| Luke 15:11-32 "The Elder Child: Lost in the Familiar" |
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| Written by Rev. Don Lee | |
| Saturday, 16 September 2006 | |
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Good Morning Saints! Good Morning Sinners! We’ve been talking about Jesus’ parable (often referred to as “the Prodigal Son). Today, we take a long, hard look at the Elder son. Our reading comes from the Gospel of Luke 15:11-32, I invite you to stand as you are able and listen for the Good News. 11 Then Jesus said, ‘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.” ’ Prayer: Renew your church, O Lord. Save us from easy answers and self-deception in your service. In the power of your Spirit transform us, and shape us by your cross. Amen. (20th century South African prayer) That the prodigal experienced unconditional love and acceptance is part of the story but not all of the story. If you look at Rembrandt’s painting, a third character in the narrative emerges. His matching red cloak identifies him as family, the elder son. He stands at a distance. From his gaze, it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking but given the way he refers to his brother in parable, his feelings are clear as crystal. “This son of yours…!” I asked my study group who they most identified with in the parable. The elder brother was the most common answer! We all know what it feels like to be treated unfairly; to get the raw end of the deal. When others receive preferential treatment, reward or grace, resentment creeps in. That is, of course, until we find ourselves on the receiving end of grace. No question. Grace is preferential treatment. God extends the gift to those who most need it. As Jesus says in Luke 5:32, "I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." Being his mother and father’s son, the Elder Brother knew what they would expect of him. His parent’s “call for compassion” is based upon a higher law then merit, worth, law, or even justice (at least as the elder brother defined it). The appeal is made on the basis of family. “He’s your brother, our son, for God’s sake….please forgive him.” If the father’s unconditional “welcome home” of the prodigal was shocking to Jesus’ 1st century audience, the Elder Brother’s resentment and reluctance to join in the homecoming celebration, was not. There’s an OT story with similar themes. Can you guess what it is? Here are three clues. It involves: a running away, repentance and a refusal to forgive. Jonah and the big fish! Jonah represents Israel. He cannot forgive the Ninevites because they are enemies of the Jews who have terrorized his people. In Jonah’s way of thinking, they don’t even deserve to live. Kind of sounds like modern day. God’s spares the Ninevites, and then pleads with Jonah to share in the compassion of God. It’s a wonderful story about the breadth of God’s saving love. Taken together, the two stories make a strong point. In both stories, restoration does not fully take place until both the doer and receiver of injustice conform to the will of God. Family isn’t family until both offender and offended embrace. Hot, sweaty and smelling of farm, the elder brother is incensed about his brother’s warm welcome home. Worse, he finds out about it second hand. Rembrandt’s painting includes the brother in the “welcome home scene” to provide the creative tension between the father’s unconditional welcome and the brother’s refusal to forgive symbolizing the “here” and “not yet” reality of God’s basilea, God’s kingdom. You can almost hear the brother gruff, “We’re better off without him!” Nouwen takes it one step further by suggesting the that the elder sibling’s response demonstrates he has also left home! He writes, “The parable that Rembrandt painted might well be called, “The Parable of the Lost Sons.” Not only did the younger son, who left home to look for freedom and happiness in a distant country, get lost, but the one who stayed home also became a lost man. Exteriorly he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but, interiorly, he wandered away from his father. He did his duty, worked hard every day, and fulfilled all his obligations but became increasingly unhappy and unfree.” P.69 In Jesus’ parable, the story is left unresolved. The brother is left standing outside the home wrestling with his demons, with his father pleading with him. He is at a crossroads. What would the brother do? What should he do? Better yet, what will we do? On September 11th, I attended a Memorial service at Perkins Chapel at SMU. R.Gerald Turner, president of the University had invited all students in the school to participate. The chapel was packed and the room reflected the incredible diversity of the student body. We remembered those who had lost their lives in the attacks including the 343 NY city firefighters (and 60 NYPD and Port Authority police officers) killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Courage and honor defines how they lived and died. Courage I define as the willingness to risk. Honor, as holding yourself to a higher code or good. Running into a burning building instead of out of it? I call that courage. Why would anyone do something as crazy as that? Because, they had honor. They believed risking their lives to save others (regardless of who those people were) was a higher good. 400 firefighters and police officers died for that greater good. In my mind, to live by grace takes courage and honor. It holds us to a higher good (God’s reign) and refuses justice that demands a balancing of the scales…it’s a willingness to take resentment and put it aside. Implied in Jesus’ parable is the redistribution of the elder sibling’s “portion” to support both sons, and family further heightening the injustice of the Prodigal’s return! Truly the father speaks quite literally when he says, “All that I have is yours…” But his words also serve as a gentle reminder that the elder brother’s fortune came to him as gift. It was an act of grace. “To live by grace” is the decision the elder brother is faced with as his father pleads with him to come in to the home. As one writer puts it, “If we go in, we accept grace as the Father’s rule for life in the family.” -Interpreters p.305 Like the cabdriver who said, “Sometimes you’ve got to forget your morals and do the right thing!” We have all been on the receiving side of grace. Will our sense of justice keep us from being on the giving side as well? I think