Notice who is in the crowd as Jesus tells
the familiar story we just heard from Luke’s Gospel. There are the tax
collectors and sinners who have been coming to Jesus to hear a word of healing
and of “good news.” We can almost see in our mind’s eye, however, how their
mere presence causes the scribes and the Pharisees to grumble and squirm a bit.
They are the religious folks. And they practice a piety of separatism. They’ve
been taught not to hang out with sinners because if they do, it might rub off
on them. The way to remain “pure” is to steer clear of “this sort.” So Jesus tells them all a little story…
Actually, he tells them three stories. As
you may have noticed we skipped over Luke 15:4-11b. All of them are what we
might call “lost and found” stories. The first is about a shepherd who has 100
sheep: one gets lost and so the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go after the
lost one. The second story is about a woman with ten silver coins. (A little
note in my Bible says each coin is worth the equivalent of a day’s labor—so
these aren’t dimes—but more like $100 bills; I bet if you lost one you’d turn
the house upside down, too!) She does lose one, but after looking diligently
she finally finds it, and she’s so happy that she throws a party.
Story number three is the one before us today:
the story most of us know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I imagine that
second son as a restless soul who lives for the moment. He can’t wait to leave
home. But as soon as he does, he finds trouble in dissolute living. Or maybe
trouble finds him: there was also a severe famine in the land. In any case, it
doesn’t take long before he’s on a downward slide. When I reflect upon those
gathered around Jesus as he tells this story, I imagine that most of those
“sinners and tax collectors” could immediately identify with this character in
the story. They encountered in him a kindred soul.
But I also think we misunderstand the story
if we are too literal about applying the lessons of the two previous stories, the
one about the lost sheep and the one about the lost coin. People are more
complicated than sheep or coins. I do think the first two stories invite us to
think of that second son as more “lost” than “prodigal” but I also think that
in this story there is more than one lost brother. It may be far more subtle (and
perhaps less obvious to both of them) that this is true. But it’s not less
real.
The older brother is also lost and he also
needs to be found. He’s lost because
he’s an overachiever and an overfunctioner and yet as often happens, there is
no joy in that for him. He’s grown resentful about carrying the weight of the
world on his shoulders. It’s pretty exhausting. I suspect he’s at least a
little bit envious of his little brother, imagining what it would be like to be
far from home, living the good life. (There’s a lot of projection there, of
course, because as hearers of the story we know that is hardly the case; the
younger brother is fighting the pigs for something to eat.) But the grass is often
greener on the other side, and resentments often mar our vision. In any case, clearly
the older brother has very little compassion for the brother who has taken his
inheritance and left. Good riddance!
I suspect that most of those scribes and
Pharisees listening to Jesus (and perhaps some of us here today as well) identify
with the older brother and are lost more in the way of his choices than those
of the younger one. Lost more to resentments than to lust. Lost more to
measuring our lives in teaspoons than in reckless abandon. But lost nevertheless
and in ways that, if left unexamined, can lead to self-pity and
self-righteousness, traits that don’t leave much room for joy.
All families are complicated and birth order
always plays some part in shaping who we are, maybe even more than gender or
Myers-Briggs Type or generational differences. Over the years I’ve kept an
unofficial tally and noticed that more often than not, oldest children partner
up with other oldests, and youngers with youngers and middle with middle. Birth
order leaves a mark, for sure. And it is so easy for petty sibling rivalries
and jealousies to push aside love, as if love were a commodity, as if there
isn’t enough in a family to go around. We can find ourselves forced into roles
that leave less space for the person we are really meant to become. And if we
hear too often at a young age: “he’s my shy one” or “she’s the responsible one”
or “she’s the one who is going to give me gray hair” those labels can stick. They can become tapes
that play very often long after they are even true.
So back to our story: at the end of it, the
younger brother has been found and he is celebrating. His story is like the
hymn, “Amazing Grace:” he once was lost, but now he’s found; he was blind, but
now he sees. He is the recipient of an abundant outpouring of grace that helps
him to see the wideness of God’s mercy as he
encounters a dad with open arms who runs out to meet him. This is good
news to all who feel lost and afraid and ashamed.
But the jury is still out on the elder
brother as the story ends. Will he uncross his arms and join the party or not?
Even if he does, will he be able to let go of his anger and hear the words of
his father? The fatted calf awaits him, too, after all. There is enough veal
piccata for everyone. No one has excluded him from the party. But to enter he must
let go of that sense of entitlement; the belief that his brother is
undeserving. (Or more accurately, I suspect, that he is more deserving.)
