Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.10.13; Rev. David Williams
It’s hard to have kids.
One of the most significant challenges in parenting comes when that first bundle of joy becomes more than one bundle of joy. It’s not just because life gets twice as hard, because it doesn’t. It’s not one plus one. It’s one with a zero added. It’s not addition. It’s exponential.
That’s felt particularly true these last few months, as kids have gone to school to gather knowledge and the latest crop of influenza and noroviruses. Dealing with one feverish child is a challenge. Dealing with two feverish children? Oh, that’s extra super fun.
And even more fun? When you have more than one of them, your kids more quickly learn that four-letter word that every parent dreads. It’s the worst one of all, the one that changes everything. Oh, you think your little ones are innocent, you think they’re never going to say it, because they’re so sweet and charming. Plus, they’ve been raised by you, so naturally they’re going to be perfect. Then, when you least expect it, you’re sitting around the dinner table and that word pops out of their mouths:
“Fair.”
“That’s just not fair!”
I mean, that is the word you were thinking, right?
I mean, that is the word you were thinking, right?
You’d think that’d be a good word. Be fair, you say. Don’t be unfair, you say. But for some reason, that word causes trouble.
Because things are never fair. After dinner, someone gets very slightly more ice cream than someone else. “Moom! Look at Taylor’s plate! He’s got three point two grams more than me! That’s not fair!” And if you measured it, it’d be amazing how dead on they’d be. When you’re meting out household responsibilities, one task is ever so slightly more difficult than another. “Daaad! Taylor’s room isn’t as messy as mine! She’s not having to work as hard as me! That’s not fair!”
When you try to get them to unplug from their cybernetic brain-leeches for just a moment to engage with the real world, you’ll hear, “But DAAAAAAD! OMG! TNF! TNF!”
Finding that balance seems impossible. That perfect point where everyone gets exactly the same and no-one gets less than any other person seems forever beyond us. It’s a good thing we stop worrying about that when we grow up. Right? I mean, right?
Like, say, during that one Presbytery meeting every year when my colleagues are presented with the breakdown of every salary of every pastor in the area. There’s just never ever grumbling or complaining or comparing. I mean, we’re ordained servants of Jesus of Nazareth, Teaching Elders gifted with the vocation of sharing the Good News. Gosh, we’re just so holy that we’d never resent another person who works the same hours as us but makes twice as much. Never ever. Honestly. We pinky swear.
And if you believe that, there’s a guy I got an email from recently who you might want to talk to, a pastor who wants to transfer 11.5 million dollars into our church bank account that he inherited from his dear praying departed Nigerian uncle.
Human beings do resentment easily. We have mad skillz at feeling aggrieved and outraged and annoyed. What we’re rather less good at is generosity, forgiveness, and grace, and it was that pointed message that Jesus was endeavoring to drive home in the famous parable we hear today.
The parable of the prodigal son is a remarkable story. But like so much of what we’ve been hearing over the past few weeks, it is also a story that just one of the gospel writers included in their story of Jesus. Only Luke chooses to tell it as a part of his recounting of Christ’s teachings, and for a reason.
The reason that this particular story was remembered in Luke’s Gospel and in none of the other three stories of the life of Jesus? It’s the same reason that Luke was the only Gospel writer to recount how Jesus told those stories about suffering, the ones we heard last week.
Why? Of all of the Gospels, Luke’s was most clearly written for those who were doing well in life. It was a formal Greco-Roman history, remember, one written for those who could read it themselves. In the ancient world, that meant that it would have been heard by the literate, the elite, the merchant class. Luke’s first audience were the successful and the hard-working and those diligent in their studies, in other words.
How would they have heard this story? They would likely have heard it in much the same way that Christ’s first listeners heard it: as a challenge.
This story is not only a challenge, mind you. Like many of the stories of Jesus, it’s rich with possibilities, and speaks powerfully into all corners of the human condition. The traditional name of the parable tends to drive us into reading it through the lens of the youngest son, the prodigal himself.
