Lent 4C
March 6, 2016
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
I’ve been
very aware this week of being at the halfway point in our journey. Halfway can
be a really good thing – it feels like an accomplishment, gives you a marker,
and an enthusiasm to keep going. But it can also be a really tiring thing,
because it makes you feel sort of… lost. You’re right in the thick of it.
You’re as far from the beginning as you are from the end, and so you have to
keep going somewhere: keep going through the end, or revert back to where you
were when you started. I saw a video recently of this horrifying new glass
suspension bridge in China. It is 600 feet above the valley floor beneath, and
nearly 1000 feet long, and due to its height and length, it gently sways, even
as you can see the distance down below your feet. Can you imagine being halfway
across that? As far from the beginning as you are from the end? Yeesh,
heebie-jeebies!
My feelings
of being halfway through the Lenten journey are not quite that extreme, of
course. But they are worth noticing. I am profoundly aware – more so now that
we’re halfway through than I was when we began – of what it is like to be
wandering.
Wandering
can take many forms in our lives. Maybe we are like the Israelites in the
wilderness, searching for a place to call home, even as we learn, day by day,
more about who we are and who God is calling us to be in this world. I have
seen this in people who bounce from job to job, relationship to relationship,
and even town to town, searching for something that feels life-giving and
comfortable, before finally landing somewhere that feels like the right place,
the place God has called you.
Or maybe we are wanderers like the
younger brother in today’s famous parable of the prodigal son, who leaves the
safety and comfort of his home and his family to wander in search of something
more interesting, only to discover that what he sought was back where he
started. If I recall, I felt this as one of the symptoms of the “senior-itis” I
contracted my senior year in high school, and then had a recurrence my last
year in college. Both times, I felt a need to figure out something about
myself, and I knew that I wouldn’t find it where I was, but that if I went
looking, I might figure out it. Though I didn’t engage in “dissolute living”
like the son in the story, I did go 2000 miles away from home to college, and
then upped the ante and went to even further, all the way to Slovakia, for a
year after college. And after all that, I ended up back at my dad’s alma mater,
pursuing the very same career in ministry that three generations in my family
had before me. Like the prodigal son, I eventually came home: back to what was
familiar to me.
Or maybe your wandering is only in
your mind, as your body stays in one place – like the older brother in today’s
parable. He dutifully stays home, working hard for his father like he is
supposed to, but his reaction to his brother’s antics and free spirit point to
his resentment of this fact. I wonder if he spent his days dreaming of having
the courage to leave, too? I wonder if his resentment of his brother is really
jealousy, because he feels trapped where he is, but longs to venture out on
some wandering of his own?
Whatever form
it takes, wandering can be exciting, but it can also be terribly lonely, and at
the end of the day it can leave you feeling like you don’t belong anywhere or
to anyone, that you don’t really have a home. And home, and a genuine sense of
belonging – is that not what we all, ultimately, long for? How, then, do we get
there? How can we even know what home and belonging look like?
Today’s
famous parable helps us figure it out. The Prodigal Son, of course, of one of
the most
well-known and one of the richest of Jesus’ parables. It’s got
rebellion, scandal, disappointment, jealousy, resentment – all these things
that are all too familiar in our broken, human experience – and of course, it
ends with not one, but two extravagant expressions of love and grace. A wayward
son makes his way back home, literally covered in the stinking shame of his
mistakes (presumably, he didn’t get a shower before his last day feeding the
pigs!). He is unclean: physically, spiritually, and ritually. He is also
prepared with a speech outlining his wrong-doing, in which he will ask his
father to take him back, not into the position he previously held, as a son and
inheritor, but as a mere hired hand. He assumed home would have to be something
different now. But to our shock, and the shock of anyone watching, this
dignified landowner does the most undignified thing possible: he runs out to
meet his pig feces-covered son and throws his arms around him. He plans a grand
celebration for his return. He dresses him in fine array.
 |
| Rembrandt's famous portrayal of The Return of the Prodigal Son |
He is home,
and home looks like nothing he could have imagined or hoped for. It looks like
undeserved forgiveness. It looks like extravagant celebration. It looks like
immediate belonging. I think this would all be a lot to take for this man who
expected only to become a hired hand for the man he had betrayed!
But the
extravagance doesn’t end there. Not everyone is happy about the return of the
lost son. I’m sure many of us identify with the older brother, watching the
father’s response and thinking, “But that’s not fair.” Now it is no longer the
younger son who is lost, but the older. He had an idea of what home, what life,
should be like, and that was duty and righteousness. You work hard, and you get
what you deserve. And now the father was throwing that all away in his lavish
welcome of this younger son who was not dutiful, nor righteous. We humans have
a strong reaction to things that “aren’t fair.” Just this week in confirmation,
we were talking about things that make us mad, and pretty much everyone agreed
that one thing that makes us mad is when things aren’t fair – whether that is
on a small scale, like you do something nice and don’t get credit for it, or a
large scale, like an entire town getting lead poisoning from their water
because the elected leaders wanted to save a few bucks. Life should be fair,
and we do not like it when it isn’t. It makes us mad, like it did the older
brother when his father extended such a warm and celebratory welcome to this
irresponsible prodigal.
Yet even in
the midst of this older son’s anger and resentment, the father extends radical
welcome to him, too. He goes to the son. He invites him to join the
celebration. He, the father, wants all to be at home, wants all of his children
in his embrace – both those who are extreme and obvious in their wandering, and
those who only wander in their minds, as they stew about how the world is not
how it should be and blame everyone else for that reality.
Because you
see, this is home. This is belonging.
It is being welcomed even when you don’t
deserve welcome. It is God opening his
arms to receive you just as soon as you appear on the horizon. It is being
accepted and invited, even by a God who sees the resentment in your heart. It
is those words we hear at the beginning of worship: “your sins are forgiven.”
It is coming forward to this feast, this celebration, putting your hands out,
and knowing that whether you deserve it or not (and let’s be honest, none of us
really deserve this), God is going to offer you grace, love, and belonging in
this family of Christ. The home that God welcomes us into is full of scandal –
it is the scandal of welcoming sinners and prodigals, and guilt-ridden
repentants who are covered head to foot in their shame, and those who fancy
themselves righteous but who, in fact, stand back to silently judge the others.
That God would open arms to all of those – all of us – and celebrate our return
home is indeed a scandal that is not in any way fair. But grace is not fair.
That’s why all of us are welcome here: because God’s invitation for us to come
home is bigger and more gracious than we could ever imagine or hope for.
Let us pray…
Prodigal God, you are irresponsibly
gracious, extravagantly loving, and indiscriminately welcoming – even though we
don’t deserve any of it. Bring us into your loving embrace, and as you make us
grateful that we find our home in you, also help us to extend that sense of
home and belonging to all of your children. In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment