even scary? How can you get captured by
the love instead of being ensnared by the fear?
In these words, God shows you the way.
Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.
How in the world does this story of an angry older
brother help you to overcome your own fears in the face of an uncertain, even
scary world? It helps you see how
subtly and powerfully fear can capture you without you even knowing it. In this part of this famous story on the
two lost sons, Jesus is showing you.
You can be lost in fear, especially in your relationship with God and
not even know it. Heck, you can be lost
in fear in that same way, and not even believe in God at all. But not only does Jesus show you the
fear. Jesus shows you the way out, how
instead of getting ensnared by the fear you can get captured by the love.
But let’s first look at how this older brother has
gotten ensnared by the fear. As we take up the story, the father is
experiencing a tremendous joy. His lost
son has returned home, alive and well.
Elated, he throws a huge, extravagant party. But then his older son finds out. He gets so angry that he refuses to join in
the feast. Even when his father pleads
with him, he refuses to go in. And
that’s way the story ends with this older son left outside.
Typically, when you
hear this story, people focus on the first part, on the story of this son who
disrespects the father and leaves home, and then is welcomed back. But Jesus spends as much time talking about
the older son as he does the younger one.
And Jesus tells us that the younger one gets reconnected to the
Father. But with the older one, we
don’t know. Why?
Jesus is showing you
how easily fear can capture you, can leave you on the outside of life, without
you even realizing it. This older
brother doesn’t even realize it. But he
has a relationship with his father that is rooted in fear. Look at how he describes his life on the
family farm. He says. For all these years, I have been working like
a slave for you. Wow! What a way to describe your relationship with
your dad. He’s the master, and you’re
the slave.
Or look at this part of
the conversation with the dad. The
older son says: “I have never disobeyed your command, yet you have never given
me even a young goat so I can celebrate with my friends.” And
then how does the father reply? He says
to him. “Son, you are always with me,
and all that is mine is yours.” All
that is mine is yours.
Do you see what’s going
on? The father and this son have
radically differing perceptions on what their relationship is all about. The father is basically saying. Don’t you get it? Sure, I appreciated your work, but you’re not
my slave, you’re my son. And if you wanted to throw a party, throw a
party. Everything I have is yours. So
why didn’t the older son do that?
He was living out of
fear. And when you live out of fear, you
don’t so much live your life as much as you try to control it. Let me do a good job for the master so that
I can get what I want from him. So, he does
a good job for his dad but not because he loves him. He does it so he can get things from
him. But here’s the irony! What he wanted to get, he already had. And let’s be clear. He didn’t just want a
goat. He wanted what that goat
represented, his father’s approval, his father’s love, his father’s joy in
him. But what he didn’t realize is that
he already had that!
Now if he had realized
that, he likely would have lived his life in the same way, worked faithfully
and well but now out of a completely different mindset. He would have done it simply because it gave
him joy to help his father out, to be able to join his dad in this life and
work that they shared together.
And in this older
brother, Jesus is pointing you to two ways you can live your life, one ensnared
by fear versus one captured by love. And
you can know how much your life is ensnared by fear by how much it is dominated
by the desire to control it, to control yourself, to control others, to even
control God.
Sometimes, when I meet someone,
and they find out I’m a preacher, I catch some serious anger. It usually goes something like this. Preacher, I used to go to church. I was even a leader, taught Sunday School,
the whole deal. Then I got fired or my
child got sick or my wife left me, and that was it. And so, you can take all your religious junk
and stick it…well, you get the idea.
I guess the person figures if they can’t yell
at God, they can at least yell at one of the lower level employees. I’m like a customer service person with a
highly dissatisfied customer. And when
those conversations happen, I don’t really say much of anything, but I’m
sorry. I can see underneath the anger,
the bitterness, that they hurt, and they hurt deeply.
I also recognize what
is going on. Somewhere along the way,
they got the idea, likely because someone taught them, that they had a deal
with God. I obey the rules and I get the
good. But then God broke the deal. But what they didn’t realize is that God
never wanted a deal. God wanted a
relationship.
And relationships,
well, relationships you can’t control. In
fact, the certain way to be wrong is to think you can. And we live in a world of relationships not
simply with God but with one another, and with the world around us. And if anything, Covid 19 has taught us is
how much all those relationships are not in our control. We certainly couldn’t control whatever
mysterious leap from whatever animal occurred that popped Covid-19 into our
world.
And now that’s it’s
here, we realize how much we can’t control around us. Yes, we need to follow the guidelines
carefully and well. But even then, we
can’t wipe down everything we could possibly touch at every place we could
possibly go. We have to trust that as
much as we can, most folks are doing their best to not only watch out for
themselves, but in some way to watch out for us, that we’re all doing our best
to watch out for each other.
The great writer Annie Dillard put it well. “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when
we fancy we control any switches at all.”
And that older brother was deeply asleep. He couldn’t control his father’s love or
favor. He couldn’t control how his
father welcomed his wayward brother home though in his anger he certainly
tried. But here’s the tragedy. If he had let go of the delusion that he
could control the relationship, he would have realized the truth. He already had what he deeply desired, a
father who loved him without question, without condition, that loved him on his
best days and his worse.
And in this story,
Jesus isn’t simply talking about a Father and his children. Jesus is trying to tell you about God and
us. Jesus is saying. You don’t need to live in fear, trying to
control this God or even your life, as if that is even possible. But you can let go and trust that even in a
time as scary and uncertain as these days, you can trust in a God who loves
you. In fact, in Jesus, this God loved
you so profoundly, he gave up control, even over his own life for you. He gave it up to show you once and for all,
he doesn’t want a deal with you. No, God
wants a relationship.
Not only that, God offers
a relationship of unbreakable, unshakable love, one that even as you killed him
did not stop loving you, one that not even death could defeat. And as you let go and let that love capture
you, it frees you from fear. It
liberates you from the obsessive need to control what is out of your control. And you realize, that in this uncertain,
scary world, you can trust that love. In
this journey with God, you never really know where you are being led. But you know this, you love the One who is
leading, and you know that this One loves you, no matter what.
And as you let yourself
be captured by that love. You will
realize that none of us can control what God does, but we can open our eyes and
see what God is doing. We can see God in
the doctors and nurses and care workers standing on the frontlines, in the researchers around the world working to defeat the virus, in restaurant owners giving away food when they have to close.
And if we but look, we can see that God in one another, in the people we
love and that love us. So, in these
coming days, don’t let the fear ensnare you.
But let the love capture you. For
the more you let that love capture you, the more free you will become. Let us pray.
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