A slave does not remain in the household, but the children belong to it forever.

John 8:36

In case you weren’t around, I had a cranky week to begin the month of May. Our new home is missing any semblance of landscaping, and the weather has prevented the situation from improving. Several encounters with customer “service” personnel proved nothing short of useless. An eye surgery that I hoped to have in a few days was pushed all the way into the middle of June. Let’s just say that I wasn’t pleasant to live with.

In the midst of my bout of middle-class American rich-person problems, I was hoping to find someone to bear the brunt of my frustrations. I had a number of clever barbs, retorts, and newly-coined witticisms. As I thought of expanding my hoard of verbal weapons, I had a sense from the Lord. It was something like, “Go ahead, use them all – then come back and tell me how it went.” Sometimes, some gentle shaming by the Father (and some help from my wife) goes a long way. Tragedy averted.

The thing is, our discipleship journey is full of some tragedies averted, and others that we insist on rushing into headlong. In doing so, we are simply carrying on an ancient and enduring tradition, that we inherit from our first parents, whereby we say “no” to the good provision of God and set out on our own flawed trajectory. Or – and this is an equally faulty tack – we refuse the Father’s largesse out of the rather insane notion that we have to earn his gifts as good worker-bees. We stay at home, living on a starvation diet when the banquet table beckons, and then sit in judgment of each and every returning prodigal.

Yes, little brother meet big brother. We are capable of defying a seemingly impossible existential condition of spiritual schizophrenia. In Martin Luther’s words, like drunken horsemen we fall off one side of our steed, and then the other. So one week – like this last one – I’ve fallen into the snark pit. The next, having climbed out (by grace), I congratulate myself and scoff at anyone so foolish as to have taken my place. Laughable, if it weren’t so pathetic.

The parable of the sons (usually called the parable of the prodigal son, see Luke 15) illustrates two expressions of the orphan life. Each rejects the relationship that their father offers to them. It’s too easy to focus on the prodigal and his flamboyant rebellion, and to give far less attention to the good boy who stayed at home. Maybe that’s because we’re more like the latter, rather than the former. Be that as it may, it’s clear that merely living in the house doesn’t mean that you’re experiencing what it means to be an heir of the one who owns the house.

The orphan life arises from faith crises. The essence of faith is that we believe and trust in the consummate goodness of God, which is neither defined nor conditioned by circumstances. From the early chapters of Genesis onward, we find broken faith. Normally, this would mean that someone we trusted has not lived up to his or her end of the bargain. In the case of our relationship with God, the breaking is all on our side. He has done nothing worthy of our repudiation of him. It is we who have chosen to trust and hope in lesser gods and their promises. Our vain expectation is that they will not be so demanding, so intrusive, so unwilling to compromise with our desires to rule our own fiefdoms.

Of course, we build an orphan life on lies. Every little god we serve eventually demands everything of us, breaks every vow, distorts every perspective on what is happening with and to us. The orphan life is the life of disintegration and un-wholeness. It shatters the self and the self’s relationships. We spend precious emotional, physical, and spiritual capital competing with each other for scraps, ignoring the feast that awaits our turning from the garbage heap of self-love.

Every day I squander some portion of my inheritance as one who has been loved by God. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wife, my children, the poor lady I chewed out on the phone the other day for making a mistake on a billing statement. Just check my anxiety levels when the landscape guy isn’t showing up. Just listen in on my sometimes feeble or distracted prayer time.

The great tragedy isn’t that I am a sinner and a squanderer, it’s that my response to being one is so similar to that of the First Sinners: I may be too “sophisticated” to use the blame reflex, but I do still play hide-and-seek in the garden; I have a lovely collection of fig leaves for every occasion; and I am still deeply committed to using defensiveness at most nearly every turn. Like the prodigal, I need to come to my senses and renew my claim on the Father’s inexhaustible store of mercy, grace, and power.

As a parent, one of the things that I want most for my children is that they know they are loved; that they belong to me; that they cannot lose their place in the family. It would be profoundly painful to see them not believing, not accepting, not taking advantage of the full measure of my desire to bless them. And I say this as an extremely limited and deficient human father.

So think about saying “no” to the open door that God the perfect, eternal, infinite Father has set before us. The core of our Christian identity is adoption as children. The core of our spiritual dysfunction is living as orphans. All our sin, fear, relational disease, foolish decisions; every bout of anger, passivity, gossiping, and offensive speech; whatever envy, rivalry, striving, or greed – in short, all our failure to express our redeemed nature in Christ lies at the feet of our not feasting on the good things of the Father’s house.

So even though there are numerous further topics to address, we are bidding farewell to our series on faith’s freedoms. I hope it’s been clear that what I’m saying today about our participation in God’s goodness and grace is necessary AND sufficient for living the life of free obedience that wins the world to Christ. We are not beggars, nor slaves, nor burdened by exhausting duty. Welcomed by Jesus, we are sons and daughters who don’t just live in the Father’s house. We have the run of the place.

This ain’t easy, and we won’t walk in anything near perfection. But we can let the Spirit grow our capacity for his banqueting table and increase our distaste for that which does not satisfy. Every day, and throughout the day, we can be manna-gatherers.

And, when we think we’ve run out, let’s be bold, like Oliver, to ask for more. I can assure you, the service people of the world will appreciate it.