Sermons

The Waiting God

Roderic P. Frohman	Third Presbyterian Church
March 29, 2009	Luke 15:11-32

I have been motivated to preach about the parable Prodigal Son today because of the ongoing Lenten study on Wednesday evenings at 6 PM in Johnson Hall led by the Episcopal priest Miriam Owens. If you have missed these presentations thus far it's certainly not too late to join the study. Plus, for a donation of five dollars you can get wonderful soup supper too. Miriam is using perhaps the most profound literary tribute to this parable, a book by the Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, in which he parallels his own spiritual journey based upon an encounter with Rembrandt’s painting of the same title.

Rembrandt and many other artists depicted the prodigal son, not only in painting but on stage and even in popular music. And I will date myself to remind you all that the Rolling Stones depicted the prodigal son in the 1968 album, Beggars Banquet. It should be noted that from that album I did get satisfaction.

The parable of the Prodigal son is probably one of the most familiar parables in all of the New Testament. It is therefore very easy to read and assume that we will get the same meaning out of it every time we read it. This is not true because, at least when we read it in a modern context, we need to understand that it also could be parable of the prodigal daughter.

Jesus, like many rabbis of his time, used parables to teach. A parable is designed, by its storyline, to make a particular truth vivid and convincing. A parable may or may not be a real event. The point of the parable is to "parabolize” the hearer, that is, to challenge the will and imagination of the original hearer, the first audience. There is also a second audience for this parable and other New Testament stories that deal with themes of authority, as does this one. Keep in mind that the Gospel of Luke was written some 20 to 25 years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman General Titus, so that second audience is the Christian Church planted in the culture and the system of authority of the Roman Empire. But there is a third audience, which is us. So in order to appreciate the depth of the Biblical parable, one has to put on at least three-dimensional glasses.

The traveling son is the first personality of this parable. He is depicted as a rather tragic and somewhat stereotypic figure. He takes his legal inheritance, travels to the Las Vegas of his day, wines, dines and whores his money away. He is depicted as clearly foolish and wrong. He abuses the freedom and the wealth which his father has given him. When he is out of cash and out of favor he ends up in a rural skid Row--- on a pig farm--- and is reduced to eating pig slop for survival. Yet, like a soldier in a foxhole, he has a change of heart, manages to get turned around and returns home to be reconciled to his father.

A second figure in the story is the elder brother. He is a hard worker on the family farm, performing all the chores dutifully, yet one suspects, grudgingly. He seems to be the kind of person who would give stern lectures on the breakdown of family life and make a point with his friends that his younger brother is a classic example of such. One also suspects that there had been a lot of squandering going on in his own life at home too. He seems to have feasted the table of bitterness so long that he has wasted years of opportunity for finding love of family and son-ship, even though he had lived in the midst of opportunity. At the end of the parable he is as far away from his father as the prodigal son originally was. It is as if the two sons have switched roles, the lost is found in the found is lost.

The father in the parable is a loving and enigmatic figure, somewhat hard to predict. In one way he is an overindulgent father. What parent in his or her right mind would give all their inheritance to a child who they know is just going to blow it? But, in another way, the father is willing to turn his heart inside out for his children. One gets the impression that whether the prodigal son gets his money or not, he is surely bent on leaving. So the father really has a forced choice. One assumes by context that the father has been giving the prodigal son everything money could buy, so why not give him a little bit more. But despite the forced choice, I wonder whether or not the father is just as irresponsible in giving his son the inheritance as is his son in squandering it.

So, you can see that there’s a certain ambivalence that I have toward the father. You've got to admire him, having the courage to give the son his due. But maybe the father lacks the courage to stand up to his son. Sometimes I think that the father is weak. Yet another look shows him as strong, loving and forgiving. Unlike the prodigal son and the elder brother, the father is a complex character of many dimensions willing to risk his love.

Many of us can identify with one or more of the characters in the parable depending on where we are in our stage of life. I know for sure that as a young man I was somewhat of a prodigal. At the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960’s I turned my back on the religious, political and cultural traditions of my parents, and then, when I went off to seminary on the east coast at Princeton, I politely slammed the door and never went back. Oh, I went back to visit from time to time, but I never went back home again. And I am aware that that my practiced distance was the cause of sadness to my parents and to me. Yet it was the price of self- actualization.

The prodigal experience is part of us all: the rebellion of the younger child, the hurt of the parent, the bitterness of the elder sibling. The personalities of the characters are carried out within our own nuclear families. There is within us a deep longing for family, for love, for recognition of our own worth and dignity. We all desperately want to belong, to be treasured and valued. And if we don't find this experience, our spirits wither and die.

But, in addition to the hurt in this parable, there is a joy that continues to shine through it. It is the joy of the other side of the prodigal experience, the joy of being restored at home. As Jesus tells us in this parable, there is clearly one highway that leads homeward and that is a highway of forgiveness, of restoration, of intimacy of reconciliation.

In our own families, the restoration may have taken years, years in which a young person may have left home in a huff and only the steady love of parents over time wooed the family back together as equal adults. Or maybe we are the ones who left and broke the love relationship. Maybe there has been an olive branch extended to us over the years that is only recognizable in light of this parable. Or is there a possibility that there is a little of the elder brother in each of us? Are there people in our lives who have wronged us but whom we still have not forgiven? This parable helps us to remember the old adage: “a chip on the shoulder usually indicates that there is wood higher up.”

