True Love Waits - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

It is good to be with each and every one of you on this Spring Break Sunday.

I'm grateful for you being in this space.

I'm also grateful for our online ministry.

For the past few years, Reverend Anna Hagler has been leading a team of both staff and lay leadership and lay volunteers to do all we can to ensure that people have access

 to our worshiping community while they are either away or permanently live in another location.

And I am very pleased to say that our online offering continues to grow at an exceptional rate, which signifies, I think, that folks feel connected here, like they have a sense of belonging, like we're kind of working on this thing, right?

 And so as there are people traveling all week for spring break, I am grateful that there are many watching online with us this morning.

And so, Anna, thank you for your hard work and your team's hard work.

Media team, you are sequestered away in the media room, but thank you.

Dexter and all the volunteers, I am very grateful.

I'm also aware that we are moving rather quickly, maybe...

 Maybe it's just me, but it feels like we're moving through Lent rather quickly.

In just a few weeks we'll be celebrating Pop Sunday, then Holy Week, and then of course Easter morning.

And I'm aware that

 it can feel, I don't know, it's luring to move quickly to the Easter story because we're in such good news, we're such desperate for the good news that Easter morning proclaims.

But before we get there, I want us to appreciate that the challenge that's sort of been laid out in this Lenten worship series, Simply Love, because we're now four weeks in to this series and the love that we're describing, the love we're wrestling with is not simple love.

 But when we strip it all away and we realize that divine love is both given and then there's sort of this expectation that we then give it to others, that is certainly not easy.

The type of love we're talking about is not sentimental.

It does not necessarily stay where we put it.

Simply love has really challenged me as a pastor, especially as a preacher, having to engage with this week in and week out.

Remember in week one, we

 We talked about receiving this love before we do anything, before we feel like we deserve it.

Week two, we really asked ourselves the question about how far is God's love going to travel, and we looked at the story of the woman who interrupted a dinner party.

Last week, we stretched ourselves to think of what it's like to be in need.

 To see ourselves not as the Good Samaritan, but as the person in the ditch.

And this Sunday, we are looking at a story about a father and two sons.

And hopefully at the overlooked center of this story, which is actually patience.

I know we want to sort of move to forgiveness in this story, but I would argue that one of the major themes in this story is patience, not forgiveness.

 And it's not the type of patience that maybe we're familiar with.

So I invite you to rise and embody your spirit for the reading of the gospel.

Luke chapter 15.

I'll actually be reading verses 11 through 24.

Then Jesus said, there was a man who had two sons and the younger of them said to his father, father,

 father give me the share of the wealth that will belong to me so he divided his assets between them and a few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant region and there he squandered his wealth and dissolute living when he had spent everything a severe famine took place throughout the region and he began to be in need so he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that region who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs

 He would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating and no one gave him anything.

But when he came to his senses, he said, how many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger.

 I'll get up and I'll go to my father and I'll say to them, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Treat me like one of your hired hands.

So he set off and he went to his father.

But while he was still far off,

 His father sought him and was filled with compassion.

He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.

And then the son said to him, Father, I've sinned against heaven and before you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

But the father said to his slaves, quickly bring out a robe, the best one, and put it on him.

Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet and get the fatted calf and kill it.

 and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found.

And they began to celebrate for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

Will you pray with me?

 May the words of my mouth, the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

Teach us the patience of the Father who watches.

Teach us the love that does not force.

Teach us about the grace that waits with its eyes open.

Amen.

 So I've been rather fixated on this one line.

And if you're in the pastor's Bible study, you've got a little bit of this.

I've been fixated on this one line that gets sort of lost in the beauty of this story because it is a beautiful story.

In verse 20, the text says, so the prodigal son, the younger son, set off and went back to his father.

But while he was still far off,

 While he was still far away, his father saw him.

His father was filled with compassion, the text says.

The father ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.

While he was still far off.

When I was growing up in Rockwall...

 We were culturally swimming in these sort of hyper-evangelical waters, and there were at times, at times, the cultural pressure of the suburbs, and particularly of Rockwall, found a leak in our sort of First United Methodist Church firewall.

And like many of us millennials, I was part of a youth abstinence program called True Love Waits in my youth group.

Some of y'all know it.

 Many of us who grew up in a youth group in the 90s, early 2000s know what I'm talking about.

And it really is, if you spend some time thinking about it, it's wild to think about what we were taught.

I remember feeling the tension of puberty and the amount of tension existing and the changing of our bodies and the real push and pull between wanting so desperately to

 to love God with my whole being, with my head and my heart and to serve God and also feeling a real pull to wondering if the girl from Plano was gonna be hit summer camp the next year.

