Family Dynamics and Prodigal Parenting

Luke 15:11-32

Oh, what a familiar story this is about the prodigal son,

         a great Lentan reading regarding repentance and confession of sin.

 

But let’s look at this parable from another angle: in terms of parenting.

 

I was looking at this parable with a meditation group once,

reflecting on how each of us interacted with the parable

         who we identified with

         what caught our attention

         how did we react

         what were we feeling as we heard the story.

The responses were what many might also respond with.

 

One person shared simply, yet powerfully 

         about his identity with the younger son

raised well – good family

         but in college in a fraternity

                  he got into partying, alcohol took over

                                    and he made a mess of his life.

He said, almost exactly quoting the line from the prayer book

         in the Rite of Reconciliation, form 2:

“…I have squandered the inheritance of your saints, 

and have wandered far in a land that is waste.”

 

When things were about as bad as they could be

         he started coming to his senses and reached out for help.

 

AA provided for him the embrace of loving arms, no questions asked,

                  full acceptance, and strong support for living a new life

He felt so unconditionally accepted, 

         and, he said, this was the most important factor in saving his life

                  and bringing him back to God the Father.

It was obvious to him that these other people

         were a direct extension of Christ to him. 

The 12 step program was very important

         for restructuring his life AND making amends for the past,

but it was the unconditional love that had the biggest impact

 

And another person admitted

         that she had had a close identification with the older son

                  who had very real and justifiable objections to make.

         She related about her own envy of others 

who seemed to be able to get away with something 

that she herself had worked so hard for, 

         that she had earned through her moral uprightness.

 

The parable as seen through the eyes of the two sons 

is familiar and very recognizable and understandable, 

but what is the intent in Jesus telling the story?

As you can imagine it’s something more.

 

Parables in Luke, you need to know, are kind of fishy.

         There is always some point in the parable that isn’t quite right,

                  not normal, not quite what you would expect.

That’s the working edge for the parable.

         It is meant to catch us up;

                  it moves us to a shift in perspective

 

The abnormal, the unexpected in this story is the father.

I was thinking about the father in the parable

         what would that have been like 

         to have a child/a son ask for his inheritance.

Who knows what that conversation might have been like.

“Hey, Pops, I’m fed up with things here at home.

         This family stinks.

         I’m out of here.

         I can handle things just fine on my own.

So why don’t you just give me what I’d get when you die,”

         which is sort of like saying,

                  “Why don’t you just drop dead, old man.”

How does the father react?

He doesn’t say, “You don’t talk to me that way, young man!”

His mother doesn’t jump in and say,

         “Watch your tongue.  Show some respect for your father.”

 

The father lets him run.

         He divides up the goods –

                  the land to the oldest son

                  a cash settlement to the younger

                  and hands it all over to both of them

                            all his own living, all his pension plan and retirement savings.

The father acts as though he were on his death bed,

         as though he were dead.

                           Didn’t catch that in the story, did you?

 

Now, this younger son leaves the country,

         is utterly out of hand in self indulgence

         and spends everything extravagantly and foolishly,

till both HE has nothing AND the whole country is also in famine,

                  and he is hungry.

Then he wakes up.

Even though he is as far away as possible 

                           from his family, country, and culture,

         he still remembers that he is his father’s son.

He is not worthy to be called his son,

         but he still is, on that most basic level of life, his father’s son.

And so he regrets what he has done and repents, 

         he turns around and comes back home.

And then when he does return from his non-kosher stint with the pigs

         there are no “I told you so” lectures, no recriminations, 

                  no laying down the law

                  no stipulation of conditions for return

                  no 12 step program for rehabilitation

but the father going out to meet him when he was yet at a far distance,

                  treating him like an honored son

                           flamboyantly, extravagantly, shamelessly

                  without regard for what the neighbors would think

                           - crazy old man, spoils his son, 

that boy won’t learn an ounce of responsibility 

if he gets away with all that.                           Scandalous!

 

And the older son has a right to complain

         His father had given him his inheritance too,

                  so whose expense was it that was paying for the feast?!

 

The father is just as profligate, just as prodigal as the son

         a bad example of responsible parenting

         undermining the whole moral code of society.                  Scandalous!

 

And yet, we would say, in this story Jesus is revealing to us 

              God the Father’s unconditional love and acceptance for all of us sinners.

 

If God is like that, 

then what does this say about 

the whole Covenant of the Law, 

the 10 Commandments, 

and being right before God?

 

Being right with God is not something we earn

         nor something we can suppose that God owes us.

 

The same prodigal love that the father had for the younger son

         was also available to the older son.

                  although the older son didn’t see that.

