"Conditioned by the Unconditional"
#92-02Presented on The Lutheran Hour on September 8, 2024
By Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Lutheran Hour Speaker
Copyright 2024 Lutheran Hour Ministries
No bonus material MP3
Text: Genesis 25:23
Imagine a teenage girl. She's typing an essay for her college application. Her name is Cady, and the essay prompt she's answering is something like "discuss an important accomplishment that has shaped who you are." Now, Cady could have written about the class she struggled with but still managed to get an A in. She could have written about that perfect season with her team or the blue ribbon from the art competition. But instead, she decides to take that word "accomplishment" in a different direction. She writes about her father, about something he wrote for her before he died, when she was just a baby. In his book, he wrote to her: "One day, when you are asked to give an account of yourself, to provide a ledger of what you have been and done and meant to the world, do not discount that you filled a dying man's last days with joy." So, taking her deceased father's advice, Cady, instead of talking about another task finished, she writes about a relationship given.
I imagined this situation after reading the memoir When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanathi, Cady's dad. In 2013, Paul Kalanathi, a 36-year-old brain surgeon, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And during his last days, Paul and his wife Lucy had to discern what was most important to them. Both Paul and Lucy were doctors. They had spent the last two decades building impressive ledgers of accomplishments. But in their last days together, they decided that they wanted to have a baby. Lucy had asked him, "Would having to say goodbye to a child make dying even more painful?"
Paul answered, "Wouldn't it be great if it did?"
In 2015, their daughter Cady was born, eight months before Paul died. So today, Cady would be around 10 or 11, admittedly a little young for college applications. But in a few years, if she does have to give an account of herself, I wonder, will she take her father's advice? When she's asked, "Who are you? What have you done? What have you meant to the world?" will she say something like, "I am the daughter of my father who loved me, simply because I'm his? "
Now, Cady's relationship with her father is unique. Since he died when she was still an infant, she has no conscious memory of him. But she has the stories, the stories her mother tells her and other family members tell her about her father, like how he used to keep a gorilla suit in the trunk of his car and would say, "It's for emergencies only." Or how he cared for his patients as a doctor, staying late to talk with them, treating them not as problems to solve, but as persons to love.
And when I learned about him, reading the words of his book, I could see that he was a remarkable man. And that his daughter brought him such joy during his last days—that says more about him than it does about her. Because it couldn't be for any of his daughter's accomplishments that he loved her, and none of her forthcoming failures could make him love her less because he wouldn't see any of that. No, he loved her simply because she was his. Loving her was his accomplishment. He could have devoted the last days of his life to traveling or wine tasting, but instead, all he wanted was to hold her, even if that meant dying would be all the more difficult.
This father's love for his daughter is a faint picture of God the Father's love as described in the Bible. One of the most repeated phrases in the Bible is a description of God's character as a father, drawn from the Old Testament book of Exodus: the Lord. The Lord. The great I AM is His Name. He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Steadfast love, or as we might say, unconditional love. Love that is God's accomplishment, not ours. Love that can't be earned or enhanced by what we do. Love that can't be diminished by what we fail to do. That's the love of God described in the Bible, and it's part of the central message of the Bible, which is that God's love is unconditional, but our lives are not.
The love of God is unconditional, but your life isn't. Your life, your well-being, your mental and emotional health, your personhood and mine are not unconditional. They are conditional. Conditional because we are created. We're not the Creator, and that means we can only live under certain conditions. We were created for a trusting, life-giving relationship with God our Father. Those are the only conditions that work for us. Other conditions might approximate it or imitate this life, but they won't deliver. It's like starting a gasoline engine with diesel, or sating your hunger with a steady diet of potato chips, or sustaining a marriage on text messages alone. It won't thrive. It won't last. It won't go on like that. So also if you try to go on without trust in your Creator, without the commands and the promises of God, without receiving your place in the story of God, what you'll accomplish is only a shadow of life. A fleeting imitation. Mortal life, leading to death. Separation from God. Hell.