This is a very natural, very human, very real way of growing and changing and feeling all the feelings

 And those feelings and those desires, the thinking of the day was that lust or desire was a real threat to Christian youth programming and the efficacy of what the church was teaching.

And so a program was created out of LifeWay resources, True Love Waits.

 And it was all framed as patience, as waiting, as a virtuous thing that we as youth could do.

Your future marriage deserved it, we were told.

Your future spouse was probably going to require it.

And your wedding night would either be a night of exhilaration or a night of deep pain and disappointment.

You choose, ninth graders.

 I wish it was as funny back then because there were cards to sign and pledges to make and sometimes young women in our youth group were given rings to wear as a sign of their commitment to remain pure.

But here's the truth.

What we were taught about our bodies, what we were taught about God, what was expected of us didn't actually feel like patience.

 It felt like pressure.

It felt like control.

It felt like someone else's timeline was placed on top of our bodies, on top of our questions, on top of our life.

And this was true for me, but it was especially true for the young women exposed to purity culture at such a young age.

 There have been plenty of studies that have shown the real harm, significant psychological trauma that was inflicted by the church in the 90s and early 2000s around purity culture.

That's why I think there's a real difference between these two things, pressure and patience.

That's why I'm also very, very pleased that we as a church don't shy away around conversations around sex with our youth.

 But we do so, we have these conversations in ways that promote healing and wholeness and flourishing for both the young boys and girls in our program.

Wonderfully Made at the end of March is not just one more program that we offer.

I know that it's easy to look at the list of events on our church calendar and think, wow, they just are trying to do as much as they possibly can.

Everything that we offer is actually very thoughtful.

 And wonderfully made as an antidote to a purity culture that has done significant harm.

So if you or you know someone who is raising young boys and girls who would benefit from having real honest conversations about changing bodies, sex, and faith, I really encourage you to sign up.

Have them sign up.

Because real patience...

 Real patience cannot actually be demanded.

It can't be demanded from us.

The moment patience becomes some sort of mechanism for control, it actually stops being patience.

It becomes something else, something that looks like love from the outside, but does not feel like it from the inside.

 I think a lot of us have experienced this kind of waiting.

Not the waiting that trusts, but the waiting that is sort of in relationship with pressure.

Not the waiting that leaves room, but the waiting that narrows the room.

And I think some of us have confused the two for a very long time.

And now here's what I want you to notice about the father in the story.

 And I have to be honest with you, this is not the first time I preached from the text from this pulpit.

I know many of you keep very meticulous notes and remember everything that I say from this pulpit.

And if you are one of them, then you would know that I preached on this text in September.

 where I argued, I think very effectively, that Jesus Christ is the prodigal son.

It's a view I still like to hold, and I am saying that the reckless, sort of extravagant, self-emptying love of God is what we actually see in the prodigal son, what the story is really pointing at.

I do still believe that, but a text this rich, even though we know it well, a text this rich does not give up everything in one sitting.

 It's why we read scripture over and over and over again so that we can see the true depth and breadth of God's love.

And what I want us to see today is something that I did not linger on in September.

It's not the younger son.

It's not even the theology of return or the practice of forgiveness.

It is simply the father standing at the edge of the property watching the road.

 day after day before anyone came home because I think that image has something to say to us that we are not finished hearing the father saw him while he was still far off that is not the language of someone who happened to glance out the window at the right moment

 That is the language of someone who's been watching the road, someone who has been standing at the edge of the property, scanning the horizon day after day, not knowing if today would actually be the day that his son returns.

There's a theologian named Thomas Ord, I love his work, who has written about what he calls the uncontrolling love of God.

 His argument is simple and it's still rather unsettling because he argues God does not control, not because God lacks the power to intervene, but because love by its very nature cannot force.

The moment love becomes coercive, it stops being love.

It becomes something else entirely.

 The father in this story lives that out.

He does not chase the son down.

He does not manipulate the circumstances to engineer his return.

He does not withhold food from the far country until his son has no choice but to come home.

He lets him go fully and then he simply watches.

Because that is what love does when it refuses to become controlled.

 It opens its hands and it keeps its eyes on the horizon.

The father had to be looking actively, persistently with a great measure of hope.

And this is not sort of a passive waiting.

This is not resignation.

This is not the kind of patience that simply folds its arms and says, fine.

 Let me know when you're ready to come back home.

This is the patience of someone who has decided that the story is not over, who has decided that the distance between them does not have the final word.

 In the ancient world, a Middle Eastern patriarch did not run.

Running was undignified.

It was beneath a man of standing.

But his father sees his son in the distance and he lifts his robes and he sprints down the road.

And the father does not wait for an apology to be finished.

He does not wait for proof that the son has changed.

He moves towards him before the son can say a word.