This kid has messed up on a whole bunch of different levels. The first level we miss, because we’re not first century Judeans. The younger son goes to his father, and says “Give me my inheritance.” In the Jewish culture of the time, you received your inheritance only when your father died. What this young man was saying wasn’t just “let me have access to my trust fund.” He was saying, “Dad, you may as well be dead, for all I care.”
And then, well, then he’s off to Atlantic City for a wild spree. That ends the way these things always end for marks and suckers, with promise lost and a life’s possibility seemingly ruined. Bad choice follows bad choice, step by step, until nothing is left but what’s aways left. Nothing. Realizing what he’s done, the son returns home, utterly repentant and willing to be nothing more than a slave in his father’s home.
Instead, the father receives him with joy, and calls on the whole household to celebrate his return. That’s the part of the story we tend to focus on. It’s the part that shows the depth of God’s love for all of us, and the willingness of God to receive us back. For any human being whose ever felt broken and lost, it’s powerful stuff.
If you’ve every really and truly screwed something up, and your life has been a ruin, and suddenly someone has shown that they’re willing to look past all that and see hope in you, then you know why this part of the story has power.
But when Jesus starts telling the tale, he doesn’t say, “And the title of today’s story is ‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son.’” He says, instead, “There was a man who had two sons.”
As short as this story is, it isn’t about the dynamics of the relationship between a parent and one child, but the significantly more complicated relationship between three souls. And the Eldest child, honestly, is just as much a part of the story. This is the diligent one, the dutiful one, the one who stayed at home and did what was in the best interests of the family. He’s done well for himself. His place in the household is without question. He’s been working the fields and being responsible and folding his laundry and putting it away instead of stuffing it under his bed.
And when his ingrate brother comes back with nothing, and his father rejoices, the brother seethes. He’s outraged, outraged at the total lack of justice. If there was justice, that worthless moocher would be sent packing. If there was justice, then at least that stain on the family name would be made to earn his place back again. Worthless piece of garbage. He deserves everything he got.
But no. Instead, celebration! They’re having a party!
Faced with this utterly unfair turn of events, the brother sits down in the field. I’m not going in there. Not going to do it.
When his father comes out to talk with him, the older brother is clear where he stands. “You know what I’ve done for you. You know how hard I work. Every day. And what do I get? I get bupkus. Nada. Zilch. And this...this...” Here, the older brother searches for words, and comes up with “...this son of yours.” Meaning, “He may be your son. He’s not my brother.”
The father gently chides him. “Why wouldn’t I celebrate? Right now, that’s the right thing to do. Your brother,” says the father, and those words need to be emphasized, “Your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”
The reminder Jesus offers up in this story is that grace, like mercy and forgiveness, are fundamentally unfair. Grace is not a transaction. Grace does not work that way. It’s offered up as part of God’s infinitely generous love.
For Jesus’s first listeners, the tension was between law and grace, between obedience to the regulations of Torah and the deeper law of God’s love that gives all of them power.
For those who first read Luke, that tension between law and grace remained, but it went deeper. Those who’d done everything that the law required and had done well? Those wealthy and successful merchants, those scribes and elites who did well because they deserved it and read Luke’s history of Jesus with bright and searching eyes? They were reminded that they were loved just the same as any struggling street drunkard who heard that word of grace and yearned for change.
And for us, the story remains, rich with meaning, sounding in our ears as we need to hear it. If we see our brokenness for what it is, and can’t imagine that God’s justice has a place for us, the story opens up the truth of God’s grace, in all it’s unfathomable depth. If we perceive mercy as unfair, and grace as a slap in the face, then Jesus reminds us, in his relentless, pain-in-the-behind way: “This is your brother. This is your sister. This is your child.”
Hard as it may be to have kids, we’re reminded by the one who loves us all that unfair, unjust, and absolutely unconditional love is always and invariably God’s answer.
It needs to be our answer, too.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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