Dear Rose Park,
Sam and I landed in Chicago on Sunday evening. We spent the night at Sam’s parents and then drove back to Holland on Monday morning. Two weeks is the longest I’ve ever been away from my family. I missed them dearly and was overjoyed to hug Simon and Winnie. In the grand scheme of things two weeks isn’t that long, but in a small sense it just felt good to come home.
This sense of ‘coming home’ reminded me of one of my favorite bible stories, The Parable of the Prodigal Son. You can find this story in Luke 15, but it essentially tells the story of two brothers. The older son listens to his father and is always obedient. The younger son however, asks for his inheritance early to pursue his own desires. When he runs out of money, he realizes he must come home and face his father. He prepares an apology and assumes he will be scolded and then enslaved as a worker in the field. Instead, the father embraces his son and rejoices that he has been found.
There have been several books written on this parable, but my favorite is entitled: The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith by Tim Keller. Tim Keller was the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. He was a brilliant theologian and author, but unfortunately Tim passed away while I was in Scotland on May 19.
In his book, Keller writes these words as it relates to the audience of the parable: “the targets of this story are not ‘wayward sinners’ but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them. It is a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells his story primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.”
As individuals and communities who know the person and love of Jesus it can be so tempting to adopt an ‘us vs. them’ mindset assuming all of Jesus’ teachings must be for those ‘wayward sinners’ who do not know Him. It would serve us well though, to adopt a posture of humility recognizing many of Jesus’ teachings are in fact directly targeted to those who do know Him but for one reason or another choose blindness to His teachings.
This is all to say, come home. Come home with a sense of humility not seeking to divide or answer the question ‘who’s in and who’s out?’ Come home with a desire to find unity in and through the person of Jesus. Come home and find the arms of the Father are wide open for you. Come home and be embraced by the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. Come home to worship the Risen King with a body of believers who celebrate when the lost are found. Come home.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash