Listening to John Prine Sing About Boundless Love

If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

--1 John 1:9 NRSV

If you are looking for new music to listen to, I’m the last person you should ask.  I rely on friends who are music lovers to let me know who I should listen to.  Often I discover a band or an artist way after other people do.  A good example is John Prine, who died a month ago at age 74, from the Coronavirus.  Prine is an almost unclassifiable songwriter who usually gets described as folk, country or alt-country.  He was a songwriter’s songwriter who penned some of the greatest songs other great artists made hits out of.  Perhaps, his most well-known hit is “Angel From Montgomery” as sung by Bonnie Raitt, and also covered by everyone from Carly Simon to John Denver.  I’ve always known Prine’s music through my music-loving friends, but I rarely got around to listening to it much on my own.

Since his death, I’ve finally been listening to his music and I’ve found it an eloquent soundtrack to these days of the Coronavirus which are both slow but still filled with angst and sorrow.  I’ve been letting Prine’s last album, 2018’s Tree of Forgiveness sink in.  Now that Prine is dead, many people are drawn to the final song on the album, “When I Get to Heaven,” which is absolutely worth a listen, but I feel most deeply touched by the song “Boundless Love” which he wrote for his wife.

I woke up this morning to a garbage truck
Looks like this old horseshoe's done run out of luck
If I came home, would you let me in?
Fry me some pork chops and forgive my sin?

Surround me with your boundless love
Confound me with your boundless love
I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be
When you found me with your boundless love

Sometimes my old heart is like a washing machine
It bounces around 'til my soul comes clean
And when I'm clean and hung out to dry
I'm gonna make you laugh until you cry

Surround me with your boundless love
Confound me with your boundless love
I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be
When you found me with your boundless love

If by chance I should find myself at risk
A-falling from this jagged cliff
I look below, and I look above
I'm surrounded by your boundless love

Surround me with your boundless love
Confound me with your boundless love
I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be
When you found me with your boundless love

You dumbfound me with your boundless love
You surround me with your boundless love

I’m married to a pretty great wife too, who happens to be forgiving of my own washing machine-like heart, but she is the first person to remind me that if I’m looking for grace, she has a limit; only God’s grace will never end.  Thankfully, I haven’t reached her limit yet, but I know what she means.  In this life, one is always going to be disappointed by others.  Even our most loving relationships will not be perfect, will be broken at times and will hurt us.  Every time we invest another person, a job, an organization or an institution with the faith and trust that they will always be there for us, we set ourselves up to be heartbroken sometime or another.  The only one with truly boundless love is God.

We operate in this life with the delusion that we earn love.  If we are good enough, accomplish enough, give enough and love enough, then we will be worthy of the love we receive.  All my life in the church I’ve been taught about grace as an “unmerited gift” of God, yet in living that out I was also taught that I had to “accept” that gift and demonstrate I had received grace, turning the free gift into a transaction with all kinds of strings attached.  At other times, I’ve heard smug Christians teach about grace, but act as if they really have succeeded enough in life to earn it after all.  Rarely, have I known Christians who really lived out the mystery of God’s grace in their lives.

Often during communion, churches will have a time of confession, and read the verse from 1 John which says, “If we confess our sins, [God] who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Yet, even that seems conditional to me.  Only “if we confess” will we be cleansed?  What happens when we are in too much denial to confess our sins or what happens if we are too ashamed of what we have done and who we have hurt to confess?  Will God still forgive us and cleanse us then? 

Prine’s song, “Boundless Love,” gets at the scandalous truth that God’s grace and love extends to us even when we are at our worst and can offer nothing in return.  It feels so much better to believe we can do something that triggers God’s boundless love, and it offends our sensibilities, because we wish to make everything about us.  John Wesley said, "Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace." 

One of my favorite books is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  In it, one can find this powerful line, "Love is holy because it is like grace - the worthiness of its object is never really what matters."  That’s what I hear in Prine’s song.  I’m glad he felt he received “boundless love” from his wife, but I’ve spent my life trying to accept the hard truth that even the ones I love the most will hurt me and I will hurt them.  The only way I can muster the compassion for others’ faults even as I ask for them to show compassion for my many more faults is to find my security in God’s boundless love.  Everybody else’s love has a limit somewhere if I push them to it.

United Church of Christ minister, Anthony Robinson, writes, “We have imagined that Christianity itself is a religion of virtue. But no, Desmond Tutu reminded us, 'Christianity is not a religion of virtue; it is a religion of grace.' And there's a difference. A religion of virtue says, 'If you are good, then God will love you.' A religion of grace says, 'God loves you.' God loves you despite your foibles and failures, not because you're so good but as a sinner in need of mercy. God loves you; live then as one who is beloved, who has been forgiven.”

I have found preaching about living as God’s beloved who has been forgiven is easy; living as one who is beloved and forgiven seems nearly impossible.  I’d much rather live as if I’ve earned the love I receive.  It’s only when 

I find myself at risk 

A-falling from this jagged cliff

that I am forced to admit the mystery of God’s grace.  

I look below, and I look above 

I'm surrounded by your boundless love.

The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.”   I think that’s the idea John Prine was singing about with the words “Confound me with your boundless love” and “Dumbfound me with your boundless love.”