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Totally Unpredictable God                        Luke 15: 11-32                   March 14, 2010

Master storyteller Stephen King's latest book, Under the Dome, is about a small, Central Maine town called Chester's Mill, that finds itself abruptly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible, impenetrable and incomprehensible dome.

For more than a thousand pages he writes about the residents of that small town, and what it's like to be living where no one from the outside can either help or hurt you. He chronicles all the good, bad and ugly events and developments that unfold when all the rules of normal American life are essentially suspended. In typical Stephen King style, there are lots of ugly, sometimes quite gruesome developments.

He skillfully introduces readers to an interesting cast of dome-dwelling characters, each with a distinct personality. Key players include an ex-Army short-order cook, a crazed meth addict, the editor of the local paper, a politically powerful used-car dealer, two very different clergy and even a very resourceful Welsh Corgi.

Despite its length, the book is a true page-turner. Partly because of the way King demonstrates - as he always seems to do - his understanding of what motivates people to be truly heroic, on the one hand, or extraordinarily evil on the other. You find yourself really despising the villains and enthusiastically rooting for the heroes.

But it's a page-turner; despite the number of pages you have to turn, mostly, because right up 'till the end, there is no way to know how the story will turn out.

Our Gospel lesson for today, the story of the Prodigal Son, his father and his brother, is one of Jesus' best-known parables. It is also his longest. Not as long as a Stephen King novel, to be sure, but twenty-two verses in all.

Most of us know how the story turns out, because we've heard it so many times before. There aren't very many passages in the New Testament that have been as picked apart and preached about as this one. But the original listeners - a diverse group that Luke describes as "all the tax collectors and sinners and the Pharisees and the scribes" - were most likely surprised by the ending of the story.

And, like most of Jesus' parables, that is part of the reason it is such a good story. Jesus spins stories that have all sorts of twists and turns. They are totally unpredictable. And most importantly, they point to a totally unpredictable God.

Jesus liked nothing more than telling people what God is like. And most of the time, he answered people's "What is God like?" questions by telling stories:

"Which one of you shepherds," Jesus asked, "has ever lost a sheep? When that happens, do you not leave the rest of your flock in the wilderness and go beat the bushes for that one lost sheep? And then, when you finally find that lost sheep, which one of you would not put that sheep on your shoulders and, again leaving the rest of the flock, take the sheep back to your friends and say, 'Come, have a party with me. I found my lost sheep!'"

Think about it for a minute. No shepherd would ever do such a thing. Leave the whole flock of sheep to fend for themselves while he chases after one lost lamb? No way. No how.

You can imagine the puzzled looks on the faces of the shepherds in the crowd when Jesus told that story. But he doesn't stop there.

"Which one of you women," he goes on to ask, "if you lose a coin, would not rip up all the carpet from the floor of your home, move the washer and the dryer and the refrigerator out into the yard, and put all the furniture out on the porch? And then, when you have found that lost coin, which one of you would not run out into the street and say to your neighbors, 'Come, have a party with me. I found my lost quarter!' Now, which one of you would not do that?"

"Say what?" the women in the crowd were probably saying to themselves. "Turn the whole house upside-down over a lost coin? No way. No how.

But that is Jesus' story. And he is still not finished. He's just getting warmed up.

"Which one of you fathers has a young, rebellious son?" he asks. "And if the son said, 'Dad, pretend that you've already dropped dead! Put the will into effect. Give me the money that will come to me in my inheritance and I'm out of here!'

Which one of you would not do just what he asked? Which of you would not give everything you had to your rebellious son?

And then, when he leaves, goes off and squanders all of the money, and comes back home, penniless, in rags, telling stories about his last job working for a pig-farmer, which one of you would not say to him, 'Son, you wanted to party, I'll show you a party! We'll slaughter our best calf and throw a feast the likes of which you have never seen.'

Which one of you fathers - or mothers for that matter - would not do that?"

Of course, the answer, once again, is that none of us would do that! No way. No how.

We might give the kid a hug when we realized that he was still alive, but pretty soon thereafter we'd ground him for the rest of his natural life. The next time he'd see a party would be when he'd earned enough money to throw one for himself.

So why does Jesus tell these stories - stories that ask unpredictable questions and suggest unpredictable answers?

Because these are not stories about the way the people who were listening to him normally behaved. Or even stories that were intended to show them how to behave in the future. These are stories about the way God behaves.

God is the shepherd who won't give up even one lost sheep; God is the woman who can't rest until the coin that which was lost is found again; and God is the waiting, inviting father who goes overboard to welcome home his prodigal son.

God, in short, is totally unpredictable. And anyone who thinks he or she can predict what God will do at any particular point in time is missing Jesus' point.

I mentioned before that the parable that is our lesson for this morning has been preached about a lot. I've read sermons that approach the story from the lost son's perspective, others from the stay-at-home brother's perspective and lots of them from the perspective of the waiting father. I even read one sermon recently by a preacher who argued that the proper perspective was the point of view of the fatted calf!

Actually, I think that while all of those attempts to capture the essence of Jesus' words are helpful, they all fall short.

Barbara Brown Taylor puts it well. "The problem with a really good parable - especially one as beloved as this one," she writes, "is that it can become limp from too much handling. Like the velveteen rabbit, it can lose its eyes, its whiskers, and a lot of its stuffing, until it conforms to the arms of whoever picks it up. After a while, you hardly have to hold it anymore. You can just sling it over your wrist, with the head on one side and the body on the other, trusting it to stay put while you go about your business. That's how you know you don't have a live parable anymore, capable of leaping from your arms and leading you out to where you did not mean to go. You have a domestic pet instead, as captive to you as you are to your culture."

The God that Jesus points us toward in this parable can never be held captive. God's actions are never conventional. And, if we're willing to follow, God regularly leads us to places we do not mean to go.

Over the thousands of years that humans have been walking on this Earth, there have been countless attempts to explain what God is all about. Most have failed miserably.

We Christians have an advantage, however. We have the person of Jesus - God become human - to guide us. And if we follow Jesus' logic - if we understand his parables; his answers to the ever present "tell us about God" questions that he was continually asked, we discover that there are two things we can know for sure about God:

First, we can be sure that despite our human tendencies to pull back, God will grab us and draw us in. Every time we get lost, God will find us. God's love is that great. That powerful. That unpredictable.

And second, we can be sure that when we accept the embrace that God offers us, there will be reason for celebration.

"I will get up and go to my father," the Prodigal Son said, when he came to his senses, "and I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'

And then he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him."

On this Fourth Sunday in Lent, the time has come for us to rise, and accept the embrace of the God who welcomes us home.

                                                                             AMEN

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