The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

March 18, 2007

4^th Sunday in Lent

Scripture Readings:

Gospel – Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32¹

¹Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

³So he told them this parable: …

“There was a man who had two sons. ¹²The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. ¹³A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. ¹⁴When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. ¹⁶He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. ¹⁷But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! ¹⁸I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; ¹⁹I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ ²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. ²¹Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ ²²But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; ²⁴for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

²⁵“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ ³¹Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

“There Was a Man Who Had Two Sons.”

The Bible is full of stories about journeys. From the prototypical human beings, Adam and Eve, and their journey out of the idealized Garden of Eden, to Abraham and Sarah leaving Ur of the Chaldees for an uncertain and yet promised land, to the great story of Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt, followed by the Exodus, there are journeys filled with significance for us all. Particularly here in Lent we speak of our own lives as journeys, as pilgrimages. John Bunyan spoke of our search for God as a “pilgrim’s progress.”²

The story that most of us know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son is actually a story about a number of trips by a number of different people. The first one, of course, is that journey of the younger son. He leaves home with a pile of money that he really didn’t earn or deserve, and without as much as a by-your-leave, takes off to do his own thing. It’s a journey to a far country in more ways than one in that he squanders not only his money, but his youth, his health and any self respect he ever had. Finally, the great depression hits and he gets himself a minimum wage job on a pig farm. Right there, in the midst of the pigs, hungry, dirty and far from home, he makes the shortest, and yet most difficult journey that any of us ever has to make: “he came to himself.”³

For those of us who’ve made such a journey ourselves, we know it takes a whole lot of traveling to get away from our “self” – to wander far from home and finally, in the pigpens of our own making, to begin the return trip. The journey toward home is a time for deep reflection, for repentance, and for all of those rehearsals of reconciliation: “I’m going to get out of here and go home – I’ll say, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing, treat me however you have to, but please take me back in.’” There’s a long journey to a far country, and another one very nearby to himself, but in that final journey home he’s met while he’s still a long way off – by his father, who’s made a hurried journey of his own. Out in the fields is another brother who, on his way back home, is sickened by the songs of deliverance.

It is hard to understand the father in this parable. From a common-sense point of view alone (the view that so many of us proudly claim as our own!), the father is a fool. You don’t set up a family feud by splitting up an estate so that half can be converted to cash at a discount, and all for the sake of a spoiled kid! That’s not generosity; and it is not justice. It’s stupidity, says common sense. As for standing around and scanning the horizon every day hoping that this wastrel of a son will return, well, that’s not love, it’s moronic sentimentality and the worst kind of co-dependency, says common sense. And yet….

Let me suggest that the older brother could just as well be our focus in this parable, because Jesus may have wanted his hearers to ask themselves whether or not they might not be just like him. Were they unwilling to welcome the returned sinner whose pleading for forgiveness? Were they unhappy about what Jesus was doing, befriending the dregs of society as he was? It’s only natural, then, if we want to hear this parable well, that you and I be willing to ask ourselves whether we may be that older brother, faithful to our duties, but missing something very important.

If we want to pause long enough to ask that question seriously, we’ve got to go one step further. We’ve got to recognize that the elder brother, who was faithful by every standard that society understands, is also in a very real sense just like his younger brother who’s squandered everything he ever owned. We see this once we notice the older brother’s seething envy. While envy always seems to be directed against somebody else, it’s just as surely hatred of yourself. What the older brother cannot accept in himself, he hates in his younger brother. He takes a hard and bitter line against his brother for wasting his life because the older brother, himself, has closed himself off from the longings within his own heart. In his envy he betrays an unconscious desire to be just as impulsive, fun-loving and foolish as his younger brother was. When the father tries to cool the anger of his eldest son, urging him to come on in and join the party, in effect he’s trying to tell him, “Join us in this celebration because your brother is part of who you are.”

