Speaker 1: What is up?
Speaker 1: Everybody?
Speaker 1: My name is Ryan.
Speaker 1: I'm in studio here with Mike Lauer.
Speaker 1: What's up, mike?
Speaker 1: The Vikings lost.
Speaker 1: If you were there on Sunday, of course this will be broadcast a couple of weeks after.
Speaker 1: But my Denver Broncos beat the Vikings.
Speaker 1: Sorry, pal, but good news is I won four free burritos in a couple of wages One with Mike, one with my father-in-law John owes me a burrito and my uncle, kurt, owes me one.
Speaker 1: Anyway, hey, we're not here to talk about the Broncos, we're here to talk about week.
Speaker 1: We are in the third week of Advent and we are on the love week, and just a moment ago Mike broke out in a rendition of the B-52's Love Shack.
Speaker 1: But we're not here for that either.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna keep moving.
Speaker 1: But anyway, you know, when people talk about why God made the world, a lot of people sort of offer up these conjectures about why did God create the world?
Speaker 1: Why do you exist?
Speaker 1: And some people will say, well, you were made to worship God.
Speaker 1: And fine, I get the understanding behind that, but really, if God made creatures to worship Him, it feels a little bit self-serving, you know, as though God needed to create a bunch of beings to just worship Him.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that's the answer.
Speaker 1: Others will say well, god was lonely, like I don't know if God was lonely.
Speaker 1: If you ascribe to a Trinitarian theology, that God is Trinity Triune, that there's Father, son, holy Spirit, then God wasn't lonely because God in and of God's self is a community, sort of a Triune being, which is quite lovely.
Speaker 1: But well, the answer I would suggest we're running out of time here is that God is love the Bible says that and love, if you think about love, love always creates.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think about the act of sex, for example, sex is this incredible, ideally, this loving act.
Speaker 1: It's probably the most physically intimate you can be with a person, and many times the act of sex creates a new life, and so love always creates.
Speaker 1: So I think that God in and of God's self, the Triune being, was overwhelmingly a being of love, and so love just always creates.
Speaker 1: So the world was created, you were created, I was created, chipotle burritos were created out of love.
Speaker 1: I know it sounds cliche, but I think it's really absolutely true.
Speaker 1: And for the earliest Christians the story of salvation was an entirely, was entirely one of rescue all the way through.
Speaker 1: This is great.
Speaker 1: Theologian who says it this way, says that the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creature from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of Hades to set the captives free and to recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation.
Speaker 1: This is the whole point of creation.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, here in Advent, we celebrate the coming of the Christ child.
Speaker 1: Why does God come to earth?
Speaker 1: Well, love, it's a story of rescue through and through, and three of my favorite stories in the Gospel of Luke, I think, depict this wonderfully.
Speaker 1: It's three stories that are told one after the other by Jesus, and when you read them you really should read them all and interpret each of them with the other two.
Speaker 1: So it's the story of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son found in Luke, chapter 15.
Speaker 1: And I love it.
Speaker 1: These are stories about God coming to rescue us, which is what the Advent story is.
Speaker 1: God coming to earth in Jesus is a great rescue mission motivated by love.
Speaker 1: And so in the sheep story, the sheep gets lost.
Speaker 1: It wanders off is what sheep do.
Speaker 1: If you know sheep, they're kind of dumb, they don't always know better.
Speaker 1: They wander off to get lost, to get stuck in the brambles and they need help.
Speaker 1: And so in the story it's a really short one Jesus says the shepherd leaves everything and goes to find it and he carries it back joyfully.
Speaker 1: The text tells us on his shoulders, and I always imagine cause sheep are just, they don't know better, they're kind of stubborn, they're obstinate, they're kind of dumb.
Speaker 1: So I imagine that sheep, by kicking the whole way back, like in the shepherds, exerting all this energy, like God, you sheep, come on, I'm trying to help you out here, and the sheep's just being a knucklehead and the shepherd drags the sheep back out of love.
Speaker 1: The shepherd doesn't want to lose that one lost sheep.
Speaker 1: And then it says he gathers his friends and his neighbors to celebrate cause the sheep is brought back home.
