Two Sons,
Two Roads
© by the Reverend Dr. Byron E.
Shafer
(Rutgers, March 25, 2001; 4th
Sunday in Lent, Year C;
Women’s History Month)
Psalm 32 (OT, p. 559); Luke
15:1–3, 11b–32 (NT, p. 80)
OK.
So this is a sermon on the S-word: s-i-n,
“sin.”
“Sin”
was once a common word, a serious word, a word that was part of our national
discourse, not just Sunday sermons.
Abraham
Lincoln was our country’s most theological president, although he never
formally joined a church. In 1863,
he issued a call to our war-torn nation, saying: “It is the duty of nations as
well as of [individuals] to own their dependence on the overruling power of God,
to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope
that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.”
Ninety
years later, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower could still use the word
“sin” in proclaiming a national day of prayer, but he dropped that word from
all seven of his subsequent calls to prayer, finding the concept of “sin”
somehow incompatible with his vision of America as a proud and confident people.
And to the best of my knowledge no president since 1953 has ever called
on our nation to offer a prayer expressing a thought like, “May God be
merciful to sinners like us.” As
a nation, we stopped talking about “sin” some fifty years ago, although we
certainly haven’t stopped committing it!
Our
first lesson, Psalm 32, isn’t shy about using “sin” and its synonyms.
In the first five verses we hear the words “sin,”
“transgression,” “iniquity,” “deceit,” and “guilt” no fewer than
nine times. Still, this psalmist really isn’t wallowing in sin, beating
himself up over it. His attitude
actually strikes me as being pretty healthy, for he seems to be saying, “Look,
the S-word happens! Get over it!
Confess it, find happiness in God’s forgiveness, and get on with your
life, heading now in a better direction!”
In
this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells us a parable about two sons, two
different kinds of sinner, and their two different roads of response: the
younger son, who follows one S-road, the road of “surrender,” confessing his
sin, opening himself to happiness in his father’s forgiveness, and moving
ahead in life in a better direction; and the elder son, who follows quite a
different S-road, the road of “stubbornness”—refusing even to acknowledge
that he has sinned, experiencing little happiness with his father, and, in the
end, it would seem, standing ready to head off in an even worse direction.
This son seems just as lost as his younger brother was, but he’s become
lost without ever having left home, and by the end he hasn’t yet come to his
senses.
In
Jesus’s parable, the younger son is not the one with whom most of us identify,
if those who attended our bible study class last Wednesday noon and this morning
are typical of us. We identify
primarily with the elder son. Yet
it is the younger son who has been the focus of most artistic treatments of this
parable.
Two
people who attend our Lenten lectionary Bible class, have shared with us images
from George Balanchine’s ballet of the Prodigal Son, set to the music of
Sergei Prokofiev. For them, the ballet’s most stunning moment is its
conclusion. The son, having
recognized his sin, journeys homeward; he moves across the stage toward his
father on elbows and kness, taking
his journey on the road of surrender. The
father stands upright with arms wide open, prepared to embrace him; the son
falls prostrate before him, then reaches up, places his hands around his
father's neck, and pulls himself up off the ground, curling himself into a fetal
ball, whereupon the father wraps his arms around him, totally enfolding him.
Lights! Curtain!
End of ballet! The story of
the elder son is never reached.
The
embrace between father and son that concludes Balanchine’s ballet is also the
focus of what’s probably the most famous painting of Jesus’s parable—The
Return of the Prodigal Son, by the 17th-century
Dutch master Rembrandt. In this
painting, we see the old father bending down and embracing his disheveled young
son, who’s kneeling before him.
The
great 20th-century
Jesuit writer Henri Nouwen describes his first viewing of a copy of
Rembrandt’s painting in these words: “When I saw [it] for the first time, in
the fall of 1983, all my attention was drawn to the hands of the old father
pressing his returning boy to his chest. I saw forgiveness, reconciliation,
healing; I also saw safety, rest, being at home.
I was so deeply touched by this image of the life-giving embrace of
father and son because everything in me yearned to be received in the way the
prodigal son was received.” (in
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of
a Homecoming)
Well,
artists and dancers have identified with the younger son, the wandering,
dissolute, prodigal one. But most
of us who frequent houses of worship tend to identify instead with the elder
son, the stay-at-home son, whose scene is seldom danced or painted.
Fr.
Nouwen reports that after identifying with the younger son a friend quickly
suggested to him that Nouwen was not so very much like the younger son after
all, but that he was really very much more like the elder son, a person lost not
while wandering rebelliously far from home but lost while remaining obediently
at home. Lost at home.
Nouwen
goes on to observe that the sin that lies at the heart of being lost-at-home is
harder to identify than the sin that lies at the heart of leading a dissolute
life. The sin that lies at the
heart of being lost-at-home is the sin of feeling superior to others, a sin we
often mistake for righteousness, a
sin that harbors a buried resentment at God’s all-forgiving love for others, a
resentment that often expresses itself in sins we’ve come to identify in
ourselves as virtues, until something or someone hits us between the eyes and
alters the way we see ourselves.
At
the end of Jesus’s parable, the father comes out to invite his elder son to
overcome his anger at his brother’s restoration to well-being.
He offers him an alternative vision of how to relate to his brother, a
vision that, if accepted, would bring him into the banquet and would allow an
embrace of joy to displace his resentment.