some Christian envision a Tough Texan God who’d just as soon kick some tail, then let anyone get away with injustice. Unfortunately, that attitude paints Jesus as weak and his gospel of peacemaking, forgiveness and love of enemies as irrelevant in our post 9-11 world! “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus claims in John 14:9. It seems to me if you discount the gospel message, you discount the messenger. On the contrary, the Jesus of the Gospels had great courage and honor. He believed so strongly that “the heart of the Lord is mercy” that he ran “into” the burning building instead of “from it.” It takes a lot of courage to die for something you believe in. It takes courage and honor to live the Christian life with integrity. Remember the story of Elijah and how God, the narrative says is not in the wind, earthquake or fire. And God tells Elijah you will not see my face but my back, as I pass by. It was Rabbi Harold Kushner who suggested that this does not mean God has a back. Rather it means that you cannot see God, but you can see where God has been, the after affects of God’s going. I think the parable of the Prodigal gives us a glance at God’s backside. What we see is only a brief glimpse of God’s inconceivable unconditional love, mercy and compassion (like a mother to her child). Family isn’t family until both offender and offended embrace. What does it mean to be family? In my family we’ve got marrieds, singles, divorced, remarried, living together, Hispanic, Argentinean, Asian-American, natural born, adopted, resident alien, RCC, United Methodist, Southern Baptist, agnostic, bi-polar, ADD, Republican, Democrat, undeclared, rich, poor, middle, step moms, step kids, 2nd wives, eccentric, exotic, and looney…I’m telling you its a veritable circus! …and that’s just on my wife’s side! Mine is much worse! The point is they are all my family. And every time it grows (and my family is growing all the time), we are better for it! We celebrate. We make room. We adjust. If there is nothing you or I can do to earn God’s love, grace or forgiveness; if it truly comes as gift and not conditioned on merit, then our relatedness to one another cannot be based upon merit either. To do so would be a flat out denial of our identity as children of God. We are all family, because God made us that way. A diverse family, for sure… but still family. So what does being family look like in “real time?” There continues to be much discussion in the Christian community about who belongs in church and who does not. The message I keep hearing is this, “If you’ve got your act together, then you’re welcome here.” I say, if you’ve got your act “together” then “Congratulations, you’ve got yourself a church of one” because the rest of us are still working on it. We can be warm and friendly as a church and still not let people in on the inside…isn’t that true? And folks, its just plain wrong! One of the reasons we serve open communion is because we believe this is God’s table. And at the table, all are beloved of God, all are invited, all are welcome…regardless of whether you think you deserve to be there or not. And if this is the way it is at God’s table, why would it be any different away from it? The good news is, in Christ we learn to be family together. The Lord’s prayer, the Beatitudes, the golden rule, the Great commission, the parables….they teach us how to behave as family. And when we live as family, we enact the reign of God on earth! Granted, this is really radical stuff we’re talking about! If we take Jesus seriously this is down right subversive. Friday’s New York Times left me hopeful yet conflicted about peace in Uganda. A 20 year war known as the Acholi war that has been raging there between the government and the “Lord’s Resistance Army,” that has displaced 2 million people and left tens of thousands of people dead. The LRA has built a rebel army of abducted children, forcing them to burn home, disfigure their victims and brutally murder their young. A former 18 year old rebel, kidnapped at the age of 9 is quoted to say, “I killed and killed and killed. Now, I am scared of myself.” The Times reported that on August 26, a ceasefire agreement was signed and for the first time in 20 years the killing has stopped. Whether peace lasts will depend on whether Uganda can honor the amnesty requested by LRA’s commander, Joseph Kony and his top deputies who have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Reading from the article, “The victims of this war are so desperate to put the nightmarish days behind them that they want to forgive, just as much as they want to forget. Typical is Christa Labol, whose face was disfigured by a bayonet wielding prepubescent soldier she now says she would welcome home.” The article goes on to explain that the Acholi people have their own solution. It is the mataput-the word means drinking a bitter root from a common cup – and is a traditional reconciliation ceremony. Peace is more important than punishment the Acholi elders say, and they would rather have Mr. Kony return to Gulu for a mataput than rot in some European prison. Now, some of us are going to have a real problem with how the Alcholi people find peace. They will say “peace without justice” is no peace at all. I suppose it comes down to how you define justice. And here the Alcohli people may have (if not perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of justice), at least a more Christian one. It is in the Eucharistic image of the common cup that we are reminded of our identity. We are family. Like the Elder child, I believe our church is at a crossroad. We have been richly gifted and blessed. It would be easy to argue that we’ve earned “all this” but this windfall comes as gift. And it would be easy to say, “I’m not going there… I like it out here. I’m comfortable the way things are. Besides, that “child of yours” doesn’t deserve to share what’s mine.” I believe if we listen, really listen, we can hear Jesus pleading with us…. “Please, please, I am always with you, and all that I have is yours. But we need to do this, because your sister was dead and is alive again. Your brother was lost, and now he is found. Prayer: Renew your church, O Lord. Save us from easy answers and self-deception in your service. In the power of your Spirit transform us, and shape us by your cross. Amen. Next week, we’ll explore the mothering heart of God. |
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