Running down the Road

Year C, Lent 4, RCL

March 14, 2010

Today's Gospel lesson is like a great piece of art, or music, or writing. It is often admired, talked about, picked apart, and examined. Many times, we think that enough has been said about it, so we let the piece of art stand on its own. We forget to take a closer look at what the artist drew on the canvass or wrote on the page. We don't think to look at what the artist may have been thinking or feeling or where she or he might have been when they created their masterpiece. Not knowing those details doesn't take away from our appreciation of the piece of art, but knowing them helps us to appreciate them even more.

That same piece of art, or music or writing will likely have different meanings to us at different times in our lives, and may be a piece that we come back to over and over again. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton is one of my all-time favorite novels. I think I've read it three times in the past 15 years, and each time, it has a new meaning to me.

Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son, like a great piece of art or music or literature, has been told, re-told, and re-imagined over the centuries. It might be one of the most dissected of Jesus' stories, and certainly the term "prodigal son" or "daughter" has become part of the common vernacular.

One of the things I love most about this particular parable is the way it can have different meanings at different points in your life. The parable has four main characters whose perspective we could look at: The father, the younger or Prodigal Son, the older son, and the servants. (Well, OK, five perspectives if you count the fatted calf. But we may keep that until next time… )

Here is the question I want to run with this morning: What does this story teach us about God?

We can glean a great deal about God's grace from this passage, as well as how deeply God longs for a closer connection with us.

There are a few details from first-century Palestinian culture that will help our 21^st Century minds to understand it a little better. These were details that didn't need explaining in Jesus' time, but might help us get a better grip on the magnitude of the story.

First— Jesus' hearers knew and understood that to be the one who was feeding the pigs, especially for a Jew, was to have fallen about as far as you could fall.

Second—And possibly, most important—what the younger son did was an insult to his father, the demand for his inheritance, the returning, etc. It was culturally abhorrent. It just wasn't done. The son was basically saying to his father, "you are dead to me."

Knowing those two bits of information, let's think again: What do we learn about God in this story?
The son who left and squandered his dad's money, we'll call him, Jeff, comes to his senses and is willing to come back to his father and be treated as one of his father's servants, someone with no rights and no way of earning those rights. And if his father had rejected him, it would have been justified in doing so. But as "Jeff" is making his way home, no doubt practicing his groveling speech to his father, his daddy sees him off on the horizon and is so overcome with joy that he runs to Jeff, puts a ring on Jeff's finger, a robe around his body (and not just any robe—"the best one!"), and says, "I don't care how you smell or what you look like! I'm so glad that you are home, we are going to have a huge party!"

Now, raise your hand if you think that Jeff deserved all that.
Of course he didn't "deserve" it, but that's what he got from his father: Unconditional welcome and reception. And more importantly, his dad didn't just wait for him to walk in the door, and Jeff didn't even get to finish his speech. His dad saw him, was maybe even keeping an eye out for him, and his dad went running to meet him.

So what do we learn about God from this parable?

After Jeff had been given more than enough, he spent it on "dissolute living." One translation of the Bible calls it "wild living" and another calls it "loose living." And yet, his father welcomed him back with open arms.
How many times in our lives have we been loose or wild with what we have been given? Maybe we haven't spent it on parties or jewelry or other extravagances, but we all have been guilty of it at one point or another. Maybe it's what we haven't done with what we've been given.
God has given us all a share in the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus is pretty clear in his other parables that for us to do nothing with that is what breaks God's heart.
But our God is a God of Grace and Mercy, who is willing to forgive, to love and to give us untold number of chances. Just as Jeff's father took him back in and threw a party for him, I am a firm believer that God takes us back and throws a party (with or without the fatted calf) each time we return and re-commit ourselves to doing God's will.
Let us not forget Jeff's brother, Walt. Walt is working the field, hears the sound of a party, sees nothing on his Blackberry about a party and goes to ask one of the servants what is going on. When Walt finds out, he's a little mad. I'm not real sure what he is madder about: that Jeff came home or that daddy is throwing Jeff party. Walt has every right to be angry that his brother gets a party for all his loose living and money squandering when Walt has been faithful and hard working and yet, daddy has not given him even a small goat for a small party. Makes you wonder which brother was really lost. Walt needs to see the big picture, doesn't he? What was lost, dad says to him, has now been found; what was dead is now alive. We don't know if this made much difference to Walt since that is where the story ends, but it leaves us with a good point: Christ came for the lost, not those who were already found.
We don't deserve the spiritual and material gifts that God has lavished upon us, but we get them anyway. We don't deserve God's grace when we mess up. But God showers us with that grace anyway. As Mother Teresa said, "People are illogical, self-centered, and unreasonable. Love them anyway." Some part of me believes she was pleading to God on our behalf when she said that.
So let's look at the question again: What does this parable tell us about God? It tells me that with God, there is always room at the feast for us, and that no matter our transgressions, we are loved so, so much by God. As author Rodney Clapp wrote about this passage, "Every time God's active, stretching, searching, healing love finds someone and calls that person back home, it does not mean there is less for the rest of us. It means there is more. More wine. More feasting. More music. More dancing. It means another, and now bigger, party."

