One of my neighbors in New Jersey is a man named Frank. He and his wife are the parents of two sons and a daughter. Both sons are in college now, and the daughter is in high school. Frank and his wife go to Mass just about every day, and Frank is in training to become a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, an office open to married men (but not to women—married or single). The office of deacon in the Roman Catholic Church is more like that office in the Methodist Church than in the Presbyterian Church. For Methodists and Roman Catholics a deacon is like an almost-priest or junior-minister, authorized to do almost everything but celebrate the sacraments and perform marriages.
Last summer when I was away for two weeks, Frank took care of my mail, taking it out of the curb-side mailbox and placing it on the table in the screened-in sunporch on the back of my home in New Jersey. Sometimes he left a personal note with the mail, a comment about the weather or about his studies in preparation for ordination. One note said, "In preaching class we were asked to designate our favorite Biblical text and write a sermon based on it. I chose some verses from Luke, chapter 14, on the cost of discipleship. What would you have chosen?" My answer was "The next chapter of Luke, chapter 15, verses 11 through 32, on God's amazing grace"—today's Gospel reading.
The story widely known as the parable of the prodigal son can be better called the parable of a parent and two children. All three main characters are important. Right up front we need to acknowledge that the story reflects the patriarchal mind-set of the Bible. It is a tale about a father and two sons, but it could easily be about a mother and two daughters in our culture. Having said that, we can use the words "parent" and "child" as well as the words "father" and "son" in thinking about the story this morning.
You know the story outline. The younger of two sons asked his father for his share of the inheritance, and the inheritance was most likely real estate and tangible property that could be turned into cash for early distribution. We know enough about the laws and customs of the time to understand that the request was disrespectful and unusual. The younger son was treating his father as though the father were already dead. For the most part a family farm was not divided until the death of the owner. The significance of the son's request comes through in the Greek for "he divided his property between them." The Greek word translated property in the request is ousia; in the statement of what happened, the word is bios, or life. The son asked for his share of the property. The father gave him part of his life.
The younger son took what his father gave him and frittered it away. He tried the far country with all its attractions, and it left him empty—lonely and almost dead. He knew he had no further claim on a place in his family; that was true not because he had been a wastrel but because he had taken his share of the inheritance and left with it. But in his loneliness, his lostness, his brokenness, he realized that belonging was what he yearned for, even if that meant belonging as a hired servant.
We could focus on the father or parent as central in the story, and we would learn more of the good news at the core of our faith. One commentator writes, "No other image has come close to describing the character of God than the waiting father, peering down the road longing for the son's return, then springing to his feet and running to meet him." I thought about that this past Monday when I read in the New York Times the tragic story of a college student who disappeared thirty-five years ago and has not been heard from since. The anguish of the mother, at fist getting phone calls with silence at the other end. Then even they stopped. She has not given up hope that her son is alive. In our parable the parent watched and waited, then sprang into action when the child was a speck on the horizon journeying home.
If you carry one image of God in your head, let it be that one—a mother, a father, waiting and watching for a child to come home, then running to meet the returning one with kisses and hugs.
A Presbyterian Church publication last summer focused on what it called faith-sharing. The lead article was entitled "We Have Stories to Tell." You and I have stories to tell, and the Parable of Two Sons and a Loving Father connects with my story.
People who knew me in high school and in college probably saw much of our parable's older brother in my character and demeanor. Like the older brother I had grown up as the good boy in my family, following the approved path, doing well academically, and spending a lot of time in church. I took that background to college, and some of it was good. The fraternity I pledged would not have had a designated driver for parties if I had departed from my family's practice of abstinence from alcohol. Also, I was asked by a student editor to write a column on religion for the college newspaper, which proved to be helpful preparation for weekly sermon-writing, a practice that became part of my life for over forty years.
But much of being like the older brother was not so good. I thought I had answers for everybody else's questions, and they were rather rigid answers at that. I had strong opinions on how other people should live their lives, and I wasn't particularly open to new ways of thinking or acting. I was pretty sure of my own goodness, although I would not have acknowledged it at the time. The hardest part was that being the older brother, the good one, kept me from living much of life, especially as Jesus spoke of it in John's Gospel, chapter 10, "life in all its fullness."
My life was conventionally successful: progressively larger churches with bigger salaries and many meaningful relationships. I think that's the way a lot of people live the first part of their lives. Often the death of parents can be the catalyst for significant change. In September of 2005 in the Sunday New York Times Magazine there was a reflection by the writer Joan Didion on the sudden death of her husband in December of 2003. Her play based on that event and the death of her daughter is now in previews on Broadway, The Year of Magical Thinking. Almost in passing she commented on the death of her parents several years earlier and shared something a friend wrote to her at that time. He wrote that the death of a parent "despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago."
I was forty-two when my father died and forty-six when my mother died. Her death and a conversation at the time with a man who was going through a personal crisis led me to begin what turned out to be ten years of psychotherapy. I chose to work with a Manhattan psychiatrist who had just published a book called A Man in the Making.
In the process of going deep within myself, I learned to inhabit my areas of brokenness as well as my areas of strength. A shift began, moving me from my character as the older brother who was sure of his own goodness and could tell other people how to live, toward the younger brother, the prodigal son as we call him, who came to himself (in that wonderful phrase) when he was in the far country, away from home. As the text says, "When he came to himself, he said, '...I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, I am no longer worthy....'" And he was welcomed home.
For me the shift was the existential discovery of what I had known intellectually and had proclaimed as the Gospel: that the God we know in Jesus loves us not because we measure up to certain standards, be they doctrinal, moral, or cultural, but because God is like the parent in the parable: waiting to love us and wrap us in a bear-hug of affirming embrace—just as we are.
Central in my faith journey now is what Professor Daniel Migliore of Princeton Seminary calls "God's shockingly inclusive love." And I keep in mind what Howard Thurman, the late African-American minister and educator, wrote in his autobiography, published in the 1980's, about the younger brother of our parable:
When the prodigal son came to himself, he came to his father.... Thus, to be Christian, people would not be required to stretch themselves out of shape to conform to the demands of their religious faith; rather their faith should make it possible for them to come to themselves whole, in an inclusive and integrated manner, one that would not be possible without this spiritual orientation.
As I read and re-read this morning's parable, I find myself wondering if the older son, the one who never left home, ever came to himself in the sense of clear-eyed self-awareness. I hope he did eventually, but in the story he seems not to have. When he heard the sounds of celebration and learned what they were for, he stayed outside and refused to go in. When his father came outside to him and pleaded with him to join the festivities, he cried out in anger, "All these years I've slaved for you and never once disobeyed you. And you didn't throw a party for me" "Never once disobeyed?" I want to ask. "Take a good look inside."
There are older sons and older daughters in almost all churches. I haven't been at Rutgers long enough to elaborate farther. But it also needs to be said that there is something of the older brother, the older sister in each of us—no matter how hard we work to get rid of him or her. This journey of ours is about progress, not perfection. And we can celebrate our gains.
This morning's parable is about grace—about unconditional love and the way it can open hearts and lead to new directions in people's lives. I sometimes hear it said that people cannot change. Our parable says otherwise, and so do I.
With every fiber of my being I believe in the kind of eternal homecoming depicted in the parable, where a loving parent greets us with a bear-hug, and there is music and dancing. In the parable of Two Sons and a Loving Father, I come to myself, and the God of amazing grace comes to me, to you, to anyone whose heart is even part-way open.