God Welcomes the Prodigal (song, meditation, art)

Sara Groves composed this song based on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal child returning to the Loving Father.


“My Dream”

Lights get low in a darkening house
Ghosts of doubt whisper and wander
What do I really know and how
All these questions to ponder

I have lived a life of faith
I have felt and heard the Spirit
Still the darkness brings its weight
And assurance is gone
But as I fall asleep I have a waking dream

You are standing in the driveway
As I come up the street
I can tell by your movement you’re not angry
You are waiting there

How much foolishness and folly are allowed in your graceland
How much doubt and melancholy
Till I’m lost
And as I fall asleep I have a waking dream

Every night for a year you have come to meet me here
Just a simple image in my mind
As I fall asleep
Of you standing in the driveway
As I come up the street
I can tell by your movement you’re not angry
You are running now
You are running

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Kingdom, Lent, and Blessing

March 5, 2018 By David Kendall |
http://fmcusa.org/davidkendall/2018/03/05/kingdom-lent-and-blessing/

Excerpts:

The Kingdom that begins with Lent also begins with blessing.  There is the call to turn—repent!—which is Lent.  There then comes a pronouncement: “Blessed!”  Consider how stunning this is.

When Jesus begins to teach about the Kingdom of God, the first word is “Blessed!” This is not what we expected, not from God almighty in the season of Lent.  We think it’s the time for sober and brutal assessment; time for acknowledging our failures; time to confess we are moral losers, spiritual losers, and relational losers.  Gather it all up and summarize our human condition as failed.

Our natural default, sometimes even after long association with Jesus and his friends, leads us to expect that a perquisite of entering and experiencing the “Kingdom of God” is a fierce facing of our many failings.  We really expect the first word to be something like: “Wrong!” or “Woe!”

But Jesus begins teaching about the Kingdom that calls for repentance, for Lenten sojourn, with a very different word: “Blessed!”  Then, to make sure no one can miss the point, he repeats that same word 8 times.  Again and again he announces blessing (see Matt. 5:3-12).

That must mean God is not angry.  Jesus has not come as the last straw before God does something rash.  No, he comes precisely as the rash thing God has done for us, which is to bless.  “Blessing” is the first word, and the first order of business for the kingdom Jesus declares, demonstrates and for which he dies.  Blessing.

If we can let that word work its way into us, several things become clear.  As a start, God does not enter the world in Jesus our Lord because God is angry.  God does not approach as one “armed and dangerous,” weaponized with wrath.  If that were how God was and is, God wouldn’t need to bother with personal appearance.  Long before anyone could imagine or say “drone,” God could have authorized a strike.

God is not angry.  God is the creator of what is good and beautiful, which is why our creations accounts provide the first setting for the first utterance of blessing.  God made it and then God blessed it—all.  That Jesus begins his Kingdom teaching with this blessing should make us think that the Creator may not be done creating.

God is not angry.  But God is determined to salvage and rescue as much of his creation as possible.  So, God calls a family to bless, and to become a source of blessing for all other families the world over.  In fact, God binds himself to the family of blessing so that eventually through this family blessing would flow.  God binds himself by making a holy pact, a covenant, with one people—Abraham and Sarah’s people—for the sake of all people.  Thus, when Jesus begins with a nine-fold pronouncement of blessing, we are right to think about God’s vow to purge the world of curse.  We are right to think that holy promises are coming to pass.

God is not angry.  God is King and is rightly fed-up with the unending failures of curse-shaped human governance and so God sends the Only begotten One, Jesus, whose throne is unrivaled and whose rule is right.  It is this One and Only enthroned who speaks blessing back into the world.  Therefore, God is not angry.  The first word is “blessed!”

Read the full essay at
http://fmcusa.org/davidkendall/2018/03/05/kingdom-lent-and-blessing/

Thanks to Julie for the links to the song and the essay!

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image


John August Swanson:  The Prodigal Son
https://www.eyekons.com/prodigal_son/portfolio_of_art

Find a whole online portfolio of art based on the parable of the prodigal at
https://www.eyekons.com/prodigal_son/portfolio_of_art

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