4th Sunday in Lent (Year C) - March 31, 2019

Fourth Sunday in Lent
Year C
March 31, 2019
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I love the Gospel of Luke. But I gotta admit. Thus far in this lectionary cycle, preaching Luke has been hard. As it should be. Luke challenges us to push our limits and to push our understandings of God and of the Kingdom of God. And I love that the Gospel of Luke does this. So we get tough passages, passages that push us, that challenge us. And I love the challenge of preaching Luke (so recognizing the challenges is far from a “complaint”). Yet I am thankful that today we finally get to one of my favorite passages in the Gospel of Luke, often called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The challenge with well-loved and well-known passages is to keep listening and to keep encountering it anew. To keep letting it “work” on us. To keep letting it woo us into relationship and into conversation with the one who bring us this parable. Like the rest of the Gospel of Luke (and everything we’ve heard so far), the parables of Jesus help us to envision what the kingdom of God looks like and feels like - and what it means for that kingdom to be breaking into this world.

Yet the parables hit us differently than much of what we’ve encountered thus far in Year C of the lectionary- because instead of speaking in commands or in harsh words - Jesus tells us a story and speaks in narrative. Think about it: when we read a novel, we can picture the story. We identify with the characters. In a well-told story, I can almost smell the scents and taste the food. Often, in a well told story, we can see ourselves as part of it. In other words, a well told story invites us into it. A well-told story opens up new worlds and new possibilities.

A well-told story becomes a living thing that we encounter anew each time we read or view it. It is how we can read our favorite book or see our favorite TV shows or movies again and again.

I think about how, for instance, reading Harry Potter, I encountered it differently as a kid growing up alongside Harry Potter and from how I encounter it as an adult. As a kid, I perhaps saw myself as somewhat of a Hermione - a so called know-it-all and goody-two-shoes - who needed to find her way, find her voice, and find her power. As an adult, the story keeps pulling me in, but I perhaps see myself more as one of the adult characters - maybe a Professor McGonagall - looking at the events from the view and the perspective of an adult, watching the mistakes of the adolescents in concern with their safety - wanting what’s best for them and feeling the disappointment when they fall short. Good stories do that. Good stories change with us - and good stories change us and our perspectives. Good stories are polyvalent with different meanings in different times and in different places in our lives.

I think that’s part of the reason that Jesus speaks so often to us in parables. The parables are good stories about the Kingdom of God that pull us in. They are living stories. When we read closely enough, when we allow the stories to work on us, we find ourselves in the story. And in different times and in different places in our lives, it means something different or at least touches us in different ways. Perhaps, hearing the story, you find yourself with the younger son - the one who wanted what he didn’t deserve, what he didn’t earn. The one who caused heartache as he deserted his family. It’s easy to see him as greedy and ungrateful - but there’s so much unsaid. Maybe he wanted his inheritance because he already felt alienated from his family; and a physical separation was the only way forward for him. Maybe he wanted his inheritance because he needed to find himself. We don’t know. Perhaps, hearing this story, you find yourself with the older son. Hard working. Loyal. Keeping everything together by a thread. Resentful. I earned what I have. I earned my father’s love. I did all the right things. Dang it, I deserve that party and my father’s loving embrace. Maybe today, you find yourself with a little of both of them - seeing various ways and various times where you found grace when you didn’t deserve it, while recognizing that sometimes you’re a little bitter when the same is given to someone else. If I’m honest, today that’s where I find myself - in the both/and of the two brothers. Maybe you find yourself sitting with the father, not knowing whether or not his son was alive, yet rejoicing at the chance for reconciliation and redemption.       

Many (if not most) sermons on this parable focus on the sons - and on the ways each one of them fall short and mess up in the story. We tend to focus on their sins - the sin of pride for the older brother and the sin of greed for the younger. While that’s well and good - we need to look honestly at the ways in which we all fall short - and the ways in which we are like the brothers needing the mercy of a loving father. This morning, I want to focus much more on the father in the parable. When I was on internship, my internship supervisor created all of his own curriculum for confirmation. Because we had a large group of kids, we split the group in half. I led the curriculum with one group, Pastor Neal with the other. And I loved it. So often in leading these lessons, new light was shed on familiar passages in ways, breathing life back into passages that I found myself getting in a rut with. We happened to lead one confirmation class on this parable.

Pastor Neal’s argument was that the story of the brothers serves, not to get into a debate about which son was more worthy or which son was “the worse son” but the brothers and their behavior serve to illustrate the main focus of the story: the unimaginable depth of the Father’s love. Not only that - the story serves to upend our expectations - inviting us into the turned-upside-down world of the Kingdom of God.

Both sons are stuck in a transactional way of being in the world - one earns what they get. Quid-pro-quod, this for that. This shouldn’t completely surprise us. That’s how our world still works (or at least that’s how we imagine that our world works). We expect to earn what we have through hard work, through sacrifice, through doing whatever it takes. And we expect those who don’t “get what they deserve.” (Hopefully, we see that the world is more… complicated than that, but that’s at least the narrative our society tries to sell us). And that sometimes spills over into relationships when we try to earn one’s love and affection.

The father turns that on its head. Neither son could do anything to earn nor to distance themselves from the love of the father. Neither the younger son’s recklessness nor disrespect of the Father could separate him from the love of his Father. Neither the older’s son anger nor self-righteousness could separate him from the love of his Father. In fact, in both cases, the father goes out and meets his son where they were to show the mercy, love, and to bring about healing. He ran out from the threshold and the safety of his own home and ran to meet his younger son in his shame as he came back, prepared to offer himself as a slave. He ran out from the threshold of his own home to run into the field to meet his older son in his indignation and anger. He goes out and actively invites them both to the party. In short, this is a story about resurrection. It is a story about bringing life (and a heck of a party) from brokenness, from resentment, from death. Both sons, in their own way, are brought from death to life again - in relationship with the Father.

Through this story, Jesus invites us to see what resurrection looks like and feels like. Bringing life from our shame, our resentment, our brokenness through  reconciliation and relationship with the Father. It invites us into a different way of being in relationship with the Father. Jesus today invites us today to see that we too are recipients of God’s love and mercy that we can never earn. The typical ways of being in relationship are shattered: God doesn’t deal in quid-pro-quod. In this for that. God always gives us what we don’t deserve. Or better said, God always gives us better than what we deserve. It becomes clear that God’s love is bigger than our shame, our recklessness, our indignation, our self-righteousness, our stubbornness. God’s love is bigger than our attempts to run away from that love and mercy. God’s love is bigger than our attempts to justify ourselves and earn it (because clearly we can’t). This is a parable that invites us into the kind of reconciliation and relationship that God offers - freely, as a complete gift - to older and younger brothers alike. God crosses the threshold to bring each of us into the party.

Further Jesus invites, through this story, a vision into what God’s family looks like. God’s love is big enough to encompass you, me, and those who we couldn’t feel more distant from. It is big enough for our neighbors. It is big enough for strangers. It is big enough for those we consider to be our enemies. God cannot imagine a party as long as one of us is absent. God will not quit reaching out, God will not quit risking crossing the threshold, until each and every one of God’s children is brought into relationship with Godself and brought into the party. God will continue to bring about new life. Thanks be to God for that.
Amen