But God wants more for you than that. Better than that, God wants to give you Himself. God wants you to live, knowing that your best accomplishment is His accomplishment, because you are His living work of art. You are created and called to be His beloved child in Jesus. He chooses not to see your failures. So you are loved simply because you are His, and He is love. Love that your accomplishments can't enhance and your failures can't diminish. And as you get to know Him by letting Him tell you His story in the Bible, you'll see it, you'll feel it, you will know it and you will live in Him, in His story. But it's a long story. It's a story you'll have to stay with, and in, for as long as you live.
Some people only sample the story. They read it or a part of it and then quit. Some say, "How can a loving God be in that?" They hear of God's anger. They sense God's wrath, God's settled opposition against human sin and evil, and demand, "How can a loving God be in that?" But they forget the Bible's double truth: God's love is unconditional, but our lives aren't. These two truths are what make the Bible a long and complicated story, because it's a story told to communicate the depths of God's steadfast love and the heartbreaking complications that come when we try to live under our self-chosen conditions. In a thousand different scenes, segments, and segues, the Bible is urgently communicating these two truths: God's love is unconditional, but your life is not. When you and I stake our lives on conditions other than God's unconditional love, everything comes undone.
And of all the books of the Bible, Genesis especially tells this story with visceral, relatable clarity. Read just a few chapters of Genesis and you might wonder, how can God's love be in that strife, in marriage and family, pain, in raising children, thistles and thorns, in the fruits of our labor, accomplishments that turn to dust? How can a loving God be in that? But Genesis isn't telling a story of God in love with Himself, but with us and people like us, people designed to live by the unconditional love of God but stuck looking for something else.
For example, take the account of the family of Abraham found in the book of Genesis. We hear that God has selected Abraham and his family to be the conduit, the carrier of His love. But why choose them? Because they're no better or worse than the rest of us, and if God can love them, He can love anyone. But why start with just one family? Why not all families? Because God's love isn't an idea or a value, it's a relationship. And for this relationship to take hold of any, it must start with one. But for God's unconditional love to fully take hold of even one is no easy task because, as Genesis so starkly reveals, without God's love, all we know is conditional love, imitation love that induces competition and division, jealousy, and strife.
Listen to how it happens in this story from Genesis 25, the account of Abraham's son Isaac and his family. So far in the book of Genesis, God's love has been on display. God creates and provides and gives Himself freely as a Father to humankind. He gives His command and His promise and His story freely. But our kind tries to create our own conditions, conditions contrary to our designs, so God enters these unfavorable conditions to bring us back. God gives Abraham and his family the unconditional love that they need to live, but they keep reverting back to their own conditions. Listen to how it plays out in these excerpts from Genesis 25, starting at verse 19.
Now this is the account of Isaac, the son of Abraham. Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah. Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, whose brother was Laban.
And Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she was barren. She couldn't have children. And the Lord answered Isaac's prayer, and Rebekah, his wife, became pregnant. And the babies jostled against each other. They wrestled within her. And Rebekah said, "Why is this happening to me?" And she went to inquire of the Lord, to seek the word of the Lord.
And the Lord said to her, "Two nations are in your womb. Two peoples from within you will be separated. One will be stronger than the other, and the great one will serve the little one."
Now, the time came for Rebekah to give birth. And look, twin boys were in her womb. The first one to come out was reddish, and his whole body was like a hairy garment. They called his name Esau. After him came his brother, and with his hand, he grasped Esau's heel. And they called his name Trickster, the heel-grabber. That is, Jacob. And Isaac was 60 years old when she gave birth to them. That is after they had been married for 20 years and, presumably, praying for 20 years.
Now, the boys grew up and Esau became a cunning hunter, a man of the open country. And Jacob was a quiet man, staying inside the tents. And Isaac loved Esau because Isaac had a taste for wild game. But Rebekah loved Jacob.
Once, Jacob was boiling some stew and Esau came in from the open country and he was hungry. And Esau said to Jacob, "Give me some of that red stuff." He said, "The red stuff, because I am famished." This is why Esau was also nicknamed Edom, which means red.
So Red ask his brother for some of the red stuff, and Jacob said, "First, sell me your rights as the firstborn of the family."
