John Killinger Enjoying a Life on Loan First air date March 21, 1999 – Program #4221

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Congregational clergyman and author, Dr. John Killinger, is from Williamsburg, Virginia. John has had a distinguished career in the ministry as a pastor, seminary professor, and prolific author. Today, he wears several hats: he is President of the “Mission for Biblical Literacy,” an organization in Nashville, Tennessee, that promotes the reading of the Bible worldwide; during the summer, he is pastor of the historic Little Stone Church on Michigan’s Mackinac Island; and, when he can, he continues to spend a good deal of time writing at his home base in Virginia, from where he has just completed a new book, Preaching the New Millennium.

Let me read a few verses of familiar Scripture for you:

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. A few days later, the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country and there he squandered his property is dissolute living.”

You know the story. The son spent everything and he found himself destitute and came home. The father ran out to meet him and called for a celebration of his return. The elder son was put out about it, but the father said, “We had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life. He was lost and has been found.” It is one of the great stories of all time from the Gospel of Luke. We will come back to it in a moment.

A few months ago, I was visiting some old friends in North Carolina, Bill and Emily Tuck. Bill is a pastor in Lumberton, North Carolina. We fell to reminiscing about our children and places where we had lived. We spoke of the pain we felt at giving up certain things in our lives. Emily asked if I had read a book by Joyce Rupp called Praying Your Goodbyes. I hadn’t. She said it had meant a great deal to her. And a few days after I returned home, a package came in the mail, bearing a copy of the book.

The book begins with the author’s recalling how she felt when her brother died. It was her first hard experience of loss. Then she talks about other losses in her life, and losses in the lives of people she has known and counseled. Life, she concludes, is a pilgrimage in which we are constantly losing loved ones and possessions, and at the same time encountering new people and acquiring new possessions.

That’s true, isn’t it? Life is like crossing the country on a wagon train during pioneer days. Looking back, you remember the tree where you buried a little child, the river where you lost your prized china, the mountain where a sister fell to her death. But you also recall where you picked up the stranger who became a dear friend and the trading post where you purchased the warmest blanket you have ever owned and the visions of those unforgettable sunsets on the prairies. Life is a pilgrimage of having and letting go, of letting go and finding new things to replace the old ones.

About a third of the way into Sister Joyce’s book-she’s a member of a Catholic group called the Servite sisters-there is a wonderful little essay about having everything on loan. She cites an ancient Aztec prayer that reflects on the wonder and brevity of life, and how all things fade. “Oh, only for so short a while,” it says, “you have loaned us to each other.” This understanding, this attitude, says Sister Joyce, is “the first and most important attitude of a pilgrim heart.” If we can only grasp it, and make it central to our thinking, it will help to ease us in all our losses. People and things don’t belong to us. They are not ours to keep. We are only on pilgrimage. We aren’t permitted to own or hold on to anything forever. We only enjoy it-and celebrate it-and let it go.

Think about that. It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? The parents you had were only on loan. The child you lost was on loan. The job you had, the house you lived in, the friends you knew in that former city, were all on loan. You loved them, you felt pain when you let them go, but you could not hold them. You can still love them-love doesn’t perish-but you cannot have them, cannot reproduce them. You can only go on meeting and enjoying the people and things that come into your life now, and some day you must let them go as well. “Here we have no lasting city,” says the book of Hebrews, “but are looking for the city that is to come.”

Now let’s come back to the story of the Prodigal Son. It always puzzled me that the father gave the son his part of the inheritance so easily. Do you remember? The son said, “Father, give me the part of the inheritance that will come to me,” and the father did it and the boy went away to a foreign country. That was very unusual. Fathers in those days gave most of the inheritance to their eldest sons, and this boy was a younger son. And they didn’t give them anything until they died and the inheritance passed naturally to the children. Yet the father in this story offered no resistance. He just handed over to his son a sum of money sufficient to permit the son’s journey to another place.

Joyce Rupp’s book helped me to understand this. This father apparently knew his son was only on loan to him, and that once the loan was called in, there was nothing in the world he could do to hold on to the child. He may have loved the child dearly. Apparently he did. He probably looked into the pained face of his son and thought of the innocence he had seen in that face through the early years of childhood, and the joy he had taken in having a second son. But he saw now the rebellion and hatred in the son’s face, the son’s disgust for the father’s home and the father’s way of life, and knew there was absolutely nothing in the world he could do to turn that son around and regain his affection. So he released his grip on the son. He merely gave him some money and turned him loose.

He didn’t stop loving the son. That’s part of the charm and the lesson of the story. But he knew there was no point in holding on. So he celebrated his love for what they had had together and released the boy. He was able to let him go because he realized that life is a pilgrimage and that we spend it saying hello and goodbye to the people and things along our way.

Now this interpretation of the father’s behavior enables us also to understand the father’s speech to the elder son when the elder son became upset about his brother’s return. “Son,” he said, “you are always with me, and all I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” He knew the elder son was on loan to him too; but the elder son hadn’t left; he didn’t show any inclination to go. It was a loan that would last a lot longer. But the younger son had returned-the son who had so obviously been on loan and come back, so that the loan was renewed, and the father was overjoyed about it. He thought the elder son should understand and welcome the renewal of the loan as well. The loan had been canceled but reopened; the younger son was dead but now was alive again. It was an occasion for rejoicing!

