Reading: Luke 15:1-2, 11-32 (story of "The Prodigal")
The Opening Prayer for this service:
Loving God, Father and Mother of all,
if it is true there are only two kinds of children in your family --
on one hand, those who know that all is grace,
that all is pure, undeserved gift
flowing freely from your heart of love, and to all;
and on the other, those who somehow imagine
that we earn what we have,
and are able to deserve the good we have by what we do,
and grow to resent those who don't seem to earn,
and don't work hard enough to deserve your goodness,
then please help us to be among the first.
Teach us our need of grace.
And help us to embrace it.
In the name of Christ and by holy spirit. Amen.
I got my hair cut
last week. In the course of conversation
the woman cutting my hair mentioned she had worked for a while in a Salvation
Army kitchen cooking meals for hungry and homeless people who found their way
there. I mentioned my connection with Wesley
Urban Ministries during the time when they had both a daily drop-in and an
0vernight programs, and I thought we might have a lot to talk about.
Then she
explained she doesn’t really have much sympathy for them anymore – for the
people who came in for help, and who are hungry and homeless.
“It’s their own
choices,” she said. “Most times, there’s
drugs. That’s what I’ve seen,
anyway. It’s their choice. And with all the food banks around, there’s
no need for any of them to be hungry and not have good food any time.”
Our conversation
petered out. I didn’t know what to say.
In part, I
realized later, because often I get hooked by that same way of seeing
things. And how can you argue against
what you also practice? Even if only
part of the time?
I’ve been in
different retreats and group-therapeutic settings, for instance, where we’re
all gathered to grow, to learn, to work through difficulties. For the time that we’re there, we’re
community with one another – a kind of family of healing. And almost invariably someone starts having
trouble, and complains about how the program, the process, the people in charge
just don’t do it for them, aren’t right, aren’t giving them what they really
need, are actually a barrier to their growth and healing.
And instead of
listening and taking their concern and their need seriously, often I find
myself almost automatically dismissing them, devaluing what they suffer, and
deciding that really it’s their own fault in some way. That there’s some weakness, some limitation,
some moral failing of theirs that they just need to fix in themselves, and join
the program.
For whatever
reason I identify with the system, the structure and the people in charge against
those who find themselves on the outside of the circle, looking in. Probably because it’s easier. It saves me the trouble of critically examining
my own place of comfort within the system, of really connecting with someone
else – someone different from me, who’s struggling for whatever reason, and of
stepping outside my comfort zone to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
So I didn’t know
what to say to the woman cutting my hair.
But the reading
this morning makes me think Jesus would say something.
Maybe not argue
with her. Not debate the impact of
psycho-political-social conditioning.
Not point out inequities and flaws in our social structuring. Not even talk about the role of fate and
fortune, and the meaning of God in a hurting world and a broken social scene.
Maybe he would
just tell her – and me, a story.
A story maybe about
a young man – the younger of two brothers, who finds himself on the outside
looking in. On the underside and
outerside of society. And yes, in this
case, through his own moral failing, his bad choices, his habitual
self-destructiveness. You’re right, he
might say to my hair cutter: in this case it is his own fault he ends up where
he is.
But then, he’d go
on to say, you have to realize the story’s not just about him. It’s about the whole family and whether they are
– or are not, family together. And it’s especially
about the father. Because the father is
still alive. The son has both received
and lost all his inheritance, but even though this might make you think the
father is dead and gone, he is still there. Not dead, but still very much in the
story. And it’s precisely the continuing
presence and action of the father that makes the story so good.
Because what does
the father do? It seems he spends all
his time looking for his son to come home, and for the family to be whole and
connected again. And when, with his eyes
fixed day after day on the road that both separates and joins him and his son, he
sees the slightest glimpse of movement and glimmer of hope, he is on his way –
legs running and stumbling for all he’s worth, robe flapping, arms swinging
wildly, letting everything go and putting all he has into meeting and matching any
effort of his son to come home, with even greater effort on his part to welcome
him and help him really be home again.
And why is the
father so immediate and extravagant in his response to his son’s need? So unjudging, unquestioning, undemanding and uncritical
in his welcome and embrace of the one who was lost?
Because to the
father it’s not about good and bad choices, deserving or not deserving, or
judging between fault and no fault in another’s fate. To him that’s a fool’s game, Satan’s way of
setting unnecessary limits on the goodness of the human heart and the healing
of the world.
What matters to
the father is the family he has called into being – the family we all are, and
are meant to be together. What matters
is that all, no matter where they have been and what they have done, know at
any moment that they are still and always beloved children within the family of
the father.
Which means those
who are lost are to be found. Those who
have died are to be brought back to life.
Because as long as any are absent and not in their place at the family
table, the family itself is lost to us as well.
And as long as any are dead to us and not part of how we spend and give
our life, the family God creates and calls us to be, is also dead.
So I wonder if Jesus
had been sitting in the chair next to mine at the hair place last week, when we
wandered into wondering about how to feel about others who suffer and deciding
who deserves help and who doesn’t, if he might have taken the opportunity to
tell us this story.
And if he did, what
either of us – either the woman cutting my hair or I, might have got out of it?
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