But Jesus doesn’t tell us what the elder son decides to do, whether he
continues to walk down the S-road of stubbornness or whether he diverts himself
onto the S-road of surrender.
There’s
a character in a short story by Flannery O’Connor who strikes me as being very
much like the elder son in Jesus’s parable.
That’s Mrs. Turpin, in the story “Revelation” (1964).
Perhaps the ending of her story points us to an ending for Jesus’s
parable.
All
of Flannery O’Connor’s characters inhabit the mid-20th-century
South, and although often deformed in body and spirit they are impelled toward
redemption—not least among them Mrs. Turpin.
Mrs. Turpin, like the elder son, considers her dislike of others to be
righteousness, and she, too, like the elder son, is offered an alternative
vision that can heal her and guide her to joy, by leading her away from the
S-road of stubbornness and down the S-road of surrender.
The
waiting room was very small and almost full when Mrs. Turpin, a stout 47-year
old, and her husband Claud, bald and florid, entered it, in order to have the
doctor take a look at Claud’s purpled leg,where a cow had kicked him.
A radio was playing soft gospel music in the background.
Seated
there was a well-dressed, gray-haired lady, who quickly struck up an easy
conversation with Mrs. Turpin. Beside
her was her daughter, a fat, acne-ridden girl of 19, reading a thick text book
entitled Human Development. She
scowled at Mrs. Turpin. Next to the
girl was a boy of 5 or 6, in a dirty blue romper, and across from him sat his lank-faced, snuff-stained mother,
whom Mrs. Turpin speedily labeled white-trash.
Mrs. Turpin decided right then and there that had Jesus given her only
those two choices she’d rather have been born a neat clean Negro woman than
white trash.
Why,
when trying to fall asleep at night, Mrs. Turpin sometimes occupied herself with
naming and numbering the classes of people in her world.
At the bottom of the heap were most colored people—oh, not the
respectable kind she’d have been if she’d been born one—but most of them;
then next to them— not really above, but beside and separate from them—were
the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the
home-and-land owners like Claud and her. And
above them were people with a lot of money and bigger houses and more land,
excepting, of course, that uppity colored dentist in town.
As
Mrs. Turpin and the well-dressed lady talked, Mrs. Turpin noticed that the
lady’s daughter, who went to college up north at Wellesley, kept staring at
her with alternately blazing and smoldering eyes.
“It must be terrible to be ugly, like her,” thought Mrs. Turpin.
The ugly girl’s eyes remained fixed on Mrs. Turpin, as if she had some
very special reason for disliking her. Mrs.
Turpin and the girl’s mother kept on talking about colored workers and pickin’
cotton and raisin’ hogs, all the while trying to keep the white-trash woman
out of their conversation.
At
length, Mrs. Turpin and the lady turned to talking about the kind of girls (like
the lady’s daughter) who are educated and given everything but are ungrateful,
never smile, and always criticize and complain.
Said Mrs. Turpin with feeling, “If it’s one thing I am, it’s
grateful. When I think who all I could have been born besides myself
… I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the
way it is! It could have been
different!’”
Just
then that big text book hit Mrs. Turpin right over her left eye.
And that college girl who'd thrown it went for Mrs. Turpin’s throat.
Others wrestled the girl to the ground and sedated her, but before the
sedative took hold, clear-eyed as anything, she looked at Mrs. Turpin and spat
out at her“Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,"
whereupon the white-trash woman exclaimed fervently, “I thank Gawd I ain’t a
lunatic.”
After
awhile, the Turpins were able to go home, but Mrs. Turpin found herself unable
to dismiss those words spoken by the “crazy” college girl: "Go back to
hell where you came from, you old wart hog."
Could it be that they actually came from God, and not from Satan?
That
evening, while hosing down some hogs, Mrs. Turpin reflected on the way she
treated the colored folk who worked for her and on how she kept judging others
inferior to herself. After a while,
she muttered to God,in a low but clearly audible voice, “What do you send me a
message like that for? How can I be
both saved and from hell too?”
Then,
as the sun was setting red, a visionary light settled in her eyes.
And she saw the purple streak in the sky become a vast swinging bridge
extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.
Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white-trash coming through the fire, clean
for the first time in their lives, and bands of [colored folks] in white robes,
and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like
frogs.
And
bringing up the rear of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized
at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of
everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as
they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.
They alone were on key. Yet
she could see by their shocked and altered faces that they sensed their
so-called “virtues” were being burned away.
After
a moment, the vision faded, but Mrs. Turpin remained where she was, immobile.
Then she turned off the hose and started home. In the woods around her, the invisible cricket choruses had
struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into
the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
The
sin that lies at the heart of being lost at home is the sin of feeling superior
to others, a sin we often mistake for righteousness,
a sin that harbors a buried resentment at God’s all-forgiving love for
others, a resentment that often expresses itself in sins we’ve come to
identify as virtues, until something hits us between the eyes and alters the way
we see ourselves.
In
the end, Mrs. Turpin—and, let us pray, the elder son as well—surrenders her
sin, her stubbornness, surrenders herself to wanting God’s will more than her
own, surrenders herself to finding joy at the end of the line in the equality
all sinners have in the eyes of God, surrenders herself to entering the feast of
forgiveness with massed shouts of hallelujah.
Let
us pray:
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