And Esau said, "Look, I am about to die. What is that to me, a birthright?"
But Jacob said, "First, swear an oath to me."
So he swore to him, and he sold his birthright to Jacob. And Jacob gave Esau some of the bread and lentil stew, and he ate and he drank, and he got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright, his place in the family.
The book of Genesis begins with the favorable conditions all humans need to thrive. Life conditioned by the unconditional love of God, love that never despises us, but guides us away from what will hurt us and toward what will bless us, love that promises us a place in God's story, even when our striving comes to nothing.
But in this account from Genesis 25, we meet twin brothers living in less than favorable conditions. They're living under the conditions of a counterfeit love, conditional love. And in response, one is striving and the other is despising. Neither is innocent nor totally to blame. Jacob came out of the womb striving, but how much of his later scheming was motivated by knowing that his father loved his brother more than him? Not because Isaac was so full of love, but because he was so hungry for what Esau could give him. And Esau's disdain for his place in the family, it's inexcusable, but how much of that disdain was induced by the fickle conditional love of his mother? And how much could have been different if the boys had been secure in the unconditional love of their Father in heaven and if that love had been channeled to them by their earthly parents?
But Genesis is less concerned about what might've been and more about what happened. What happened is that Isaac and Rebekah continue to make matters worse by their fickle, fleeting, counterfeit love. Esau will go on despising his place in the family, Jacob will go on striving and deceiving, and all this behavior will discolor their relationships, and everything falls apart. Genesis shows us this unfiltered strife, not just to prove to us that we can't live under these conditions, but also that God's unconditional love will keep finding us, even there.
Genesis is the beginning of the account of God's love, love that narrows down for one so that it can come to all. And there are moments when God's unconditional love really takes hold of people, gives them the anchor that they need to weather the storms of this mortal life. Isaac, praying and trusting that God's way is best, even when he has to wait 20 years for an answer to his prayer. Rebekah, seeking the word of the Lord when she doesn't understand why this is happening to her. Esau, in time, forgiving and embracing his brother despite Jacob's trickery and treachery. Jacob, striving and wrestling with people and with God, yet still holding on to God and waiting for His blessing. You read about them and they are so real, so relatable, so human, gripped by the love of God, yet still tripped up by the fear that love in the end is conditional.
The Old Testament never shows us anyone truly anchored in the love of God. Jacob's family, the one chosen to be the conduit, all his sons fail eventually. So God accomplishes what they could not. God the Father sends His eternal Son to become a human Son, born in the family of Jacob. And when Jesus seems to be failing, when He's dying on the cross, weighed down by the failures of the whole human family, He is still anchored, held in the unconditional love of His Father. Jesus endured the cross for the joy of His Father set before Him. Jesus reversed death and broke its power so that His joy could be yours, and you could be His.
From the time Cady was just learning to walk, her mom would take her to visit her father's grave. These visits for Cady's mom were more complicated than they were for Cady, at least at first. See, her mom carries half a lifetime of memories with her husband, and his absence was like an empty space for her. But for Cady, the memories and stories of him were like an anchor, a foundation she could build a life on. Paul was just a man, no better or worse than the rest of us, but his love for his daughter could be something close to unconditional, because his joy in her is confirmed by his words and finalized in death. In this mortal life, he has nothing more to say.
God, however, has more. More for you, though all He says in Jesus is nothing less than an expression of His love, and His love is truly unconditional. Not because it was bound by death, but finalized on the cross and guaranteed by His resurrection.
So this week, when you feel that empty space in your life—but you still have to give an account of yourself, some ledger of why you matter to the world—don't discount the simple fact that you bring joy to God, your Father, through His Son, not for anything you've done or failed to do, but simply because you are His and He is yours. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Reflections for September 8, 2024
Title: Conditioned by the Unconditional
No Q&A segment this week
Music Selections for this program:
"A Mighty Fortress" arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"Kyrie, God Father in Heaven Above" arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
"God's Own Child, I Gladly Say It" setting by Kevin Hildebrand. From Hymns for All Saints: Psalms, Hymns, Spiritual Songs (© 2011 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
"Crucifer" by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
