Keith Green was a teenage runaway. A doped-up hippie. A sexual degenerate who embraced "free love" and a heretic who was into eastern mysticism.
Runaway, junkie, hippie, degenerate, heretic. These are the labels "good" people back home likely put on him.
A few years later, Keith would give his life to Christ. He and his wife would take strangers into their home who needed help getting clean. They would launch Last Days Ministries. Many would find hope in Christ through Keith's music.
But before all that ... do you think the folks back home were right about Keith at the time? Was Keith a degenerate until he started doing something good with his life?
JESUS, DEGENERATE BY ASSOCIATION
If so, your thinking would be right in line with the Pharisees of Jesus' day. When they saw Jesus eating with "sinners" in Luke 15 - prostitutes, tax collectors (thieves, basically), and other "degenerates" - they judged him for consorting with people whom they thought should be ashamed of themselves.
Jesus disagreed. He explained why in a series of parables in which it was something viewed as lost that was treated as most precious. He told them about a shepherd who rejoices over one lost sheep more than any of his other ninety-nine; and about a lost coin a woman rejoices over when she finds it.
Then he told the parable of the Prodigal Son (or the Lost Son). In it, a young man just like Keith Green runs away from home. He squanders his wealth. He grows desperate and hungry and begins thinking about how his father's servants eat better than this. He decides to go back and beg to be made a lowly servant.
You may have heard this story before. You know the father doesn't make him a servant. He accepts his son with open arms. He is overjoyed - like the woman and her one coin, the shepherd and his one sheep - and even throws a party.
But knowing the end of the story makes it easy to believe the lost son was worthy of love all along. It's easy for us to look back at Keith Green's life and recognize his worth. It was easy for Keith to look back at his own life and draw the same conclusion.
It is far harder to see worth in those who are lost, ourselves included, in the midst of being lost. The easiest thing for all of us to embrace is shame.
WE PREFER TO BE ASHAMED
The lost son did not want his father's love. It didn't even occur to him that was on the table. He was operating on a system of shame. Here's how that works.
"I am in control. I did something bad. That means I'm a bad person until I fix it."
The only way the lost son knew how to fix his situation was to beg to be a servant. Believing he was in control over his own salvation, he made a plan to live in shame for the rest of his life so that he could perhaps earn redemption by the end of it.
When someone says to you, "You should be ashamed of yourself," this is what they mean. They want you to make a plan just like the lost son. Go to God as a lowly servant. Beg for forgiveness, take what you can get, and don't expect anything beyond what you can imagine you deserve.
This is what the Pharisees believed. They thought those Jesus spent his time with should be ashamed of themselves rather than dining with a rabbi. They should be begging for whatever scraps they could get, not sitting at the table like equals with a teacher.
They thought Jesus should be ashamed of himself for associating with them. We often think the exact same thing about ourselves.
We believe that if we can find the parts of ourselves we should feel ashamed about, we can fix them. Shame makes us feel in control. It means we'll have to live like servants rather than children of God, but at least everything will go according to plan.
Jesus's parable of the Lost Son show us how God's love ruins our plans.
"So he got up and went to his father.
"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate." (Luke 15: 20-24)
That's not what the son wanted! He didn't want his father to make a fuss for him. He didn't want anything he did not deserve. The son had done nothing to earn this celebration.
We sometimes don't like God's love for us because we can't control it. It can be more comforting to think we can make God give up on us because it means we can make God do something, anything.
Keith Green was raised in Christian Science, a sect that sees God as a force we can control through prayer to heal when and how we desire. He had little reason to believe God is a person who loved him without him having to do anything at all.
Yet, that's exactly what he came to realize. Keith repented of his sins as we are all called to do. But repentance happened after he understood God already loved him, not before. There was no shame required.
God never prescribes shame for us. He only wants us to see that he already loves us and then make healthy choices. Not to earn anything. Just so we can have joy.
WE PREFER TO BE SHAMING
If our stories don't resemble Keith Green's, we all have seen others go through something similar. Maybe it was a friend or a family member. Maybe it was a stranger we met on the street. Whoever it was, at some point we saw what they were doing with their life and said, "They ought to be ashamed of themselves."
That's exactly what the older brother in Jesus' story did. He saw his little brother get all this attention after squandering his inheritance and was enraged. Where was his party, he wondered? Where was the celebration of his years of loyal service to his father?
We understand this reaction so well, don't we? The labels we put on others are so comforting. We see others as lazy drunks, junkies, party animals, undeserving of anyone's help until they get their act together ... and when we see them smiling and laughing, maybe on Facebook, it makes us quietly furious.
Why don't they look ashamed? we wonder.
Suddenly, we hear that they've gotten a job. Maybe they got married and bought a house. We wonder, how come everything is suddenly coming so easy for them? Here I am working hard, slogging away. What have they done to deserve happiness?
To make sure the world is as we think it should be, we make sure to tell others about their past. "They may look good now," we say, "but do you know what they used to be into? Do you know how bad they really are underneath?"
This is the true aim of gossip. It's such a relief when we have the opportunity to shame others, to put them back into their place. It restores our sense of control. We think that we can take others down a peg or two, we can elevate ourselves just a bit.
Unfortunately, God thwarts our efforts to control how much he blesses others. His love does not bow to our wishes. To us, God says what the father in the story tells his older son:
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” (Luke 15:31)
People criticized Keith Green's ministry. Some in the Christian music industry thought he was offering free concerts to make others who charged for their music look bad. Though his bio doesn't say so, it's likely others looked at his youth and his past to dismiss him as a hippie who didn't deserve all the attention he was getting.
You can imagine the comments. "Of course you can get 12,000 people to come to a concert if you're not charging them for it. Maybe if he'd gone to business school instead of hanging out with junkies ..."
We are not in control of God's love. We have no say in God's blessings. Every one of us gets more than we deserve, and often, God gives others more than we think they deserve.
Those are the lessons of the story of the Lost Son that Jesus wanted the Pharisees and everyone around to understand. God's love is greater than any of us can fathom. It is confounding. It doesn't work the way we think it should.
WE MAY NOT LIKE IT, BUT IT'S OUR ONLY HOPE
Precisely because it doesn't work like we think it should, God's love is the only real hope for any of us.
Remember this every time you start to think any of us should be ashamed of ourselves: Jesus tells us there is no hope in shame. The shame system that gives us control over what God does for us or for others is a myth, a complete, dirty lie.
Our hope instead is trusting God to love all of us without reason, limit or condition, and to bless us beyond what any one of us could secure for ourselves. No shame required.