A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — March 14, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Luke 15:1-10 & 11-32  —  COMMUNION

“And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate;
for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost
and is found!”  And they began to celebrate. — Luke 15:23-24

Three parables, familiar stories all, and they’re all about grace.  In each something is lost—a sheep wanders off; a coin rolls into a dark corner under the furniture; a young man—the younger son in a family—takes half the family fortune and heads off to parts unknown.  And in each case, that which is lost is found and then a grand celebration kicks off.  Continuing the theme from my sermon last week, grace is like… that!  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!  I once was lost, but now am found…”  Oh yes, grace is just like that.  And grace quite simply calls for celebration.

The Pharisees and the scribes—the self-styled religious authorities of Jesus’ day—were complaining about Jesus mixing too freely with sinners.  Why, he even sits down and eats dinner with them.  So Jesus tells these stories, addressing them to both groups—the tax collectors and sinners who are crowding around and the complainers who feel there really ought to be limits.  The thing about stories is that they can be so versatile.  Good stories draw you in.  Perhaps you start out as a bystander, a “neutral observer in the story.  But the next thing you know you connect with one of the characters, and the story is showing you something about life—something comforting, perhaps, or challenging, maybe a new way of looking at things, or even new ideas about what’s possible in the world.

 

The first two stories seem designed to reach out and draw the tax collectors and sinners into them.  Everyday situations involving common, ordinary people—who hasn’t lost something of value and then hunted high and low for it?  We don’t always find what we’re looking for.  But when we do, whether it’s the lost family pet or the car keys, there’s great relief and something to celebrate.  And if you’re feeling lost in life yourself, even a little bit—being found is a joy that cries out to be shared.  I think the tax collectors and sinners probably loved these stories right from the first.  Tell them again, Jesus, tell us about the lost sheep and the lost coin!

I’m pretty sure the Pharisees and scribes didn’t share such enthusiasm.  Have you ever read a book or seen a play or movie where no matter how well the story was crafted or how amazing the acting, you couldn’t get into it because you just didn’t like or were actually repulsed by the characters?  I suspect the scribes and Pharisees were immediately turned off when Jesus began, “Which of you, having a hundred sheep…”  Did he just have the gall to call us shepherds?  How dare he?  Doesn’t he know shepherds are of the very lowest classes and their work is unclean?  And a woman losing a coin?  These are people who gather daily in a minyan of 10 or more men to pray together, and their prayers begin, “Thank you, God, that that you did not make me a Gentile or a woman…”  No, neither a shepherd nor a woman would draw these religious authorities into the stories.

The next story, however, offers more possibilities—“There was a man who had two sons.”  Oh, lost, found, and celebration are all still there.  But this richer, more complicated story offers three characters whose actions and interactions provide many more ways to connect with and enter into the story.  There’s a place for those of us who have made terrible mistakes in our lives, making choices that have hurt friends and loved ones and left us feeling lost and forlorn.  There’s a place for those who are living responsible, productive lives.  There’s a place if you know in your heart of hearts that your parents love you no matter what?  Do you only wish that were the case?  Also a connection.  Are you a parent?  Are your kids at home or out in the world on their own?  Do you long for their return?  Have you ever envied a brother or sister?  Or resented them?  So many possible connections.

Along with all the many connection points, this story reveals something real about the world—namely how people erect interpersonal walls of separation that isolate themselves from one another.  The younger son, in a fit of self-centered impatience, bluntly demands his share of the property that will belong to him.  He wants his inheritance right now; so in essence he is saying, “Drop dead, Dad!”  The elder son is much more passive in dealing with his father, accepting his portion of the inheritance without objection, as the father divides the property between his two sons.  So for all intents and purposes, he also treats his father as dead.

When the younger son returns, the older brother shows his anger by refusing to go into the party—a kind of passive-aggressive display of further disrespect for his father.  For the older brother, it’s all about himself, about the sacrifices he has made and how Dad has failed to show him any appreciation.  As for the relationship between the two brothers, we can only observe that they never once speak or otherwise interact with each other in the parable.  But the walls between them are evident, first in the younger brother’s abrupt departure and then in the older brother’s anger upon his return.  Beyond that, there’s the older brother’s seeming envy of the younger and his refusal even to acknowledge him as his brother, referring to him not as “my brother” but as “this son of yours.”

The walls that separate and divide the father and his two sons from each other shine a light on the many walls people erect throughout our world—personal walls in everyday life, but also all the figurative walls of discrimination that go by such names as racism, class-ism, and sexism, as well as literal walls between peoples and nations that are meant to divide and conquer.  Here are the walls the Pharisees and scribes try to enforce as they complain about Jesus associating with “those kind of people.”  Here are the literal walls that were erected around city blocks in European cities to isolate Jews in ghettos and the figurative walls of anti-Semitism meant to keep them in their place.  Here are the walls of Apartheid in South Africa and the walls of terror and genocide in Rwanda.  Here are the political walls around Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.  Here are walls to keep people in, like the Berlin Wall, and walls like the U.S. Border Fence with Mexico, to keep people out.  And then there’s the Wall of Separation encircling the Palestinian West Bank, which seems designed to do both—to keep Palestinians out of Israel and to keep them confined in an ever-shrinking territory.

There are so many walls and so much suffering that it can seem hopeless, even when there are breakthroughs like the fall of the Berlin Wall and South African Apartheid.  How can all the many walls be broken down, especially when new ones keep going up?  In some ways Jesus’ story honors the difficult and painful reality of all the many human walls in its lack of any final resolution with all the loose ends tied up in a neat little “happy ever after” package.  Will the elder son choose to go into the party and be reconciled with his father and brother?  We are not told.  The story leaves it open.

What we do see in the parable is the extravagant, even sacrificial, lengths the father goes to in reaching out to his two children to touch them behind their walls.  In Jesus’ time, a father had virtually absolute power and authority.  What this father does is almost unthinkable.  He casts off any sense honor and dignity to run helter-skelter to greet his younger son.  And his overwhelming joy bubbles over as he ignores his son’s apology in his haste to restore his son to the family, and now it’s time for a party—“Kill the fatted calf, and let us eat and celebrate!”  The father’s movement toward his elder son is every bit as gracious.  Instead of demanding his son’s presence at the festivities as is his right, the father goes out to him personally to beg him to come to the party.  When the elder son rejects his brother, dismissing him as “this son of yours,” the father reminds him of his relationships.   “Son,” he says, “all that I have is (not ‘will be’ but ‘is’) yours, but this party is necessary because of this brother of yours.”  “This brother of yours was dead and has come to life;  he was lost and has been found.”

We call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but a better name for it would be the Parable of the Gracious Father.  For this is what grace is like—this father reaching out to breach the walls between himself and his children so that the walls between the two of them might also come tumbling down.  When the story ends, it’s party time—“Let us eat and celebrate!”  And the older son?  The father has gone out and found him.  Will he accept grace and go into the party?  Well, that’s left to our imaginations.

God has reached out to us—to all people—in the person of Jesus Christ.  If we know ourselves to be found, then it’s party time!  If we stand behind our walls with the older brother, then still we hear the invitation, “Come in, let us eat and celebrate!”  There is a feast prepared for all of us—the bread of heaven and the cup of promise.  Before us is the table of our Lord, and all are welcome to come and partake.  For the Pharisees and scribes had it exactly right when they grumbled that “this fellow [Jesus] welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Jesus says, “Take, eat, this is my body given for you.”  Then he says, “This cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood.  Drink of it, all of you.”

What he’s actually saying is, “You were dead, now you are alive!  You were lost, now you are found!”  Truly, let us eat and celebrate!