This sermon was preached on the last Sunday during the Olympic Games, 2016. A picture of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio standing against a bright blue sky was projected onto the screen behind the preacher throughout the sermon. Earlier in the sermon we had listened to the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).

This Sunday feels a little bit different. It’s the last but one Sunday and the church’s year and numbers are down in the middle of the summer holidays. It just feels an opportunity to do something a little bit different. So instead of being led in our thoughts by a passage from scripture I want us to be led by a work of engineering and art.

I think this can be very useful every so often. When most of us, who’ve been in the church for some time, read the Bible we do so with some theological baggage. We have conceptions about what the passage should mean and how we should approach it. When we approach God through a work of art we can be liberated from some of that baggage and maybe think a little more broadly and creatively. Any of you who have been to John’s film based discussions will know that those films provoke very different conversations to those that arise in most Bible study sessions.

So as you’ll have gathered from the time we’ve already shared with the children we are going to reflect on the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio. It was proposed in the early 1920s by a Catholic church that was beginning to feel its influence wane partly as a result of the increasing influence of Protestantism, and partly through a trend to a more secular society. It was also a reaction to the horrors of the previous decade in Europe and a desire to provide a focus for Catholicism within Brazil. After several design changes and a major engineering challenge it was officially opened on 12^th October 1931.

Christ the redeemer is about redemption. Having commented earlier on about theological baggage there can be no more baggage laden word in the whole of theology, particularly for Protestants. We are all fallen, needing salvation, we can only receive this through faith in Jesus. If we do we are saved. Different people will have a different view of what it means to be saved but the majority of Christians probably still relate this to a promise of eternal life. Many of us will also claim a strong association between faith in Jesus and coming to church and we thus end up in the rather comfortable position that those of us who have faith and come to church will be saved whereas all those who don’t and stay away won’t.

Except it’s not that comfortable is it? Almost all of us will have close friends and relations who we love but who don’t share our faith in Christ. We may be saved but what will happen to them?

Many of us will have tried to raise our children to know Jesus and have faith in him. Many of us, to put it bluntly, have failed in this (including myself). It is difficult to rejoice in your own salvation and still worry about that of you children.

There is an opposite challenge of course for those of us who come to faith from non-Christian families. They will know the joy of faith in Jesus but will almost certainly have parents or siblings who have no interest in Jesus and his offer of redemption.

All of us here, no matter how sure we may be of our own salvation, will have doubts and concerns about that of people we love. This may be exacerbated if we’ve got specific views about what might happen in any afterlife. In extreme if we believe that those who have been saved will pass to one place and those who have not may pass to another.

I’m just going to pause and let you reflect on the people that you love in your life yet who do not share your faith.

But then look at this statue – Do we see judgement? Do we see a division of the population of the world into those who have been saved and those who have not been saved? I don’t think so. I think we see love and acceptance for all. Those arms don’t offer a different welcome for the saint and the sinner, they offer the same welcome.

I’ve picked the parable for this morning’s reading partly because it is a work of art. It is a story that someone (presumably Jesus) made up. There is absolutely no pretence that it is true in any historical sense. It has been created in the same sense that a statue has been created – it is work of fiction and a work of art. Yet it embodies truth – it speaks to us.

It speaks the same message as the statue. It is a message of unconditional love of the father. In protestant theology we tend to think that the young man is saved because he come home. But he isn’t really – his father loves him, and will continue to love him, whether he comes home or not. If the son had not come home, the father would still be waiting. While the story is traditionally known as the parable of the Prodigal Son it is also known as that of the Loving Father, I know which I prefer.

The father’s love was so deep that every day he went and looked down the road, waiting, with arms outstretched for a son he loved. The son is saved not because of anything that the son has done but because of the father’s love. Those open arms, have been replicated to perfection, in this statue.

So let’s pause again and reflect on all those people who we love yet do not recognise the love of God.

Let’s be guided by the truth embedded in this statue. They are not excluded from God’s love, no-one is excluded from God’s love, they have just failed to recognise it. Those of us who do recognise that love, live in a different way. We live in relationship with God and our lives are blessed by this. We can feel sorrow for our unbelieving family and friends that the do not experience the joy of the relationship with God that we have, but let us not be concerned that anything awful is going to happen to them. It cannot because God loves them every bit as much as he loves us. His arms, like those of this stature, are open to all, and always will be. For this we give thanks – Amen.