Lent 4C
March 31, 2019
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
INTRODUCTION
Today’s
readings are about wandering, straying away, and finding our way back home.
They are about what “home” looks like. They are about God’s abundant and
surprising grace.
Let’s give some
context. The reading from Joshua marks the end of 40 years of the Israelites
wandering in the wilderness. You see, after Moses led them out of slavery in
Egypt, and toward the Promised Land, God discovered that they really needed a
little more time to sort of reset before settling in said Promised Land, the
land of Canaan, some time to let the old generation die before starting fresh
with a new generation in a new land. In today’s reading, for the first time,
the Israelites will eat of the land of Canaan, rather than the manna God has
been providing, that sustained them for 40 years of wandering in the
wilderness. It is a new and exciting moment in their life!
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
he speaks to a new Christian community that has some serious infighting, and he
tells them a bit about what it can look like to be reconciled – which is its
own sort of homecoming.
And of course we will also hear the
famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the tale of a son who literally wandered
away from his father, and his brother who stayed, but with a troubled spirit.
This parable is the third in a series of “lost” parables, in which something is
lost and then found, and the finder celebrates in an extravagant and frankly
ridiculous way – the same way that God behaves when the likes of us find our
own way back to God’s loving embrace.
As you listen, consider the ways you
have felt lost, either physically or spiritually, and how it felt, or maybe
feels, in that lost place, and then, how it would feel to be found again. Let’s
listen.
[READ]
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| Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son |
It’s such a simple story, really: a son leaves home with his inheritance, makes the irresponsible choices of a young man figuring out the world, and comes back home. His father welcomes him back, and his older, more responsible brother, is mad. It is a tale of difficult family dynamics, of wayward children figuring out life, of sibling rivalry, of how it feels to fiercely love someone and wish they would come home, of gratitude and love and welcome, of envy and resentment. It is a story of forgiveness, or one of lack of forgiveness. It is a story of repentance, or at least of regret.
It is, really, a story about us, about our
lives, about some of the very same feelings that we feel all the time. It is
easy to find ourselves in each of these characters. Some of us fancy ourselves
to be the responsible one, the one who fulfills our duty, who does things
right, who makes good choices, but doesn’t always feel we’ve gotten what we
rightfully deserve. Some of us have sown our wild oats, and explored the world,
and had our fun and made bad choices and were irresponsible (or perhaps, we long
to do all that!), but eventually we came to ourselves and got our lives back on
track. Some of us are estranged from our siblings, or our parents, or our
children. Some of us eagerly watch the horizon, waiting for a loved one to
return to us in body or spirit. Some of us look at life and think, “This is
simply not fair. That person does not deserve that good thing – I do!” Some of
us have been forgiven for things we should never have been forgiven for, and
yet remain so riddled with guilt, that we still struggle to accept that
forgiveness. Some of us are angry. Some of us are confused. Some of us are resentful
about something from our past, or our present. Some of us just really need a
warm embrace.
Yes, this story
is about us, and on any given day or year, we may find ourselves in a different
character. I know I do! They are all so different, and bring up so many
different things in us.
But even as
they are so different, they are also, in some ways, the same. The differences
are obvious – one brother is irresponsible and leaves home but then repents and
returns home. He is lost and then found. The other is dutiful and responsible,
a model son, and he stays home. But I have begun to wonder if both sons in this
story are, in fact, lost.
That’s silly,
you may think. The older son isn’t lost. He never even leaves home! He knows
his place, and he fulfills his duties. Yes, on the surface, and physically
speaking, he is not lost. The lostness of the younger son is much more obvious.
And yet, it is the older son who is riddled with resentment, with anger, with
envy. It is the older son who refuses to go to the party, and must be
explicitly invited into the father’s joy. It is the older son who will not even
claim his brother or his father as his own, instead referring to his brother
as, “this son of yours….” It is the older son who has probably spent the years
since his brother left wallowing in his own self-righteousness about how he,
and he alone, has fulfilled his duty.
Any one of
those things, really, would be enough to put distance between the elder son and
his father and brother. More significantly for us, any one of those things
would be enough to put distance between us and our God. These are the things –
resentment, envy, self-righteousness, anger, unwillingness to forgive – that
keep us from having a loving and joyful relationship with God. They are the
things that cause us to be lost and estranged from God.
