Third in a Lenten Series, "Entering Into the Mystery"

Springtime in our new neighborhood is a remarkable burst of virtually every color of the Master painter's palette. In the early morning light, pastels of purple and white, green and yellow, pink and blue splash against the dim light of dawn. Later, the bright mid-day sun makes the dogwood blossoms explode like white phosphorous. As evening approaches, the fingers of the deepening shadows become the darker canvas against which even softer shades of color, not visible any other time of the day, wrap around you like a blanket, making you forget the chill of the early spring night fast approaching.

If you were to ask me what springtime looks like in north Oak Cliff, I would have to answer, "At what time of day?" The changing shades of light make you see and even feel the very same colors differently, depending on the angle of the light. That's been my experience, too, with the story of the prodigal son. How I've seen it, perhaps my favorite of all the parables, has depended on the angle of light the changing shades of life afford.

In my early years, when I was overwhelmed by the guilt of not ever seeming able to measure up to any adult's standards of absolute morality, I think I saw myself as the son, desperately wanting a father's blessing. Even now, at the right time of day, in the right mood, the mental image of the father chasing toward the son can bring tears to my eyes; my heart gets so lost in the emotion of it all.

I was the kid who never could watch a rerun of any Billy Graham crusade on television without wanting to make a new profession of faith right through the black and white screen. I didn't understand that grace was not about me getting it right, or saying it right. For people who think we can earn or have to earn forgiveness, there will never be enough trips down the aisle.

As I began preaching, my gospel was more about law than grace and I used the son as an example of what happens when you break the rules. I could extrapolate the most heinous examples of the cost of modern sin from how the son ate the food offered to the swine as I tried to scare people into behaving their way back into the family.

When I was angry at the over-institutionalized system that the church can so easily become, I would become the scolding father of the brother who stayed home. I would chew him out but good for being angry that the younger son got to belong back in the family even before he had learned the rules again, or even just taken a bath and been deloused.

Only in my later years have I come to understand that Jesus' parable was more about the father than any other character in the story. Jesus was using all the colors of the Master painter's palette on the canvas of real family life to paint a picture of how eternal God relates to sinful man, a picture of how, more than anything else, God wants family and wants all of us to be a part of it. About how the father accepts us whenever we come, just as we are, without reserve and without question. He's just glad to have us home. And, I've wondered if I could ever love anyone as much as God loves me!

It is that wondering, at least in part, about what happens when indescribable grace meets and overcomes incomparable sin, to which the apostle Paul was referring when he said of the early deacons, that they should hold "to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience." To ordain deacons on a Sunday morning during Lent might seem an odd arrangement of calendar dates. But, as we think about Lent, a time of personal reflection and repentance, and as we think about Christ's preparation for his service to all mankind in his life and death and resurrection, this is a more fitting day to ordain deacons than might appear at first glance.

Both the qualifications for who should be a deacon and the role deacons should fulfill in the life of a Baptist church have changed over the years, and will continue to do so and is worthy of on-going discussion and struggle with the scripture. As the culture changes and as our angle of vision alters with new light, so will our struggle to identify and clarify who can serve as deacons and what deacon service should look like. Yet, this one line captivates my attention. Deacons should hold to "the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience."

Whatever that fully means is truly a mystery. It means at least this much: That each deacon, each servant of Christ, whether a deacon or not, should examine herself or himself in light of this one question. Do you have a uniquely personal relationship with the mysterious grace revealed in Christ, and what is that like? It's one thing to fill a role. It's another to live out a faith that is genuinely your own experience with eternal God.

My earliest memories of deacons have something to do with the Sundays I would walk from Sunday School to worship. Standing just outside the glass doors that lined the hallway there they stood, getting their last smoke before church started. Were they just being courteous? Or, was it that they weren't allowed to bring their true smoking selves into the church? Inside, the pastor would often rail against every form of self-medication. Did they find it necessary to self-medicate outside in order to withstand the lashing on the inside?

Just for the record, if anyone doubts the effect of smoking, let them visit the Body Worlds exhibit at Fair Park. It's worth the trip just to see the smoker's lungs on full display. But, what does it say about us that we can't bring our true selves to the altar of worship and, there, find a loving father who takes us just as we are?

When Henri Nouwen first saw Rembrandt's painting of the return of the prodigal, it was actually just a print in the form of a poster on an office wall. Some years later, because of personal connections, he was granted a private showing of Rembrandt's seventeenth century work in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. For several hours, he sat in a chair just staring in silence at the six-foot by eight-foot oil on canvas painting Catherine the Great brought to St. Petersburg in the 18^th century.

