Last Sunday, we revisited John Wesley's emphasis on "being made perfect in love" and looked at our lives and the life of our congregation through that lens. We focussed on the being made perfect portion of that, exploring what it means to be called an "excellent" congregation and remembering that to Wesley, being made perfect meant to grow into holiness, into the likeness of Christ.

Today, I want to spend some time with the other emphasis in that phrase, namely, the "love" part of it being made perfect in love. Wesley frequently queried his Methodist band: "Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?"

You know, we Christians are quick to say that God is love. If there's anything we can say for certain about God, it's that God is love. But, actually, I think we have a hard time believing it and an even harder time trusting that it's true. Through my years of pastoral care and counseling, and of talking with people who sense the approach of death, I know that, sadly, far too many of us may say that God is love. But in our heart of hearts we worry that God is judge, that God has kept score, that we have not measured up. We sense that while God might love people in general, God probably doesn't love me very much.

As a result, we fear God. We fear death. We fear life. We don't love ourselves very much. And we can't love God with our whole heart, mind and strength or our neighbor as ourselves. It is my prayer that in our Lenten journey this year, we might all grow in our confidence that God indeed loves us very much, and wants for us life lived abundantly.

A week or so ago a letter came to me here at the church. It was from a man, now well up in years, who wrote to confess his sin against the church, our church in particular, and to tell me that he had asked God for forgiveness.  His tone was truly penitent and I quickly wrote back to assure him of that forgiveness and God's love for him. He had carried around for decades, for most his life, a huge burden of guilt about what appeared to me as really a childhood prank. Annoying probably at the time, but not hugely awful.  But, for him, it was huge.  It had weighed upon him all those years, diminishing his sense of himself, blocking the great love that God was trying to convey to him. And, thanks be to God, through preaching and reading Scripture and prayer, he had been set free. Though up in years, he was at last able to seek release from his sin and live in peace.

Friends, the fact of the matter is: God's love surrounds and sustains us like the waters of the ocean surround and sustain the life of the fish who swim in it. God is always eager to take from us our burdens and heal us of our pain. God is always there, close, wanting to embrace us, and reassure us, and set us free.

While he was among us on this earth, Jesus told stories designed to teach about God's love. We heard one this morning, the one about the man who had two sons.

The younger one asked for his share of the inheritance before his father even died. His father, who might have said "No" said instead "OK" and gave him the money and for some reason we're not told, the younger son felt a need to go faraway from that father and that home and that older brother and from everybody he knew and who new him. And what a great time he had until the money ran out.

But when it did, a famine had come over the land and he began to starve. He hired himself out in the lowest of jobs, feeding pigs, and when he was hungry enough to realize that he wanted to eat the pods the pigs were eating, the text says: he came to himself. It's what AA and other 12-step groups call "hitting bottom". When it could get no worse, he faced the choice between the business of dying and the business of living. He chooses life.

He returns to the father he had taken for granted and hurt so deeply, figuring that his father's servants at least had something to eat. He returns home, penitent, having prepared an apology and permitting himself a bit of meager hope for a small measure of humane treatment. Not expecting much.  Anticipating the worst. "Father, I have sinned. I no longer deserve to be called your son. Treat me as a hired servant."

To this point, the story is all too familiar to us, isn't it? Except for the one or two true saints among us, most all the rest of us at one time or another have wandered astray, have hurt someone who loves us, have wasted or squandered something precious be it money or opportunity or love. And most all of us, at one time or another, have had to shape an apology, eat crow, and hope for just a little bit of mercy.

That part of Jesus' story isn't too remarkable. Nor, I suppose, is the behavior of the jealous older brother. Lurking in the shadows, glum, resentful. The feast should have been for him, the robe and the ring. He's been the good boy all his life, at least on the outside. But on the inside, his heart is too small to take in the scope of his father's love. His self-esteem is too shallow to let anyone else share the space. He is only capable of jealousy and judgement.