Like the scribes and Pharisees who listen to Jesus tell the story (and perhaps
like some of us here today) he needs to let go of the false notion that he’s
“holier than thou” and risk embrace. That amazing grace is for him too.
Whether or not we know how lost we are,
Christ desires to find us all. We are
all beloved of the Father/Mother of us all and there is plenty of room at the
Table. If we are more like the younger brother then this Lent might be a time
when we need to “come to ourselves” by getting up out of the pig pen and making
our way back home again. If we are more like the older brother then we may need
to “come to ourselves” by letting go of old resentments and grievances and
remember God is God and we don’t have to be. The truth is though that these two
have far more in common than either realizes and not just because each is lost
in his own way, but because both are children of a compassionate father. They
are blood brothers. And so are we my friends: we are siblings loved by God who
have been claimed and marked and sealed as Christ’s own, forever. Lent is a
time to remember that truth. We are invited to the Table, invited to come and
taste and see. And all are welcome. And all means all.
We are invited to sing and to dance and to
live. But once fed, we are also called to get up and then to “go and do
likewise.” We are called to become more like the God who loves us, as we love
our neighbor. Or as that former Pharisee, Paul, puts it in today’s epistle
reading: we are sent out as “ambassadors for Christ.” We are given this same
ministry of reconciliation to share with others. We who have experienced
reconciliation with God are sent out into the world as reconcilers who seek out
all who are lost in the various ways people can get lost by sharing with them
the good news that they are God’s beloved. Our mission, our vocation, is not to
remain children but to become more like the father: instruments of peace willing
to risk embrace as the defining posture of our lives. Both of these brothers
are in need of grace and of healing and of love. But as the story ends, only
one of them has recognized that fact and received that gift. Only one has
allowed love to heal and transform him, and to unleash the peace that passes
all understanding.
Now it’s just a story, right. Jesus was a
great storyteller. There is no historical older or younger brother or father
here to interview. Jesus made it up to make a point, to sinners and saints, to
all of us across the centuries. Yet I think of people he did spend time with, like those two sisters, Mary and Martha. Their stories and personalities were different too, and they also
had a little sibling rivalry going on that they tried more than once to
triangle Jesus in on. It’s just how families are. Complicated!
We can do what we want with stories like
this, including the invitation to write our own endings. I like to believe that
while it may have taken him a while longer, eventually the older brother joined
the party, that he also “came to himself.” Maybe he tentatively walked toward
the party and hesitated at the door. Maybe his younger brother sees him and
runs to embrace him, mimicking the role that the father played for him. And the
tears began to flow. That is how the world is made new and that is how Easter
happens in our real lives and in the real world and I bet you can tell stories
like that. Hopefully the veal piccata and wine have not run out by the time
that older brother comes to himself and those two brothers find a way forward.
Hopefully it’s before they have to stand at the grave of their old man.
I have also, however, seen stories that sadly
do not end that way. Siblings who never do end up speaking again. Cousins who
never get to meet each other until grandpa or grandma dies, if then. Because
the story ends where it does, it forces us to at least consider the possibility
that the two never do reconcile and that the betrayal the older brother feels
causes a permanent rift in this family. That older brother’s pain is real,
whether or not it’s justified and it can also get reinforced every time he tells
the story of how hard he worked for his old man’s love and how unfair the old
man was in the way he treated that prodigal brother. We are free—all of us—to
refuse love. We are free to convince ourselves that being right is more
important to us than to love or to be loved.
Well, it's just a story. But it is a story
that leaves so many questions hanging in the air, stories those first hearers surely
took home with them: those sinners and tax collectors and those scribes and
Pharisees. What kind of lives would they live, after hearing such a story? The
story took hold and Luke remembered these three lost and found parables – only
Luke, by the way. They don’t appear in Matthew or Mark or the Fourth Gospel. Thank
God that Luke remembered!
The story confronts us where we are, in the middle of this Lent, each of us with our own unique ways of being lost. It leaves us pondering whether or not we dare to take the risk of being found before we get to the empty tomb. Like so many of Jesus’ great parables, the story lingers in the air and across the centuries, still haunting us: we oldest children and we middle children and we younger children; each of us lost in our own ways. We sinners and saints. God’s love is deep and broad enough to scoop us all up. We are all welcome and all really does mean all. When we begin to grasp this reality, it changes us for good.
And it
invites us to grow more and more into the full stature of Christ until we see
that compassion transforms our lives and our posture in the world is not
crossed arms that hold people at a distance, but open arms like those of Jesus
on the cross, that are stretched forth in love, ready to embrace all who are
lost.
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