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There was a man who had two sons…” Jeff Wright, 10/12/14

“There was a man who had two sons…”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

October 12, 2014

On the night in which Jesus was betrayed, he didn’t take his place in the pulpit to get in one more sermon or in the classroom with one more lesson, or on the mission field to heal one more person.  On the night in which Jesus was betrayed, he took his place at the table with the twelve.  He sat down to eat with his disciples.  While they were eating, he didn’t take a list of rules or a book of doctrine or a polished theology and give it to his disciples.  He took a loaf of bread.  He blessed it and, breaking it, he gave it to them saying, “Take, eat.  This is my body.”  And a cup, saying “Drink from it, all of you.”  Then, after they’d eaten together, he said, “When you do this, remember me.”

Texts: Philippians 4:4-9 & Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Surely there is a great sadness on God’s part.  A great and terrible sadness.  Jesus doesn’t come right out and say so, but you can’t read this parable and not feel it.  Not if you think about the father in the story, about what it means, as Jesus suggests, to think of God as a parent.  We call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  But we learn more about the father here than about the sons.  We already knew the sons.

One tends to work too hard; the other hardly at all.  One plays it safe; the other throws caution to the wind.  One has all the right answers; the other asks all the wrong questions.  One is self-righteous; the other doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word righteous.  One hoards the father’s love as if afraid there isn’t enough to go around; the other spends it recklessly.  One stays home at night, works on his PC; the other stays out late partying.  One chooses friends carefully; the other hangs out with anybody.  One thinks manners, family tradition, the law, and the opinion of others are of utmost importance in life; the other thinks social conventions cramp a person’s style.  At least, that’s how each might describe the other.

The younger is right.  There’s much more to life than work and rules.  The elder is right.  Whatever more there is certainly won’t be found in the bright lights of the far country.  I suppose it’d be okay if each could simply go his own way.  But they can’t.  They’re brothers.  They’re part of the same family.

There’s a house on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans’ Garden District that, when we were living in Louisiana, we’d pass when we were riding on the trolley.  It was owned by a wealthy, well-known family.  When they grew up, the kids in that home didn’t get along.  I don’t know why.  As adults, they wouldn’t speak to each other.  When their father died, it was an opportunity for reconciliation.  But it didn’t happen.  They argued at the funeral.  Janet and I learned this from a friend of one of the children.  Later, their mother died.  Another opportunity.  But they argued over who’d get what: the kitchen table one of them had scratched his initials into as a kid; the bedroom set another had used; family heirlooms; extraordinary antiques.  The only thing they finally agreed on – through their attorneys – was to sell it all and split the cash.  I can see them, can’t you, sitting stubbornly on the porch, like the elder brother.

At our Bible study last week – each Wednesday morning some of us are responding to the text that’ll be preached the next Sunday; you’re invited to join us – we read this parable and shared stories about our own families’ dysfunctional relationships: stories of estrangement, unresolved hurt feelings, failed attempts at reconciliation.  It frustrated us that Jesus leaves us hanging.  He doesn’t tell us if the elder brother responded to his father’s plea to come in off the porch.  Truth is, we’re waiting to see how it’ll work out in many of the stories we shared.  Surely there is a great sadness on God’s part.  A great and terrible sadness.

Maybe there was a time when it was enough for the church – for the sermon – to employ this parable to focus on the family dynamics in our own households.  There’s a lot here, as our Wednesday stories revealed.  But it’s not enough to limit the parable to our families of origin – not in the 21^st century.  And that’s not the reason Jesus told the parable in the first place.  He was talking about the family unit of an entire ethnic group, the Jews – how they were estranged from one another, judging, refusing to be reconciled.  But it’s not just the Jews.  Turns out, this is a parable about the whole of God’s family, how we find it so hard to get along, the distrust, the anger; how we judge and distance ourselves and fight each other on the bases of religion, race, ethnicity, gender and social class.  Maybe there was a time when the world was big enough that folks, irritated or pushed out, could head off to a far country.  But there isn’t any more far country.  The world’s too small.  Our cities are too diverse.  Our economies too intertwined.  Resources too scare.  There’s hardly a nation now that’s entirely Christian or Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu.  Our refusal to sit down and eat together is costing far too many lives.

This is the problem in the parable, the problem that occasioned Jesus’ telling of the parable.  The church calls it sin.  The world uses other words: stubbornness, social inequity, political reality, religious conflict, national security.  Jesus says it is family dynamics, that the whole sad and terrible thing begins in dysfunctional family dynamics.  The Bible says it all began a long time ago, just outside of the Garden when the first two brothers couldn’t get along and one killed the other.

Jesus says there’s only one cure, the very thing we find it hardest to do: sitting down with the other and eating together.  It’s not a forgetting of the past, or an excusing of another’s behavior.  It’s not ignoring our differences, or trying to rid ourselves of them.  In the beginning, it’s not even trying to overcome the differences.  It’s simply sitting down to eat together.  This is where healing begins and where, according to our holy text, the world’s healing will be realized and celebrated: around a dinner table.  In other parables, Jesus likened the great ingathering to a wedding banquet.