 

But the apparent message of this story of the crazy old man

         is the abundance of mercy, rather than justice         

- the Father moved by compassion

         meets the penitent child even BEFORE we arrive back home

 

Mercy                  Just what is mercy?

I like to talk about mercy, 

     especially when I am teaching meditation 

         with the Prayer of the Lamb, Jesus, Lamb of God, have mercy on us.

 

Here is a working definition of mercy

                  distilled from scripture and experience.

 

Mercy is a spontaneous, loving outpouring 

         of compassion, care and service 

         from God towards all of creation.

Mercy is the spontaneous flow of positive, creative life-energy.

Mercy acts whether I know I have a need or not,

         whether I am open to it, or afraid or ashamed to admit my need.

Each and every moment Christ's mercy is offered 

         and continues to be offered

         for our known AND our unknown, our unconscious needs.

Mercy is abundance of life overflowing to our poverty of life.

Mercy is unconditional. 

         And therefore mercy is UTTERLY dependable.

 

Mercy is the way things work in the Kingdom of God

Jesus said to the Pharisees:

Matthew 9:13         “Go and learn what this means,

                           I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”

                  For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

 

Prodigal God – the extravagant spendthrift of creation!

 

If we could really see this, 

then this might affect how we relate with one another.

We too might be moved with compassion

         and run to meet those in desperate need while they are yet far off.

We too might treat the person who walks through the doors

                  smelling like they had just come from feeding the pigs

as though they were the honored guest 

         – Christ himself, the Risen Lord among us.

 

I think it actually takes new eyes 

to be able to see from the perspective of mercy.

         Our old eyes don’t always see very clearly.

 

So listen again to these words from the Epistle for today:

 

2Cor. 5:17 …if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: 

everything old has passed away; 

see, everything has become new! 

2Cor. 5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, 

and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 

2Cor. 5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, 

not counting their trespasses against them, 

and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 

 

The younger son repented,

         but he only expected to be accepted back as a servant,

                  having blown it as a son.

He was willing to work the rehab program.

 

But the other side of repentance is the father running to meet him,

         and declaring his resurrection:

                  “This son was dead and is now alive,

                  was lost and is now found.”

 

Reconciled to God through that abundant, prodigal mercy,

         we are then made new – not we have made ourselves new

         We are made new

and then we are entrusted with the message of reconciliation/

 

We ourselves are called to join with the Father 

         in being prodigal with mercy ourselves.

                                                                                           Scandalous! 

Ash Wednesday

 What a particular moment in time for the beginning of this season of Lent!

This may seem like a precarious time on various levels:

         environmentally we can now see evidence that change IS happening 

                  in our weather patterns.

The tipping point is not at some time in the future, but NOW.

 

Politically there is much turbulence in which the whole world is feeling the effects of shifts in who has power and what are they doing with it,

         and what I am talking about is not restricted 

                  to just here in the United States.

 

Cultures clash, peoples are “other-ed” and there is a tendency to retreat to one’s own familiar silo of relationships and news sources.

 

It is a time of anger, feelings of hopelessness and impotence , and grief.

 

So these words from the Prophet Joel came to me:

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,

         with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

rend your hearts and not your clothing.”

 

This describes the heart being pulled to the point of being torn,

         revealing an atmosphere of grief and mourning.

 

Grief is the rending of the heart.

Grief, and you may be surprised to hear this,

                                                                actually serves a beneficial purpose.

         The deaths of those dear to us, 

         or the deaths young people dying before their time,

         or the deaths of women and children

          and the old and infirm 

               by the violence of warfare or crime or lack of basic resource for living

all persistently pokes us sharply enough to remind us that we too will die.

 

In this we are somberly made aware of the fact of our own mortality.

         We won’t get out of this alive.

 

Am I being morbid?  all this reference to death.

         I don’t intend for these remarks to sound morbid.

         They are intended as a reality check,

                  a healthy way to stimulate us to look at where we are going.

Folks, it’s a race to the grave for us all.

 

For some of us, that grave is no longer off in the distance;

         it’s looming on the horizon.

 

Maybe it’s just me. 

         My innards have been communicating to me 

                           “You are old, and getting older and starting to wear out.” 

         They tell me I am past my prime.

 

The warranty has run out on some of the parts.

The sag in the skin is here to stay.

The ache in the elbow when the barometer changes,

         a process of disintegration is in slow progress,

                  a gradual gift from God to help us disengage 

         from holding on too tightly to life here in this plane of existence.

Our mortality is the back story, the reason for this liturgy today.

Ashes, the burnt palms from the Palm Sundays of past years,

         are marked in the sign of the cross on our forehead in the same place

         where the oil of chrism marked the sign of the cross at our baptisms.