So all throughout what first seems like a “they-lived-happily-ever-after” parable, is this sharp edge of judgment. It’s directed against those of us who may be too religiously secure, too morally righteous, too emotionally uptight. But it makes its point by a very moving portrayal of a generous-to-a-fault father who, some would say, is what God must be like. The story has traditionally been called the parable of the prodigal son, and yet (curiously enough) nowhere in the story does the word “prodigal” appear. The word literally does mean “wasteful” and “unrighteous,” but oddly enough it also means “thoughtless,” even “extravagant.” So it is possible to read this parable as the story of not one prodigal but three.

First, of course (and most traditionally), there is this younger son running through his inheritance as if it were an endless stream of water, ending up in the kind of breakdown that will always follow when we abuse our freedom to choose. Second, there’s the older brother, dutifully doing what’s expected of him – although maybe with considerable resentment – and squandering years of opportunity to get to know the real meaning of home and family. In his own way he was as far from his father as his younger brother who’d left. And finally, there’s the father himself. What could be more extravagantly wasteful than the welcome that he gives to this derelict of a son, or even the gentleness of his response to the angry outburst of his eldest son? To both of them he gladly turns his heart inside out, holding back nothing, and asking nothing from either of them as a condition of his prodigal reassurances. What might it mean for us to love so “wastefully” and “extravagantly,” but not live wasteful and extravagant lives?

We’re at the Fourth Sunday in Lent, and from Day Four in our Lenten study, The Last Week, we begin to see the plot to kill Jesus begin to take shape.⁴ He’s making the religiously and politically powerful people very angry. Speaking truth to power is always dangerous. Jesus knew this, so did Gandhi, so did Martin Luther King, Jr. As Borg and Crossan point out,

Confronting violent political power and unjust religious collaboration is dangerous in most times and most places, first century and twenty-first century alike.⁵

So what was to happen to Jesus was inevitable, and he knew it.

For this and other reasons, we need to junk on the ash heap of history the twisted idea that it was God’s eternal plan to kill Jesus in order to save us from ourselves. Paul – and the church ever since – got it wrong.⁶ Jesus did not die for our sins. He died because of our sin. For far, far too long the doctrine of sacrificial or “substitutionary” atonement has been Christian orthodoxy, claiming that God demanded Jesus’ life in payment for our sins.⁷ The truth is – and this is the really scary thing – we’re asked to do just what Jesus did, and be prepared to face the same consequences in confrontation with the people in power as he did.

This is what Borg and Crossan speak about when they use the phrase “participatory atonement,” meaning that in order for us to truly be disciples of the Christ, Jesus, we’ve got to join our passion and commitment for peace with justice alongside of his, to live a transformed life just as we see it revealed in him. To fail in this is to join Judas in the worst kind of betrayal imaginable: to collaborate with those who are on the side of injustice.⁸ Were we there when they crucified our Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble.⁹

What would our world look like if we were to participate with Jesus in healing its many and deep wounds? Our parable doesn’t say. We don’t know whether or not the elder son swallows his spite and goes on in to join the party. We’re left to wonder. Did he stay outside and let his anger lead him in a plot for revenge? Did he just leave? Did the younger son finally “make something of himself?” Luke doesn’t tell us – because Jesus never would. No well-trained rabbi of the Ancient Near East would ever explain a parable; at most they’d say something like, “Those of you who have ears to hear this, then listen, that you may understand how it applies to your own life.”¹⁰ So even if the eldest son did stay home the story depicts him as just as alienated from his father as his younger brother: “This son of yours,” he hisses at his father.¹¹ This is wonderful theater, because it rings with such truth! We step right into the play and are led to ask ourselves, “In this world of sibling rivalry, who am I like – the elder or the younger son?” And will we ever understand what it may be like to love as their father did?

If we would read again this gospel story, and listen carefully to its messages, we might be struck with the fact that both sons find it hard to imagine their worth to their father. Not only do we fail to appreciate our own worth, simply as a child of God, we fail to acknowledge our immeasurable worth as part of creation – let alone as a citizen of this country or a member of this church family. If and when we finally do come to know who we are and by whom we are loved, maybe the cries of others that we’ve not yet been able to hear, will finally penetrate our ears, and touch our hearts.

“There was a man who had two sons.”¹² And he loved them both.

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