Gospel Medicine Part 1

 

For the last six weeks we have held close to our hearts two parables (the Good Samaritan or Loving-kindness Unleased) and the Prodigal Family.  These two parables are gospels within the gospels ~ they are succinct summaries of what it means to follow the Wayless Way of Jesus.  They are like sandpaper to the rough, rocky edges of my soul.  I want Jesus to give me a pass and a permission slip not to love those people who vote that way, post conspiracy theories online, or hurt and harm others.  I want to be clear that Jesus’s love is not anything goes.  You can have a strong back with a soft front, I can both show up and speak up while at the same time realizing that I am contradiction/complex featherless biped who two years from now might have a new understanding.  Love is elastic and dynamic, love does shine a light on the pain (doesn’t stick its head in the stand or fingers in its ears start singing, “La, la, la.  I can’t hear you!).  We have let our binary, either/or thinking suggest that love and anger/accountability can’t co-exist.  But that is not true!  I love my family more than words can say, but I also have had moments when I sought to speak the truth in love and times when I’ve had hard/holy conversations.  I wish we had Part 2 of both these parables.  Maybe the priest and the Levite don’t pass by on the other side the next time.  Maybe seeing the wounded beloved of God in the ditch haunted their dreams like an un-holy ghost that changed them (see the classic, A Christmas Carol).  Transformation doesn’t always happen at Mount Everest of our smashing successes when we get it right every time.  Nope.  Sometimes what sticks and stays with us, guides future choices, is when we mess up, say something we immediately want to grasp the invisible words from thin air and shove them back in our mouth!  Likewise, we have no idea what the morning after the party in the Prodigal household looked like.  The reality is that our souls like the status quo.  It is easier to travel down the ruts in our brains and relationships as they are, than forge new pathways internally or externally.  Did the younger brother have a heart-to-heart with the older brother?  Did the homeostasis of their relationship of a cold silence continue to be the norm?  I am reminded of Dr. King who said that far too many in an unjust society were merely thermometers measuring the temperature of society rather than thermostats turning up the heat to make a cold-hearted world a warmer place to live. 

I invite you to ponder what has been stirring in your heart from the last six weeks?  What new insight or idea is roaming around?  What is this gospel medicine that can be a balm in Gilead to our wounded souls that too often we run away from (like the younger son) or cynically grit our teeth at (like the older son)?  How might love be more than passive and permissive, but passionately calling us to be God’s people in these days?  May these questions evoke and provoke words and actions and a way of showing up/speaking up in these Lenten days and beyond. Amen.