 

The sign of the cross, this time with different words than we heard at baptism:

         “You are … marked as Christ’s own forever.”

This time: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

 

It is good for us to be here today, to begin another Lent 

                  with holy fasting, with self-reflection and with ashes,

         the ashes of our mortality, what is left behind of the desiccated body

                           shrunk down to an urn that we put in a niche.

Yet let us not forget these other words from the Burial Office:

         “Life is changed, not ended.”

                                    

So these are not the ashes associated with public displays of fasting 

         that the Gospel for today speaks of.

These are the ashes of grief over our mortal condition.

 

The words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount

         warn us to be carefully self-reflective about 

                  our motivations behind our public acts of worship.

Do we secretly want to have people think of us 

         as good, morally upright people, 

         not self-righteous, but exhibiting signs of repentance?

Really?  Is that why we wear these ashes on our faces?

                           for what other people will think

What sort of a temporary status does that give you?

         It may be seen by few 

and it lasts for much less time than it takes to update your status on Facebook,

                  where your “friends” can hit the like button.

 

No, these are the ashes of what we will look like after death.

This is tremendously important for us to get about Ash Wednesday

         as we begin another Lent.

We start with death, our common human condition,

         and walk with it 40 days to the cross,

                  where another Death 

         brings the end of death’s reign of terror over all humankind.

                           That is Ultimate Gospel Good News.

 

Forty days we set aside for intentional spiritual work

         of fasting, prayer and reflection on scripture and on our lives.

Notice it’s both of these – reflection on scripture AND our lives.

 

Actually Death looming on the horizon is a great spiritual gift

         for awakening us to question the meaning of our lives,

                  the course and direction of our lives,

                  the goal of our lives,

                  the value of our lives.

 

Once someone related to me 

         the conversations she had had with two different neighbors.

Both of them did not profess any religious affiliation, did not go to church,

         had left that long ago.

Yet both independently had expressed the same need for Lent!

They thought Lent was a good idea, helpful,

         for having a designated space of time devoted to personal reflection.

 

If those outside the Church see the value of Lent 

                  (whether they observe it or not),

         then don’t ignore or devalue 

                                    what Lent has to offer us sitting here in church!

 

Let me come back to those words I quoted from the Prophet Joel,

         excellent words for personal reflection

         

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,

                  with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

         rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord, your God,

         for he is gracious and merciful, 

                  slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love…”

 

Rend your hearts and not your clothing, 

         not just the outer layer of your self identity 

                           depicted through your wardrobe choices.

Rend your hearts, what is deepest, at the core of your identity.

Let them be torn open.

Let Jesus’ Holy Spirit, like a gentle hurricane, shred what cloaks your heart.

 

When Jesus died, Matthew’s Gospel tells us, 

         the curtain in the Temple that covered the Holy of Holies,

                           which was the heart center of Jewish worship,

         that curtain was torn in two, top to bottom,

and the heart was exposed, the center of being.

 

In that dramatic action, we can see the effect and the power,

         the efficacy of Christ’s death for us

that tears its way through all the veils to the place

                  where our deepest desires and loves and hurts and hopes reside.

 

His death brings liberating life for us.

 

So we no longer need fear the disintegration of our mortal bodies,

         for God’s love expressed through Jesus is gracious and merciful, 

                  slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

 

Our work this Lent is to give up and let our hearts be rent open

         to this Love.

 

May this be a blessed and happy Lent for each of you

         so that we may prepare with joy for the Paschal feast.

Love Your Enemy

 In the collect for today we prayed:

       Lord, without love whatever we do is worth nothing.

       Send your Holy Spirit gift of Love, 

       which is the true bond of peace and all virtue,

              without which we might as well be dead.

 

That begs the question:

       Just what kind of love IS this?              

 

The Greek word (one of several for love in the New Testament)

                     is in this case agapay

       and we usually are told that this is “godly love”

              like the kind of love God has for us,

and that’s good

       because that kind of love that God has for us is

              unconditional, abundant, generous, everlasting and trustworthy.

But agapay love is also unitive love, uniting love, 

       love that does not make a distinction between lover and beloved.

To experience this kind of love is to discover union with the Divine

       and union with all other living beings.

In its fullest form agapay love makes no distinction between persons,

       between species, between living and inanimate beings,

              everything belongs in this love

                     and is valued, respected and cared for.

We can understand something of this expansive love

       in terms of how much we will sacrifice for each other,

but this goes way beyond that 

       for the whole of creation is held in this agaph love.

To love with this kind of love requires us 

       to live in service to the whole environment, to everything.