Henri Nouwen
wrote a beautiful little book on this parable, and particularly on Rembrandt’s
depiction of it in his Return of the
Prodigal Son. The way that Nouwen reflects on how much of himself he sees
in the elder son helped me to see myself there, too. Reading Nouwen’s vulnerable
and self-disclosing reflections on this parable, I began to see in myself the
harbored resentment I sometimes feel, that I always try to do the right thing,
and yet see others who are less responsible get rewarded (even, I sometimes
tell myself, rewarded on my back, and to my detriment!). I saw in myself how
much I sometimes crave recognition for the good I do, so that sometimes my
altruism turns to self-righteousness and arrogance. I began to recognize that because
of my obedience and good works and good choices, it becomes very easy for me to
slip into judgment of other people’s bad choices, to see myself as not too sinful,
and see all of the specks in others’ eyes with great clarity. With each
recognition of the ways I am like the elder brother – and not in a good way – I
began to see myself as more and more lost, more and more in need of being
found.
It was easier,
I think, for the younger son to be found. He had to eat some humble pie, of
course, and admit to the man he had wronged that he’d made a dreadful mistake,
and that task is certainly hard work. But it is at least straightforward. The
older son will have a lot harder time coming home, because in his mind, he is
already there. In his mind he has done nothing wrong, there is nothing he needs
forgiveness for, no need for repentance, no need for reconciliation, because he
has been doing the right thing all along, and if his brother didn’t do the
right thing, well, that’s not his problem is it? There’s nothing he needs to
change or repent!
And yet, he does have a problem, because he is not
happy. He is not joyful, because joy and resentment cannot co-exist. He is
carrying around all this pain and anger and self-righteousness, and it is
damaging to his relationships with those closest to him, and to his
relationship with God. He is lost.
I heard a TED
Talk recently about a woman, Elizabeth Lesser, who finds out she is the perfect
match for the bone marrow transplant that could save her sister’s life. When
she does some research on the procedure, she learns that her sister’s body
could reject her cells, or her cells could attack her sister’s body. “Rejection
and attack,” she thought. “Sounds just like our relationship.” They had
experienced some rift a few years back, and had as a result developed all kinds
of assumptions about each other, and started telling themselves stories about
each other, about why the other was the way she was. With those stories and
assumptions came blame and shame, and the divide grew deeper. So Elizabeth went
to her sister and said, “After this transplant, the blood flowing through your
veins will be my blood. So I think we better work on our relationship!” They
agreed to sit through several therapy sessions, during which they faced head on
any pain they had caused each other, and instead of rejection or attack, they
worked to listen, forgive, and even merge, in hopes that if their souls could
do that, so could their cells. They discovered that they had been carting
around all kinds of made-up stories about each other, stories that had kept
them separate, stories that had robbed them of joy, stories that had kept them
lost from each other. By the time they had sorted through all that lostness,
she said, and looked at and released all those stories and assumptions from
their past, all that was left was love. They had, once again, found each other.
They had come home.
Neither of them
had done anything wrong, per se. They were human, with normal, broken, human
relationships. It was not until they were found that they even realized they
had been lost! Could that happen with the elder brother in our story? Could it
happen for us? If so, how?
Henri Nouwen
has some suggestions. The first thing we must remember, he says, is that we
are, as the prayer of confession many of us know by heart says, “captive to sin
and cannot free ourselves.” There is nothing we can do to liberate ourselves from our anger and resentment.
We cannot find ourselves. But, we can, and must, trust that God wants to find
us, that God wants us to come home, and that God would (and did) do anything to
draw us into a warm embrace. We can remind ourselves every day, “God is looking
for me. God loves me, and wants me home, and will not rest until I am found.”
The second part
to finding our way home, Nouwen says, is gratitude, which is the opposite of resentment.
He writes, “The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge
that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be
celebrated with joy.” And that gratitude – it is a discipline, not a fleeting,
incidental thought, but a practice to be done each day, even and especially
when we do not feel like it. It is seeking gratitude even and especially in
people, relationships and situations that make us feel resentful or angry –
because again, gratitude and resentment cannot coexist. We might find, as we
get more proficient at the practice of gratitude, that our resentments begin to
melt away, that our anger dissipates, that in fact we begin to love, and find
joy. We might find that we are home.
And this is
God’s dearest hope for us: like the father in the story, our heavenly Father
urges us to join the party, to partake of his joy, to celebrate that in Him we
are always home. God’s love for us does not depend upon our accepting that
invitation – the father will love the elder son whether or not he joins the
party – but because God does love us so, God always wants us to live not
wallowing in resentments, judgments, and envy, but in the eternal joy that is
made possible by Jesus Christ. So let’s go home, brothers and sisters in
Christ, and we’ll have a party.
Let us pray… Welcoming Father, we sometimes hold onto
resentments and judgments of others without recognizing that they keep us away
from joyful relationship with you. Embrace us with the promise of your love, invite
us again and again into your joy, and help us to release all that which would
hold us back. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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