Nouwen reported of his private viewing that, as the light of the day pouring through a nearby window changed, so did the hues and shades of the multiple yellows, oranges and browns that Rembrandt so masterfully used to capture the different moods of the human family. He wrote, "Gradually I realized that there were as many paintings of the prodigal son as there were changes in the light, and, for a long time, I was held spellbound by this gracious dance of nature and art" (Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Doubleday, p. 9). Nouwen stared at grace until he saw himself in the picture, personally, as the wayward child the father was holding. It was out of that deep sense of personal experience with the mystery that is God's grace that he gave a lifetime of ministry that has changed countless lives, particularly the mentally disabled.

The best ministry we will ever do will not come out of our filling a position to which we are elected. It will be, instead, like springtime bursting forth from the dead of winter, the ministry that grows out of a genuine expression of the moment in time in which our broken humanity intersected with the indescribably mysterious grace of God in Christ and we were forever transformed.

These days, as the shades of life's light are angled through the prism of fatherhood, I see the picture of the prodigal more from the father's perspective than ever. I marvel at how I actually thought I would worry more for my children in their infancy, when they were so dependent and vulnerable. No one told me that, with each passing year, my anxiety would grow in direct proportion to their independence from my ability to protect them from the consequences of their own choices, much less control them! These days, I stand in awe and marvel at how one father can raise two completely different sons. How does that happen? Maybe I should ask the prodigal's father. He knew. The same father raised both the son who stayed home and the one who left in rebellion. How did that happen?

In our home team the other night, as we usually do, we talked about parenting. It's never far from our thoughts, no matter where we start the conversation. For a moment, Stacy Hodges became the pastor to all of us as we sat around the table. She made some remarks I found so compelling that I asked her to write them down. She asked, "Weren't you taking notes?!" Anyway, this is what Stacy said and wrote and what I knew I had to share with you this morning.

"The thing that means the most to your child and is most likely to anchor them in the future is the individual relationship each child has with each parent. More important than the example parents set by the way they live, treat others, spend money, etc., is having a relationship that the child can trust. One where the child is certain that he is loved and valued for who he is and not what he does. Knowing that the parent will listen, tell the truth and cherish him for the ways in which he is just like you and in the ways he is not like you at all."

It would be one thing to ask you if have that kind of relationship with your children. The first question, however, should be, "Do you have that kind of relationship with your heavenly Father?" As the shade of life's light has changed for you, has your ability to see your heavenly Father become clearer, or different? Our faith changes. It should! That's because faith is not a rigid, cement-like block of facts that we memorize in childhood and spend the rest of our lives regurgitating. Faith is a warm, fluid, living and breathing relationship.

That's part of what makes faith a mystery. Faith's mystery is not so much like a puzzle to be solved as each little piece is discovered and then put in its place but an indescribably wonderful and ever unfolding truth to celebrate! Faith is more like a beautiful sunset. It's too real to deny, too beautiful to adequately explain but something so magnificent you stand there lost in the beauty of the changing shades of colors, just hoping you'll have at least one person to tell about it.

On the desk in my office at home is a picture of my oldest son, Griffin, when he was about three or four. He's on a swing in a park. In the picture, he is wearing his dinosaur tee shirt, the one I remember washing and folding many times. His hair is permanently disheveled by the wind. His eyes are sparkling just above the laughing smile that consumes his face. That face in the picture hasn't changed since that micro-second in time when the lens opened and the light of that one particular moment, that one day, flash-burned his image onto the negative. In the picture, his face hasn't changed. But, every time I look at it, I see something new. I see something more to love. Even as he grows beyond my control and my ability to protect him, there is a son in that picture who is more a part of me now than then.

I wonder. Do you think God looks at us the same way? Do you think each time our Father sees us he sees something more to love, something more to accept, even when we are not like him at all? I hope so. I believe, with all my heart, that the kind of mysterious faith relationship born of that kind of love for us is something that happens between Eternal God and each person, as God does his redeeming work in all of humanity, one individual face and soul at a time. Lent is the time of year when I ask myself who am I in the picture that is of God's family.

Several weeks ago, a young man whose name I don't know came through those doors, shook my hand and asked me, "What is reconciliation?" Obviously, I had used that big church word in my sermon without considering those to whom it is an unknown term. I marveled at his courage to ask and I tried to answer in that brief moment we had at the door. I don't know if I succeeded or not. The best answer I can give to that question is something anyone can see, if they will look at the picture of the prodigal coming home and the father who welcomed him when he was still so different.

Since that young man asked me that day, I've come to realize how grateful I am for those who taught me the meaning of reconciliation. It was not because they could parse the Greek, but because, with their lives, they painted a portrait of their own personal encounter with the mystery of grace by the way they lived toward me and others so desperately in need of grace. As the shades of life's light change and we can see more clearly, or at least differently, may God grant that all of us hold to the mystery of the faith so that at least one more person can finally see themselves in the unchanging, yet ever-changing, picture of God's eternal family!