 That is the patience Jesus is describing, not passive, not controlled, it's not a strategy, a love that watches the horizon because it cannot stop hoping.

We live in a culture that has very little use for this kind of patience.

We celebrate speed, we reward hustle,

 We measure people by their output, their efficiency, their ability to produce results, their ability to drive fast on 75.

This is especially true, feels true.

This culture of speed feels very true in this city, in Dallas.

And when something or someone takes longer than we planned, we start to wonder if we should just cut our losses.

 We do this with projects.

We do this with processes.

And if we're honest, we do this with people too.

We give relationships a window.

We give people a certain amount of time to come around, to get it together, to figure it out, to return who we need them to be.

And when they do not, we tell ourselves, are we being reasonable?

We tell ourselves, patience has limits.

And maybe it does.

I'm not going to tell you that every relationship should be held open forever.

 or that patience means absorbing harm without limit.

But that's not what this story is saying.

The Father in this parable is doing something our culture cannot quite make sense of.

He's watching on the horizon.

 for someone who gave him every reason, every single reason to stop watching.

And he keeps watching anyway, not because the son deserves it, because that is simply the nature of the father.

That's who the father is.

I think many of us need to hear that this patience is also aimed at us.

A lot of us are carrying a quiet pressure every single day that our lives should be further along by now.

 that we should have figured it out by this point, that the version of ourselves we imagined at 25 or 35 or 50 should already be here.

And when that version has not arrived, we do not extend ourselves the patience of the Father, we extend ourselves the pressure of the culture.

 We take on shame like it's productive.

We rehearse our failures like they are evidence.

We stand in the far country of our own regret and wonder if we have wandered too far.

Have we gone away for too long?

Are we too far gone to come home?

But the story says God is watching the road.

 God's not waiting for you to deserve it, not waiting for you to have it together, not waiting for you to make it back on your own, watching with hope still active, with love still oriented in your direction, ready to run before you even finish explaining yourself.

That is the good news this parable reveals, a God whose patience is not passive, but pointed directly, specifically at you.

 Here's the gospel at the center of this story.

The father does not run because the son finally got it.

The son came home because he was hungry, because he was desperate.

He rehearsed a speech about being made a servant.

He was not yet transformed.

He was broke.

And the father ran anyway.

Grace arrives before the apology is finished.

 before the repentance is verified, before behavior is even changed.

The robe goes on the shoulders, the ring goes on the finger, and the party starts.

This is the shape of God's love.

It does not wait for perfection to move towards us.

It moves towards us in the middle of the mess we've created.

It covers the shame we have not yet finished confessing.

It celebrates the return before we have even proven that that return is real or can be trusted.

 And if that is true, if the patience of God is this active, this relentless, this oriented towards us, even when we are still far off, then something else is also true.

We're not as far from home as we often think.

But the much-needed homecoming we experience...

 This isn't the end.

Because the whole series has been building towards something.

If we receive the good news only for ourselves, we have missed half of what Jesus is doing in this story.

The Father's patience is not just a gift, it's a posture.

And it is a posture we are being invited into.

There is someone in your life who has not yet come home.

Someone you've been waiting on.

Someone who has taken a

 their sweet time the long way around.

Someone you're not sure is going to turn back toward you or toward health or toward the life they were meant to live.

And the question this parable asks is not whether you're patient enough.

The question is simply this, are you still watching the road?

 Whether you've written them off or whether there's still part of you standing at the edge of the property scanning the horizon, refusing to let the story end, the love that we see in this parable is not meant to stop with us.

It's meant to move through us.

The father who ran toward the younger son also went to the older brother too.

 The same love that celebrates the broken pleads with the bitter.

The same patience that watched for one lost person watches then again for another.

 We do not just receive this kind of divine love.

We must learn to practice it toward the person we have given up on, towards the parts of our city that we have given up on, towards ourselves, those parts of ourselves that we have given up on.

True love does wait, not because it's passive, not because it has no other options, not because it has run out of things to do.

It waits because divine love

 has decided that the story's not over.

It watches the horizon because it has refused to stop hoping.

It runs down the road before the apology is finished because love does not need to wait for a reason to move towards someone.

 And today on the fourth Sunday of Lent, in this season where we are being asked to unlearn what love is not and relearn what it actually looks like, we are being invited to trust that this is the love that has been aimed at us, each and every one of us all along.

Not a love that waits for us to get it right.

 Not a love that is withheld if we somehow go back on our purity pledges.

Not a love that is dependent on the efficacy of our change.

 A love that is already watching the road.

That is what we read about.

A divine love that is already scanning the horizon.

A divine love that is moving towards us even before we start finding our way home.

May we trust that love.

May we trust that love and may we extend it to others.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.