I know it sounds naïve.  Pie in the sky.  To believe it is to paddle upstream against the culture.  A report on the mid-term elections suggested that U.S. policy toward Cuba is still a political hot potato in Florida.  A few years ago, there was a meeting in Cuba between Fidel Castro and the men who orchestrated the attempt to oust him through the invasion at the Bay of Pigs.  Along with Cuban military and advisers to Castro, and Castro himself, there were two former Kennedy White House staff members there and two ex-CIA officers who had helped run Operation Mongoose, the CIA action to assassinate Castro.

They were meeting to discuss newly declassified documents related to the time and, well, to visit.  The Denver Post ran the story under the headline, “Old foes share table”.[i]   It was a step toward reconciliation, which put off some of the elder brothers.   One of the U.S. delegates had been part of Brigade 2506, the Cuban-American guerrilla invasion force.  He’d been captured by Castro’s troops during the invasion.  Later after he was released, he was elected to serve as president of the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association.  When the association heard he was going to Cuba to meet with Castro, they expelled him from the group.

I’m not suggesting that we ask our delegates to Congress to invite to dinner the leaders of ISIL to talk peace.  But shouldn’t we invite our politicians to sit down and talk peace with each other?  Maybe you remember how during the day Republicans and Democrats used to argue in their chambers and at night eat and drink together.  That’s not happening much anymore.  Those who make the effort are called traitors by their own party.  The church calls it communion.  I don’t care what members of the House and the Senate call it.  But shouldn’t we expect both sides – going at each other like they are with half-truths and innuendo; sitting out on the front porch refusing to govern – shouldn’t we insist that they sit down and have dinner together?

It’s all over the Bible, occasions of eating and drinking together, or refusing to.  It’s what the father in Jesus’ parable wants for his kids.  It’s what his kids need.  So he offers a cure to our estrangement.  He throws a party.  Communion.  Not the formal ritual we celebrate here on Sundays.  This is just the practice session.  I don’t mean to dismiss what happens here from week-to-week.  Our time around the Table is holy and precious, risky enough.  But you know it’s no good, our communion in here, if as Christians we’re not trying to do everything we can to commune with those out there from whom we are estranged.

Jesus did just this.  He got up from the heavenly banquet and came down here to eat and drink with us, to overcome the estrangement between God and us, to welcome us to the party God is throwing.  According to Jesus’ parable, God isn’t like the father many of us imagine, a father who sits up all rigid and solemn-faced at the head of the table waiting for the family to gather and insisting they mind their manners.  No, our heavenly father stands out on the front porch in his bathrobe and runs down the street toward us when, in the distance, he sees one of us returning.  Even after he’s put on his finest for the party, and sat down with all his friends and neighbors to offer a toast and carve the fatted calf, he leaves it all – the love, the laughter, the reconciliation – to come sit on the porch with one of us who doesn’t get it, who refuses to join the party.

I’m not for a second suggesting that it’s easy, this reconciliation thing.  It’s been reported that in spite of her receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace, the mayor of the village in which child education activist Malala Yousafzai was raised said he still wishes that she’d simply be quiet, that she’s a trouble-maker.  We know her efforts to bring reconciliation have already cost her dearly.  But she won’t be quiet.  In her acceptance speech, she called on other young people to raise their voices.

Yesterday, I was throwing away one of the packages that our Equal Exchange coffee comes in.  There’s a lot of writing on these bags.  One of the paragraphs reads, “Since 1986, we’ve run our business democratically.  One person, one vote.  We each have a voice, with the ability – and the obligation – to use it as we build a movement for a better food system. Spending time tackling supply chains and trade models might not thrill everyone, but it’s our passion.  We wake up thinking about this stuff every day.”  Their passion – to reconcile a market economy with the needs of producers who are at the bottom of the food chain.  When we buy their fairly traded coffee, chocolate, jams and fruit, we share in the work of reconciliation.  Folks can dismiss it.  It’s just a little thing.  But it’s not a little tihng to the farmers and their families.

When Janet and I take folks to Israel and Palestine, we meet with Rami and Basaam.  Rami is an Israeli Jew.  Basaam is a Palestinian Muslim.  Both have lost children to the conflict, each killed by the other side.  Rami and Basaam belong to The Parent’s Circle, a group of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians who meet to mourn their losses and work together to end the conflict.  They don’t care if others think their hope is naïve.

If we’ve learned anything from Jesus’ parables about eating and drinking in the kingdom, anything from the accounts of the meals he shared with others, we ought to know that something amazing happens when we eat with Jesus – no matter where the table is set, no matter who’s sitting around it, no matter even if Jesus is recognized.  When people who are estranged eat together, grace can happen.  Lives are changed.  A power is loosed.  We call it the love of God.  It’s the power to overcome the world’s estrangement.

Jeff Wright

[i] The Denver Post, 3/23/01, A2