If there is to be joy and forgiveness in the prodigal situation, all the parties: father, younger son and elder brother need to forgive. It's a two-way street, this highway home. If one of the parties refuses to forgive, then there is no reconciliation.

We know the complexities and difficulties of trying to get nuclear families to reconcile. But when we attempt to extrapolate the core message of this parable to the larger society, things get even more complex.

Whether within the nuclear family or the larger society, there is an elephant in the room of this parable, and that is the role of the waiting father. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that, parabolically speaking, the casting for the role of the waiting and reconciling father is a deliberate attempt on the part of Jesus (and the gospel writer, Luke) to theologize about God. The God depicted here is not one bent on retribution, but rather focused on restoration. This God exercises unique authority. Therefore we probably could re-name this parable, “The Parable of the Waiting God.”

It's quite clear that in New Testament times that the form of authority modeled by the waiting God is clearly not that of the surrounding culture of the Roman Empire. Rather the Roman Empire was the elder “big brother.” And “big brother” was watching. That Empire’s authority was reinforced by severe taxes, a system of loyal patronage to the Emperor, enforced worship of the Emperor as God, a thorough-going slave system, and a quick and ruthless capital punishment system, of which Jesus was just one of tens of thousands of victims.

Given the parable’s perspective on divine authority, there are at least two challenges this parable brings to us. One challenge is now and the other is later.

First, now. How do we handle those who violate our society’s various social contracts? For example, when we look at one social contract, our legal system, through the lens of this parable, some striking contrasts are illuminated.

This parable teaches that God’s behavior toward all of us is characterized by restorative justice. Restorative justice does not require punishment, but instead attempts to find ways to restore, or bring back, the offender into the community.

Retributive justice, or justice by retribution, requires that the offenders be punished so that they will be deterred from breaking laws and rules in the future because it is thought that the offenders need it or “deserve it.”

Efforts at restorative justice often look for alternatives to incarceration. These alternatives can include restitution which requires that the offender repay the victim for property loss or personal damages under supervised contract, or do community service in which the offender works with governmental or nonprofit agencies, doing work for the public good. Thus justice is served by the offender's restoration into the community through restitution.

Retributive justice, or justice by retribution, is based on punishment and/or isolation by removal from the community into prisons of various levels, from school detention rooms to death row. It assumes that punishment will teach a person to not violate the law again. Under this system, a hearing in front of some hearing board determines whether or not a prisoner has been sufficiently rehabilitated to be restored to the larger community. A hearing board asks the question of the prisoner, “Did you learn your lesson?” Of course the death penalty is a form of retributive justice which assumes that rehabilitation is not possible and/or not deserved.

So the parable of the waiting God challenges our social system now as to how we handle those who violate social contracts. But the parable of the waiting God also poses a significant question for us about God’s eternal attitude toward us. Will God always be waiting for us, interested in welcoming us back home, no matter how far we may roam? Is our worst behavior ultimately reconcilable, forgivable? Or do the bad boys and girls always get their comeuppance? On what terms and conditions does God keep the door open for Genghis Khan, Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler?

The attitude of the waiting God pays humanity the ultimate compliment. And that ultimate compliment is that we have free will. Free will is the inborn decision-making process in every human being which enables us to either accept or reject love shown to us, either by God or by our fellow human beings. Free will, of course, is tempered by a thorough understanding of neuroscience, which suggests that under certain terms and conditions the free will mechanism of the human brain is permanently damaged by the human environment, such as by drugs, abuse, neglect or violence. But this damage is on a relative spectrum from very little to a whole lot. So under certain terms and conditions most of us have a modicum of free will. And that free will can choose to respond or not to respond to the love of God.

The remarkable theology of the waiting God is that the door to home is always open and the light is always on. We, of our own free, will may slam that door on our way out. But that door to God is not locked from the inside. As a matter fact, that door always stands ajar. And so while I may, by the following statement, offend many of my Calvinist forebears, I ultimately am a Universalist. That is, I think God cares for all the cosmos with an unconditional grace that keeps the door open and the light on even for Adolph Hitler or a Saddam Hussein even though they have no desire to come home. How do I know this? Partly from scripture but also through the demonstrated faith of my own biological father.

You recall that earlier I said that when I went off to university and then eventually the seminary I politely slammed the door of my parental heritage. I realize in retrospect of 40 years that during a crucial time in my adolescence, my father was largely absent. He was off traveling, doing God's work as an interim pastor up and down the West Coast, while I was going through junior high school and high school. Objectively speaking, it was not the best time for a father to be absent from the life of his youngest son. The four elder brothers and sisters had already established themselves in their adult lives and had graduated from the need of a father. During these high school years I began to perfect some baseball skills which were gaining the notice of one or two professional scouts who came to watch me play. Sadly, my father seldom came to watch me play—I can only remember one occasion.

Years later, when I was 44 years old, I went home to say goodbye to my dad who was on his deathbed. Sitting beside him I found him on the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness. And there the symbol of my childhood, my father's absence at my baseball games, erupted as the burning question of the hour for me. And so, I asked my father why he had been absent from the ballgames. After, a very long pause he gave me a one-word response, “Stupidity.” I understood his comment as both confession of his sin and love of his prodigal son. When I left his bedside that day, I never saw him again alive.

By my father’s honesty and his love, I was healed of a deep wound of my childhood and I was theologically transformed to understand that underneath all human agony is solid ground. That solid ground, that foundation, is the universal acceptance of the waiting God.