Sermons

Prodigal Revisited

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
March 18, 2007                    Luke 15:1-32

Speaking of colored rubber bracelets (a tongue twister I am retiring after this morning), we mentioned last week purple ones given out by a church in the Missouri area. They say, “No complaining, no whining.” People were intrigued by that prospect a Sunday ago. Had I been wearing one of those purple bracelets, however, I would have needed to bury it deep in the ground, never to find it again, in light of my latest airport experience.

Needless to say, I missed the flight and spent an extra night in Cincinnati (which isn’t really Cincinnati, but western Kentucky, which is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds). The night before, prior to the wonderful woman at the Delta counter telling me I had missed my flight, I was pleading with her to find a way for me to get home. I suggested every alternate route. “Get me to Syracuse!” “Get me to Buffalo!” “Get me to Toronto. I’ll get home from there,” I said. And then at the end I played the card I don’t play too often at airports, “I just want to get home to see my family.” And I meant it. And she knew I did.

There was a woman standing behind me in line. She heard me say that to the counter assistant, and said, to no one in particular (though we all overheard it) with a combination of humor and dread and brutal honesty, “Not getting home to my family” --- which we learned later included children of 17 and 24 --- “not getting home to my family is the best reason not to complain about a missed flight.” [Laughter] We looked at her, and one another, and wondered “Is that what she really said to us?”

***

We don’t know what it was like to be that character, the father, in the story that Jesus tells us this morning. We call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and along with the Good Samaritan Parable, it serves as the heart of Jesus’ gospel story to us. The words are familiar, perhaps a little too familiar. May we overhear it again today as if for the first time.

It’s an extraordinarily truthful and powerful story, experienced, perhaps, from many perspectives.

The biblical scholar Richard Rohrbaugh has written an article called “A Dysfunctional Family and Its Neighbors” to help interpret the Prodigal Son. Rohrbaugh insists the story isn’t really about that prodigal son, but a beleaguered father with “two equally lousy sons.” He asserts that the father is actually the story’s main character, who struggles to reconcile everyone so that the family can simply survive. Rohrbaugh insists that the key is to resist the parallel that I’m going to make in just a few moments between the father and God. He insists that Jesus called people to change their behavior radically, even the father in the story, to be fools for the sake of the kingdom of God.

This parable is an interpreter’s delight. I’m not so sure about that last one. We need to remember that in the context of this chapter in Luke’s gospel, Jesus has told us already about a lost coin, and a lost sheep, God’s incredible efforts to track down the minority of one, even when the majority is safely at home.

Kenneth Bailey is a Presbyterian biblical scholar who lived for many years in the Middle East. He’s written with great insight about the parables of Jesus. Ken Bailey invites us to understand these parables in the context of the culture in which they were told; that is, the Middle Eastern context. He reminds us that the younger son, in making the demand for the inheritance, treats his father as if he were already dead. The older son accepts that reality, and even more so, is disrespectful toward his father upon his brother’s return by refusing to make entrance into the party.

Then there’s the father, about whom Ken Bailey writes quite a bit. The father, a respectable man in Middle Eastern society, never runs. So to portray him running as Jesus does toward his returning son is an extraordinary, extraordinary gesture of compassion and hope. The father accepts public humiliation by running down the roadway to greet his son, and even throws a party for the community, who surely would be looking at this example in this story with curiosity and wonder, if not a little bit of consternation.

The writer Patrick Dooley, in a wonderful little essay, connects the story of the Prodigal Son to the story Norman Maclean writes in the wonderful novella called A River Runs Through It. Dooley detects a parallel theme between what happens to the younger son in Maclean’s family story and the younger son in the Prodigal Son parable. There’s tragedy and heartache, complex family dynamics and relationships. Dooley says that Jesus’ lessons in this parable call attention to a wide range of complex relationships. The dynamics between the father and the younger brother, the dynamics between the father and the older brother, how the father and older brother deal with each other and with the younger son, and how all three of them confront the reality that while the older brother is sane, sensible, and responsible, the rash, profligate, and irresponsible son is nonetheless the favored one.

I’ve always viewed this as an extraordinarily honest parable, honest to the human condition, honest about the way God acts with us and for us. We come from every kind of family constellation. We are not God, but nonetheless do we resonate with the father’s plight. We’ve yet to encounter the perfect family. If yours is, let me know, and we would all like to take notes about it! Every family has complex dynamics. Every family has aspirations and dreams that come into contact with reality and lead to disappointment.

And regardless of our family constellation at the present moment, we all leave home and we all stay home in all manner of ways, not just when we’re 16 or 18 or 21, but in every era of our lives, in our 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, 70s, and 80s and 90s, remembering the family from which we came, as we overlay the rest of our life experiences on those old, old stories.

Do we not also, whether we are parents or not, seek to influence the behavior of others, and realize that our own behavior is all that we can change? And we have trouble enough doing that.

There are some points in our lives and in our living when we’re the younger brother. We are rebellious. And even when we are not quite able to be rebellious, we become rebellious about our lack of rebelliousness! Or at some points in our lives and in our living when we are the older brother, responsible and yet resentful about all the accountability and responsibility that is a part of our lives.

We might not get every nuance of this story, and yet Jesus tells it to us and teaches it to us, and the Spirit opens it up to our living. It’s a parable about forgiveness; that is certainly the case. But at its heart it is a parable about love, about a parent’s suffering and agonizing love for their children, about a father or a mother who never says “I told you so,” about the lengths that parental love will go, the agonizing lengths, to risk public humiliation, to risk poverty even, to risk losing the safe love of the older sibling.

If you are ever in a small group setting, read this story. Like the movie whose title you didn’t quite understand, give it an alternative title. Might it be something like the parable of The Jealous Brother, or The Compassionate Father, or The Welcoming Parent, alongside the familiar Prodigal Son.

The writer Oliver McCarran says that the stories about God’s love for us, a love that we should try to reflect in all our human relationships. God’s is a love that allows us space to make mistakes, a love that is not jealous, possessive, or intrusive. That doesn’t mean that God is indifferent to our plight. “Whatever our human condition, be it self-induced through ignorance or arrogance, we remain lovable in the eyes of a God who is always ready to embrace us unconditionally.” Which is worth repeating. We remain lovable in the eyes of a God who is always ready to embrace us unconditionally.

I believe that. I believe that’s the heart of the gospel that claims us and that we profess, that God loves you and me and all of us together unconditionally, not because we are so lovable --- that would be easy --- but because we are not so lovable. “Love to the loveless shown,” we have sung, and that is the truth of the gospel.

And so the invitation, especially in this Lenten season when we think more directly and deeply about these things, is to accept the good news that you are loved by a love that will not let you go. And because we are loved, because we are loved, God calls us to love. God calls us to love the unlovable.

It is a difficult calling, not always clear. Reflecting years after his younger brother’s death, Normal Maclean writes that we can love completely, without complete understanding. And that is the case. Because we are loved we are called to love, whether in the close proximity of our families, or the interesting boundaries of the church, or an obnoxious traveler at an airplane terminal, or the stranger, or even as Jesus commands us, to love our enemies.

We do not understand it, yet we are embraced by it. We do not deserve it, yet we receive it. Wondrous, wondrous love, that gives us an inheritance even when we have not earned it. Wondrous love, that grieves deeply when we are lost and celebrates lavishly when we are found. Wondrous, wondrous love, all loves excelling, that runs to welcome us home, time after time after time, and every time. Thank God. Amen.