A Slate Wiped Clean

In the early 2000’s I served the congregation of St. Andrew’s Brampton – a city of over half a million people just to the west of Toronto. The church was located right in the downtown core of the city. In that place, we were surrounded by people who lived fragile lives - the working poor, those suffering from various disabilities, mental illness and drug addiction.

In response to those needs, the church ran a food bank. The people of that congregation contributed over one hundred thousand dollars a year to make that happen. And so, every Wednesday afternoon almost 200 people would collect packages of food to help them get through the coming week.

On those Wednesday afternoons, they would line up in the hallway outside my office door … and I very deliberately kept that office door open, so our foodbank clients would feel free to drop in and visit with me – to share a concern or a particular need, to tell me about their troubles or to ask me to say a prayer with them.

That’s how I met Dan …

Dan belonged to a charismatic and Pentecostal type church. It was just a little church, but he had an important position in that church.

Dan would see me on the street and say cryptic things to me like, “It’s about the blood Wes … read the Scriptures about the blood. You know what I mean …”

“Well … no I don’t” … but his Christian faith was central to his life … and I need to tell you, he thought we Presbyterians were rather dull – and probably not real Christians, but that didn’t seem to prevent him from showing up each week for a couple of bags of free groceries at the Presbyterian Church.

And so I was rather surprised when he showed up at my office one day wanting to talk with me. Up until this point, I thought Dan really didn’t want to have much to do with me because I wasn’t the right kind of minister, but on this day he was seeking out my advice.

Dan told me, with what seemed to be a mixture of anxiety and excitement, “I’m leaving my church. I need to find another church!”

He was obviously not interested in becoming a Presbyterian, but he wanted to tell me how he came to this conclusion – this insight – this awakening … how the need to find a new church hit him like a ton of bricks!

Dan was the head usher at one of the worship services at this little Pentecostal church. And he had a few responsibilities beyond what you or I would think were typical responsibilities in worship.

When people were led by the spirit to dance, he was the one to tap them on the shoulder if the dancing was inappropriate. If it became too provocative.

And when it came time for the pastor to anoint people with the spirit – when individuals were being slain in the spirit, Dan would stand behind them and catch them when they fell.

And just the previous Sunday, something had become very clear to him … if it was the Holy Spirit coming down – if this was of God – he couldn’t wait to tell me – “Why would God let them hit their head on the floor!? Why would I have to keep them from getting hurt? God wouldn’t rescue a soul and then give them a concussion at the same time!”

And there was a certain relief … a kind of closure … almost an assurance in his excitement – like he’d just finished a race, or he’d just turned in a PhD dissertation, or hammered home that last nail on a big construction project.

Dan didn’t much care what I had to say at that point … which was fortunate for me … however, I had to recognize, there was a kind of “gut” level logic to his argument. There was a certain practicality to his theological reflection, rooted in his life and experience.

And in my office that day, I just kind of shook my head and said, “Wow!”

And, I’ve carried that with me ever since … that conversation with Dan where he needed to tell me about his epiphany concerning God and worship and the Holy Spirit.

Now … at some point in the passage we read today from the Book of Hebrews, the writer reaches down for that same kind of gut level, practical logic. At some point it becomes less of an argument or theological debate, and more about one’s experience – one’s experience with God. At some point, the writer of this passage, after studying the Old Testament, after comparing Jesus to Moses, after dissecting the role of the ancient high temple priest – he comes to his conclusion, concerning the worship of the ancient Hebrew people before the coming of Christ … and here’s what he’s thinking, “If all those sacrifices of birds and farm animals at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem – if that worked, there would come a time when we wouldn’t need them … right?”

If the sacrifices year after year were doing any good, sooner or later, we would all be sin-free … we would all be clean!

The writer of Hebrews comes to this conclusion, “The blood of bulls and goats can’t take away sin. All the ancient Temple ritual do is remind us, year after year after year, of our sin – that God is mad at us because we keep on sinning!”

And so in his thinking, that’s where Christ comes in!

What Christ adds to all of this – what the Christian faith brings to the table is a new paradigm … that it’s not all about some transaction, where I sacrifice a goat and in exchange God forgives me for stealing a loaf of bread. It’s not this rational intellectual thing, based on a transactional relationship with God … no, no, no, no … it’s a matter of the heart – the relation between the human heart and the heart of God!

The solution is not to come back year after year to engage in a transaction with God that reminds us of our sin, but for Jesus to come … one time … one time … to live out for us the promise of God’s love – the slate is wiped clean. It is finished!

And Jesus makes this most clear in today’s Gospel reading – the parable of the prodigal son.

Now let me tell you that story over again, but wrapped in a 21st century veneer …

A young girl grows up in a beautiful loving home on the outskirts of Kirkland Lake in northern Ontario. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She’s visited Toronto only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Blue Jays play. Because the newspaper in Kirkland Lake reports in lurid detail the homelessness, drugs, and violence in downtown Toronto, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her.

On her second day there she meets a man who drives the most expensive car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: Her parents were keeping her from all the fun!

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car teaches her a few things that men like. Since she's underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room service whenever she wants.

Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring that she can hardly believe she grew up there. She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewellery she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals on each other in downtown Toronto.

After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how everyone turns against her. "These days, we can't mess around" they say … and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don't pay much, and all the money goes to support her drug habit.

When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word—a teenage girl at night in downtown Toronto can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she's hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she's piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of going fishing with her Dad in a canoe on a lazy summer afternoon.

“God, why did I leave?” she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. “My dog back home eats better than I do now!”

She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus."

It takes about ten hours for a bus to make all the stops between Toronto and Kirkland Lake, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn't she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. "Dad, I'm sorry. I know I was wrong. It's not your fault, it's all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?" She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn't apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with lights on since North Bay. Tiny snowflakes hit the road, and the asphalt steams. She's forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Kirkland Lake.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, "Fifteen minutes, folks. That's all we have here."

Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice … if they’re there …

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Kirkland Lake, stands a group of 40 family members—brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome home!"

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She looks through tears and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I'm sorry. I know … "

He interrupts her. "Hush, child. We've got no time for that. No time for apologies. You'll be late for the party. A banquet's waiting for you at home."

And so it is with God's amazing grace. And here’s what makes it so amazing … just this … we are accustomed to finding a catch in every promise – an escape clause … but in this story of God’s extravagant love and grace there is no catch, no loophole disqualifying us from God's love. Instead, we are assured of this … a love that will never, ever let us go … accomplished, once, and for all, through the love and sacrifice of Christ, who loves each one of us … as if there were only one to love …