 

Few of us catch that whole vision of what love can be,

       like St. Francis of Assisi did,

              in which he also shared the same wounds as Christ on the cross,

which is the ultimate length for one to go in loving your enemies.

 

We are Christians.

       That means we are followers of Jesus.

To be a follower of Jesus means that we listen to what he has said,

       and, as the old saying goes, to hear is to obey.

 

So that means we need to listen to the Gospel reading for today,

       listen and hear what is being said, 

              and then to follow, to obey.

 

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, 

              do good to those who hate you, 

              bless those who curse you, 

              pray for those who abuse you.

“Love your enemies.”

 

Oh, great.  

       That’s not what most of us want to hear.

If this is agapay love, does this then mean 

       that I have to see the other as being in union, relationship with me?

 

Now I need to say emphatically what I am NOT talking about.

       This is not doormat love.

       It is not a carte blanche ticket for an abuser to walk all over you.

 

agapay love is the kind of love that looks at everything as belonging, 

       that we are all so interconnected that not to love is to do self-harm.

 

And that is what we

        (speaking generally of the whole human race geo-politically) 

              currently are doing – self-harm.

 

Self-harm

       How do we intervene when someone wants to harm themselves?

I was taught in pastoral care courses and as a hospital chaplain

       that when someone says 

              that they are thinking of committing  suicide,

we are to take that seriously: 

       report, refer, 

       stay with the one threatening self-harm until help arrives.

 

I will never forget the time that happened – 

       the night when, as a hospital chaplain, 

              I received a call from a person outside the hospital,

a person who was so deeply despondent 

       that he was planning to kill himself if no one answered the phone.

He had significant reasons for wanting to die,

       and he had the means and a plan put in place.

I kept him on the line asking questions, 

              trying to establish some trust,

       while I scribbled a note to a staff nurse to trace the call 

                     in order to get his location and then send help.

An hour or so later the call ended 

       when help arrived at the door for a wellness check 

                                          and for taking him to the hospital.

 

It took a team to save his life that night.

       I couldn’t have done that alone.

I didn’t know him personally, but that was not the point.

       He was a person in need, 

       and I happened to be on call that night.

That is a clear cut example of intervention 

       when we see the potential for self-harm.

 

And what we may also see around us

        is a larger but more amorphous potential for 

                                                               or actual self-harm going on.

 

The situation today is critical, whether we personally feel it or not.

But we are called to follow Jesus.

       We can repeat his words – “love your enemies” – 

              but to follow up those words with our actions, that’s the test.

 

So it may be helpful to look at another Greek word,

       the word for enemy echthros.

It is a word that means those who are discordant, alienated,

              not simply an adversary.

 

Let me remind you of another situation of loving your enemy

       that we also just heard in the Hebrew Bible reading for today:

Joseph revealing himself to his brothers, 

              his brothers who had betrayed their relationship with him

                            in a most hateful and hurtful way,

and now their cruelty had caught up with them.

 

When Joseph tells them who he really is 

       “his brothers could not answer him, 

              so dismayed were they at his presence.”

They thought that, if he were still alive, he would be a slave

       but now they find that not only is he alive 

              he has great power over them.

In fact, he has the power of life and death over them.

But what does Joseph say to them?

       “do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves … 

              God sent me before you to preserve life.”

That is agapay love intervening, 

       a love that looked at them and bridged the alienation 

              because they were intricately connected in life.

 

Now the current situation that our nation is in 

       is one that has been engineered to create shock and awe

              and to destabilize 

So spiritually now is the time when we really need to be grounded,

       to be connected with others, with each other.

 

Each of us as individuals may feel helpless to intervene 

              and address the self-harm that we see happening 

                            that impacts us all.

       to intervene with that highest form of love agapay,

but we need to remember that we are not alone.

       It takes a team, maybe a team of thousands, millions.

That is how agapay love works – we team up

       because we know, we realize, we experience it in our bones

              that we are so interconnected

that if one falls, we all will lose balance, slip 

       and potentially go down too.

 

So I am calling you all to open your capacity for compassion,

       especially with others who are alienating,

because they are blind to how interconnected all life is;

              they do not see 

                     the self-harm they are causing themselves in their alienation,

                     and that is self-harm for us all.

 

And forgive.  This is important too, because

       if you do not forgive, you make yourself into an enemy,

                     one who is alienated and in discord.

To forgive is to liberate the other

              who has been imprisoned in their isolation of enmity.

And forgiveness liberates you from your own imprisonment too.

 

“Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 

       give, and it will be given to you. 

A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, 

       will be put into your lap; 

for the measure you give will be the measure you get back."

 

This is how we live faithfully in chaotic times.