March 18 , 2007
Lent 4, Luke 15:11-32
The prodigal son........
Last year I took a stab at leading a retreat for a men’s group from a big church in Memphis. They met at the diocesan conference center over Friday and Saturday night to explore their role in the church and to think about what it means to follow Jesus. At least that’s what their brochure said. I was told by the planners that another priest, an old friend of mine, had led the retreat the year before and though he had been good, he was a little too interested in silence and contemplation. Well they must have liked what I ended up doing because they have asked me to come back again. I was talking to this year’s leaders in conference call while driving to Richmond the other day, and their spiritual sensibilities haven’t changed much. One guy said, we want a men’s retreat, you know, without all that silence and introspection and stuff. We want a masculine retreat. I have my work cut out for me.
There was an article in the Post a few years ago about a minister who had written a book about men and church. The article said that women were more likely than men to be interested in unconditional love from a kind young man in his early thirties. It said men were more interested in knowing how to do the right thing. Guys have a difficult time believing that the path to salvation has to do with someone loving them no matter what. Instead, guys want to know what is expected of them. Men, the article said, like churches that give them information about how to live so they can get on with the task of living right. Men like to have something to work on....men like projects.
Last year the guys at the retreat listened to yours truly for a while in the morning. They broke into groups and talked about the themes of the retreat, and had some good discussions. But the part of the retreat most of them had really come for started after lunch. After lunch they launched into several projects to spruce up the conference center grounds, mostly involving chain saws. This was not a quiet retreat. There was a golf cart that traveled the two hundred acres all afternoon with a cooler of beer, and at the end of the day there was more beer and a feast in which nearly everyone was busy cooking something and there was enough food for an army. Everyone was busy at some sort of task in a setting where it was pretty easy to succeed....to go the whole weekend without letting anyone down....Letting other people down being one of the ways guys talk about sin. Jesus’ story today is a story about a boy who let his father down. Of course, that isn’t really what it’s about, its really a story about forgiveness. And that means, of course, that it’s a story about love.
If guys aren’t so good at imagining love, we make up for it by being able to imagine not living up to our responsibilities. And if we really are the kind of spiritual creatures who want to succeed by getting the work right, then when we screw up, it just means we have to keep at it....try again...work a little harder..right? But what about those times when it can’t be set right. What about those times when nothing we can do will put it back together again. The money’s all gone, we’re living a broken life in a foreign country....miles and miles away from what was expected of us. Then what? Well if that book on men and spirituality is right, then we are in a bind, because when we’ve made a real mess that we can’t clean up, the only thing left is love. Hard as that may sound, there’s nothing else.
Forgiveness is love. It is a lavish kind of love. It restores, it forgets, it revels in the healed relationship. That is all it cares about. It does not seem sensible, especially to the one who is forgiven. It isn’t just, it can’t be earned, it refuses to participate in the economy of something given in exchange for something received. It just is. For the younger son, it was beyond imagining...totally unexpected. It came out of nowhere....out of the blue.
A few years ago I was on sabbatical standing in the Louvre copying a pinting I had been working on for a couple of weeks. As I had anticipated the sabbatical, and thought of standing in that great art museum for several weeks, I wondered if I would run into anyone I knew. Thousands of people would pass by while I was there, so I thought it a good possibility but it never happened. One day, though, while I was painting, I realized that a man had been standing and watching for some time. He was tall, probably around seventy, and when he figured out that I spoke English he said, “you’re doing fine there...something like that you just have to keep working on. I know, I make period furniture and I just keep at a piece till it’s done.” Not wanting to get into a conversation, I smiled at him and kept painting. After a few minutes, though, he still hadn’t moved on so I asked him, “and where do you make period furniture?”
“Oh you’ve never heard of the place, he said. It’s a little town in Missouri, a town with about a hundred people.”
“And what’s the name of this town” I asked.
“Theodosia.”
“Where in Theodosia?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve heard of Theodosia.”
“I know it pretty well,” I said, “I still have a little piece of land on P highway... a place my father left me.”
He couldn’t believe it. “I live on P highway,” he said.
After we’d figured out that his place was less than a mile from mine, he was off. He showed up a half hour later with his wife to introduce her to the Paris painter who knew their world. He walked away amazed at having met someone from home. I was left to wonder about how loops get closed.
Most of you have heard me tell stories about my father’s home in Missouri and how I sometimes feel drawn to that place. Preachers need stories about home and roots and return, and my stories about those things have always been about that little piece of Missouri.
Seeing someone in Paris who knew his little town gave that man a fun story to tell back home. Seeing someone from that place so far away gave me a chill and a sense of wonder because of a dream I’d had only a few days earlier.
When my father died in 1998 he and I had a lot of unfinished business. We’d circled each other for a lot of years trying to get closer but it had never happened. It was just too long a journey. So I was surprised when I got away from work and home, and was alone in Paris to find myself dreaming about my father. In three dreams we continued our circling until in the last dream we held each other and cried good tears. And in that last dream his father joined us, and though he didn’t share the embrace, he laid a hand on my father’s shoulder and I realized for the first time that my father had danced the same dance with his father.
Reconciliation. Reunion. Return. There probably isn’t a person here who doesn’t know about the long journey home. At one time or another we’ve probably all had to close a great distance of some sort to find our way back into relationship with another, because we’ve all had our moments of letting another down or of being let down ourselves.
It doesn’t matter where you are in the cycle, breaking relationship, alone in exile, struggling to return, or celebrating a homecoming, the story of the kid who leaves home and comes back again is for all of us. To the one who is walking away it plants the possibility of return. The father loved the child enough to let him go. To the one who finds himself lost it speaks of forgiveness, a powerful love that sees us as the beloved even when we cannot imagine ourselves to be of any real worth. And to those who have experienced forgiveness it is a strong reminder of how love claims us and restores us, recreates us. Through the whole cycle love never stops. But the love that shakes us up and leaves us forever changed is the love that mends the break.....that closes the gap...that makes us whole.
Amen.
JMB