We can’t help thinking that the elder son had a big lesson to learn that day, and that if he learned it his entire life was going to be richer and better. The same could be said for us, of course, if we haven’t yet learned that everything in life is on loan. If we can only envision our lives as a pilgrimage, and the people and things that come into our lives along the way as temporary gifts to enjoy and celebrate, then we can accept our losses and not cling to the persons and jobs and places we have to give up along the way. And the most wonderful thing about this attitude toward life is the way it positions us for accepting the new things that come to us on loan. It keeps us from being oriented always toward the past, especially as we grow older, and enables us to face the future with anticipation and excitement for the new people and things that will come into our way.

I remember a dear lady I used to visit in a nursing home. She was so sad and unhappy when she first came there, for the home was two or three hundred miles from where she had lived, and coming there had meant giving up her circle of friends and supporters at home, except for the mail and an occasional visitor. But she was a naturally happy person, and she soon bounced back from her sorrow and seemed to blossom in her new setting. One day as I sat in her little apartment among the photographs and other reminders of her long life in another community, I commented on how much she had had to give up to come and live where she was.

“Yes,” she said, looking around at the mementoes and smiling with sweet sadness. “But oh,” she said, “I wouldn’t have missed making all these new friends for anything!” And she began listing the people we both knew in the home who had become her new family, and telling me she couldn’t imagine not having met them and living with them now.

She had learned that everything in life is on loan to us. We enjoy it while we have it, and then, without grasping let it go in order to go on to the new people and things that flow into our lives.

The picture of life this philosophy offers us is one of utter graciousness. That is, it speaks of a God who has made a vast and generously supplied creation and then has set us in it to be witnesses to it and enjoy it all our lives. We don’t own anything in life, even the things we think we own, for they can all he taken away from us in a minute. What we have, we can lose in an instant. But the world is so large and filled with such abundance that, if we learn to marvel at it and enjoy what is on loan to us, there will always he more to replace what passes through our hands. Haven’t you noticed that? God is the source of all grace.

And that brings us around again to the father in the parable. We can’t help thinking of him as God, can we? Jesus surely knew we would when he told the story. God wants his wayward children home. But this raises a question: Are things sometimes on loan even to God? If the younger son was on loan to the father and the elder son in the story, then are we human beings in some way on loan to the heavenly Father and to each other?

It isn’t as silly a question as it might at first appear, because God gives us all the kind of freedom the father in the story gave his son. That is, God permits our journeys into the far country, and our “dissolute living” as the Bible puts it-or “riotous living,” as the old King James Bible had it. There is a sense, at least, in which we are all “on loan” to God the Father, and “on loan” to one another. God and others don’t simply possess us. They don’t have us like a piece of furniture or a piece of land. We are free to do what we want with our lives, to make them God’s and other people’s or to keep them away from them. So God rejoices in our return, just as the father in the story rejoices when his son comes home. God’s children who were lost become found, and, when they were dead, become alive again.

The loan deal, then, works two ways. People and things are on loan to us, and we are on loan to God and other people. And while it is not in our power to own or keep the things that are loaned to us, it is in our power to see that our lives are always available to God and other people. The prodigal son had the ability to make his father happy-and his brother too, if his brother hadn’t been so self-centered. And when he made himself available by coming home, he did precisely what Jesus thought he should do, and gladdened the heart of his father.

There has to be a lesson in that for us. We are set in the world to enjoy what God puts in our hands-what is loaned to us for however long we have it. And we are put here as well to make ourselves available to God and to others. And if we do both of these things, our pilgrimage will he good and happy, and we will feel deeply blessed and rewarded by it!

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Interview with John Killinger Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: John, your compelling message begins with your quoting the book, Praying Your Goodbyes, which talks about life as a pilgrimage in which we are constantly losing our loved ones, our possessions, and replacing them with new. But they don’t belong to us. When was that understanding first revealed to you personally?

John Killinger: That’s hard to say. I suppose when I lost a sister when I was almost twelve years old. I suppose that was the first realization of that. But as we get older, it seems to come to us much more rapidly, doesn’t it? I mean, life is just melting away from us all the time and being restored in new people and things in our lives. It’s a wonderful world if you can just accept that premise.

Talbot: When you lost your sister, where were you on your faith journey? I mean where were you, theologically, in terms of being able to make that kind of affirmation that you talk about?

Killinger: I had just become a Christian about a year before that so that I had a confidence that my sister was with God. It wasn’t a sense that her death was a finality in the way it might have been had I not had that faith.

Talbot: When I read your message to my mother, her first words were, “Well, one thing flows into another.” And for someone to be able to grasp that understanding of the cycle of life and death…

Killinger: A lot of our friends in Eastern religions have known that for perhaps longer than some of us Westerners. Life does have this way of just trickling along into other things and if we can just ride with it or “go with the flow,” as they say.

Talbot: But letting go doesn’t really mean forgetting.

Killinger: Oh, not at all. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize that memory is one of the most precious gifts we have. And I think when we see persons with senility or Alzheimer’s or something like that, one of the tragic aspects is that they are no longer able to hold on to the gifts they had.

Talbot: I have to refer to a special gift we have in your new book, Preaching the New Millennium. Say a word about that.

Killinger: It is primarily a book for preachers and teachers who want to emphasize the new millennium as a way of getting into the consciousness of their people and taking advantage of that to talk about the message of Christ.

Talbot: And as you have conveyed in incarnation themes in many of your writings-over fifty books-what is the incarnational message for Christ in a new millennium?

Killinger: I think that Christ is being made incarnate all the time in our midst. We celebrate Easter and Christmas, we keep perpetuating the Christ event in our midst, and by becoming little Christs, as Luther said.

Talbot: Thank you so much for that compelling message, John Killinger.