Speaker 1: Then, right away after, there's a sort of the lost coin and there's this woman, by the way, who represents the God character in the story.
Speaker 1: It's awesome that God, sort of in this story, is coming in the story anyway in the form of a woman.
Speaker 1: And so there's this woman who's looking her whole house over for this coin that she lost and she turns everything upside down and it says, until she finds the coin she won't stop looking.
Speaker 1: Until she finds the coin, cause sometimes coins get lost, they get dropped and they fall and the crevices are down the drain or whatever.
Speaker 1: And she will stop at nothing until she finds the coin.
Speaker 1: And this is what God does he stops at nothing until he finds the lost one.
Speaker 1: So then the woman she gathers her friends and neighbors and they celebrate that she found this lost coin.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, the three headed story ends with the lost son and the son goes to his father, says can I have my inheritance?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 1: I want it Basically, culturally.
Speaker 1: He's saying I wish you were dead, cause you know, young kids wouldn't get their inheritance until the parents died.
Speaker 1: And then also that money that he's asking for actually belongs to the entire community.
Speaker 1: So he's saying hey, dad, I wish you were dead.
Speaker 1: Also, I don't really care about the whole community or their embeddermint, I want what's mine.
Speaker 1: And it's really the slap in the face of the father and the whole village.
Speaker 1: Really it's a severe offense and in every way the father probably would have disowned the son.
Speaker 1: The whole village, the whole tribe would disown this young man and bid him farewell.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'd even have like a fake funeral for the son, but that would be the end of the relationship.
Speaker 1: It'd be broken, be done.
Speaker 1: The son takes the money.
Speaker 1: He doesn't care.
Speaker 1: He kind of middle fingers the whole world when he leaves and takes the money, goes to foreign places.
Speaker 1: He's looking for something, apparently, and he squanders all the money, all of it, and he ends up in the worst possible situation for a young Jewish kid.
Speaker 1: He's in this pig pen with unclean pigs that are actually.
Speaker 1: They're faring better than he is.
Speaker 1: They've got more to eat, they're better off than this son is.
Speaker 1: And he comes to his senses.
Speaker 1: The text tells us and he thinks he gets an idea I'm gonna go back home and maybe I can beg my own father to let me be a servant In the household which a few days ago I was a son.
Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna go back and beg to be a servant.
Speaker 1: So the son goes home covered in pig slop and mess, just broken.
Speaker 1: He's probably ashamed, guilt ridden, just disgusting.
Speaker 1: And the father sees him from a long ways off.
Speaker 1: The text tells us and I'd imagine that you would make that kid sweat it out a little bit, make him think about what he did wrong, demand an apology, or 50 from him to you and all the whole village, but the father, who apparently loves his son, doesn't do any of this.
Speaker 1: The father sees him, he runs to him, he kisses him and he gathers friends and neighbors to celebrate.
Speaker 1: And, oddly enough, in the ancient world, grown men of stature and of wealth don't run.
Speaker 1: It's a shameful act.
Speaker 1: But the father runs and he shames himself.
Speaker 1: Also, kissing your son or like showing any kind of public affection is a shameful act, but the father doesn't care because he loves his son and he kisses him I imagine all of his face shames himself to bring the boy home and he gathers friends and neighbors to celebrate.
Speaker 1: This is the story of Christmas and of Advent.
Speaker 1: If nothing else, the father, who loves us, has dove-in, dove-dived head first into humanity to rescue us, to bring us home.
Speaker 1: He will stop at nothing until he finds us, because you and I, like sheep, we wander off, like coins, we fall down into the wrong crevices and holes and like sons, sometimes we just wander off, we squander things, looking for something else, not realizing that we had it all along.
Speaker 1: And so this Advent, let you know the love of God, the love of the father, who will chase you down to find you and drag you back home because he loves you.
Speaker 1: So anyway, happy Sunday of Advent or third week of Advent, and may you know the love of the father today.
Speaker 1: Peace.
Speaker 1: Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends.
Speaker 1: And don't forget, you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8.30, which is our liturgical gathering, or 10 o'clock, our modern gathering, or you can check us out online at clclclkriverorg.
Speaker 1: Peace.