But what this parable tells me the most about God is that God's love is so deep that God is more than willing to come running down the road to meet us, despite the fact that God is God and it is you and I who have gone and squandered the gifts we have been given. The fact that we don't have to grovel and plead for God's forgiveness is one of the most humbling realizations of all. That no matter how far we've fallen, whatever our spiritual or cultural "sleeping with the pigs" may be, when we come to ourselves, God will be running down the road to meet us and welcome us home.

Amen

Do you remember when ____?

Epiphany 5, Year C, RCL
February 7, 2010


When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Do you remember where you were when the world changed?
Do you remember what you were wearing? What you were eating? Who you were with?
Do you remember how you got the news? Was it from a friend? On the phone? Was it from the TV or radio? Did you see it on the internet?
Do you remember how you felt? Were you anxious? Were you heartbroken? Were you filled with excitement and anticipation?
Did you know right away that most everything in your life was going to be different? Or did it take a while to sink in?
Did you need a few hours or days or even weeks to realize that the way you’ve known everything to be up until this moment was going to be different?
And now that you’ve had a chance to reflect on how your world changed, was it as big as it could have been? Or was it bigger?

No matter what our age, we’ve all had at least one moment in our life where our world changed, where everything we knew to be true was tossed up in the air and we were often left with many more questions than answers. No doubt that one of those questions was, “OK. What now?”

We have two examples from our Scripture lessons today of people who have a momentary encounter with the holy and whose lives are forever altered. The prophet Isaiah receives his call to ministry in a most unforgettable way. His vision is set not at a specific moment, but rather in a particular year. Writing, “In the year that King Uzziah died,” would be similar to us saying, “It was the fall of the year the Red Sox came back from three games down to beat the Yankees in the American League Championship series.” (Or as a former rector of mine would say, "The time the Yankees blew it!") It wasn’t that Isaiah’s audience didn’t know King Uzziah. He was the king of Judah for nearly 52 years, having taken office when he was 16. So when Isaiah writes that he saw the Lord sitting on the throne of the Temple in the year that King Uzziah died, people would have an idea of what he was talking about. I have to believe that Isaiah knew at that moment that his life was changed. The vision of a heavenly creature flying to you and touching a hot coal to your mouth is not one Isaiah (or any of us) is likely to forget. The moment was so real for him that when the voice of the Lord said, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?,” Isaiah said, “Here am I; send me.” Did you notice that his world was so changed by that moment that he didn’t bother to say, “So where are we going?”

Our Gospel lesson highlights another group of folks who had a world-changing experience. A few of the fellas who had been out fishing all night are coming back to the shore with empty nets. It’s one of those conversations with Jesus that was recorded in a slightly, um, more formal way than it really happened. There they are cleaning their nets after a rather unsuccessful night of fishing, and here comes Jesus. He climbs in, offers some teachings to the assembled crowd and then says to Simon, “Put out in the water a little bit further.” I wonder what kind of look Simon gave Jesus just before their world changed and they were first-hand witnesses of an amazing fishing miracle ever. They needed all the help they could to get the fish back to the shore. And after James and John and Simon get their fish to the shore, they walk away from… what does the Gospel say? They walk away from everything to follow Jesus.

For Isaiah and for Simon, James and John, the world changed, and they were changed, when they had their encounters with the one true God.

We all remember where we were, what we were doing, and maybe even who we were with when that world-changing moment happened. I remember very distinctly where I was and what I was doing when the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the World Trade Centers were attacked, and when both of the Space Shuttle disasters happened. I also remember where I was when Navy beat Notre Dame at football for the first time in my lifetime. I was with my dad, and his dad had taught us well that Canady men don't pull for Notre Dame.

I have a firm memory of what was going on when my other grandfather died, and where I was sitting in when I found out my best friend’s mom has inoperable cancer. I remember exactly where I was and what I ordered for dinner when my parents told me that, at age 12, I wasn't going to be an only child for much longer, I even remember what was going through my head in the seconds before Emily told me the two of us were going to become the three of us. And most recently, I remember where I was when my future brother-in-law called to ask if he could officially join the family.

It’s not at all unusual for us to remember what we were doing and where we were when those world-changing moments, whether it is a mind-numbing tragedy or a something that gives us an immeasurable sense of pride.

The moments we least often remember or talk about are the ones, like Isaiah, Simon, James and John, where we are stopped in our tracks and given the opportunity to turn our feet and our hearts to follow God.

Make no mistake about it: It is a scary proposition.

The prophets of the Hebrew scripture were ridiculed, cast out of their towns and villages, and they were often killed. Genesis does not have any references to Noah’s neighbors coming to help him build the ark after he followed God’s call. Jeremiah ended up in a well, left for dead, after he called out the king for his idolatrous behavior.

The followers of Christ haven’t always fared much better. We don’t need to re-count the history of how the church was and continues to be persecuted over the past 2,000 years.

Saying to God, “Here am I; send me” is no small task. Walking away from our fishing nets and our families to walk with Jesus is a great leap of faith. Isaiah, Simon Peter, James and John were changed people. Their messages reached thousands in their lifetime, and billions in the generations since. I’m not under any allusion that any of us will affect that many people, but those guys probably didn’t think that either.

We, too, have the opportunity to be changed by saying, “Here I am. Send me.” We have the chance to share the message of Christ by taking the bold, bold step of prayerfully discerning what fishing nets we need to walk away from so that our world can be changed by God.

One body, many parts

Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C, RCL
January 24, 2010

There is some text, but it's better to hear it. Go here for the audio.