There are lots of elder brothers around, aren't there? There are elder brother voices in our head, aren't there, standing by to whisper: "You don't deserve this. You're not really good enough. You've been bad too many times!" And there are those who take on the elder brother role in all kinds of social settings, criticizing newcomers, chastising those who don't play by the rules, gate-keepers par excellence, claiming privilege and goodness but dispensing judgement and scorn.

It even happens among Christians. As Will Willimon, great preacher and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University has observed: "There are those who know everything about Jesus except that he is love, who use the Bible like a bludgeon, people for whom Christianity is a way to divide, separate, put down others. Without love, Christian faith can become cruel and ugly."  

That's what makes Jesus' parable so remarkable, a story of grace and resurrection. The miracle is found in what the father does. How he reacts. Sensing his son's return, the father runs out while he is still far off, runs out to greet him, to embrace and kiss him. He receives his errant son with open arms. He lifts his bowed head. Reassures his aching heart. Restores him to his rightful place in the family. Lavishes upon him feast and robe and ring. His father is filled with compassion and joy. His father celebrates his homecoming with love beyond measure.

It is what the French call a "coup de theatre", something unexpected in the plot that changes the whole direction not only of the story, but of the universe itself.

What wondrous love is this! The story opens to reveal a great magnet of love connecting father and son, pulling the wandering son home, pulling the grieving father from what felt like his son's grave into a feast of rejoicing at his return.

In a story pulsating with joy, the father loves his younger son in the way God loves each of us. Sensing our desire to come home. Longing to run out to greet us. Ready to embrace us and welcome us in. Standing by to lavish love upon us.

The father's words of explanation for his strange behavior are similarly noteworthy by their extremity. He doesn't talk to his son about the money he squandered, or the time he lost, or how painful it was that he didn't write home during all that time away. Incredibly, he says: "this my son was dead and is alive again. Was lost and is found."

In these days following renewed explosions of violence on our high school campuses in Santee and El Cajon, I've been wondering about this story in light of prodigal sons who go astray and parents, teachers and all the rest of us who don't have a clue about what they've done, or why, to say nothing of just how we might welcome them home. And yet, how, as a society, we ache to pour out a superabundance of love on our youth. Especially those whose hearts are broken by rejection and fear, whose all-too-easy access to guns opens the door to immeasurable heartache and grief. Those who are, for all intents and purposes, lost and dead to the person they might become, the beloved child of God they are created to be. How do we love them enough to draw them home that we might feast together at their return?

Like the father in today's story, we must first wait in hope. We must long for their return and pray for them every day. We must resist the temptation to judge them and cut them off. We must remove from among them the emotional weapons of despair and the tangible weapons that kill. We must never turn our backs on them, close our hearts to them nor give them up for dead.

An amazing woman in Washington D.C. runs a program that seeks out urban youth leaders for training and support. Her passion is lifting up the young, the hip-hop generation. Lisa Sullivan says: "This generation is being bombarded with information without the capability of analyzing it. In such a confusing society, you must have a knowledge base, otherwise it is like being a computer with no anti-virus software running---any virus can come along and take hold. I want to give them strength to find their own faith because that is what happened for me. Having faith in young folks when sometimes they don't have faith in themselves is a powerful thing."

The old, old story of God's love in Jesus Christ is the story of a love that perseveres in having faith in us even through those times when we don't have faith in ourselves. It is the love that forgives us and sets us free from past sin.  It is the love that shelters us when we wander far from home. It is the love that calls us back and rejoices to see our face. It is the love that finds the lost and leads the dead into life everlasting.

May our Lenten prayer be a yearning to be made perfect in love in this life. As Jesus journeys again to the cross and grave and beyond, to show us God's love for us, may we be graced to receive that love in our own hearts on deeper levels, in more profound ways. And growing into the likeness of Christ, may we return that love with the same superabundance that is the hallmark of our God.

© Patricia E. Farris, 2001. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.