Wherever You Are

Luke 5:1-3, 11b-32.

In 1993, sociologist of religion Marsha G. Witten published All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism. She wanted to know how American Protestantism was responding to the increasingly privatized, pluralistic and rationalistic society of the 1980s, and she investigated this question by soliciting and analyzing sermons from Southern Baptists and Presbyterians preached between 1986 and 1988. The text on which she asked for sermons was the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Some reviewers of Witten's work—as well was Witten herself—wonder whether the text choice itself colored her findings. This is a story of unconditional forgiveness, after all. Even so, Witten reports finding a "daddy" God, a blunting of the scandal of sin, and an individualized experience of forgiveness. In her conclusion, she asks these questions:

1. "What … of the immensely potent Protestant doctrine of grace, which appears eviscerated in much of the speech as speakers fail to acknowledge notions of human depravity and separation from a transcendent God?
2. "What of the ability of religious speech to deal with concerns of theodicy, if it declines to contend with issues of human suffering and evil?
3. "What of the the possibilities for creating and sustaining stable, binding communities of faith, if incentives to congregation are based purely on mutable perceptions of self-interest?

"If it loses these features and capacities, I think, Protestantism loses it essential identity" (All Is Forgiven, 140).

Borrowing from Witten's conclusions, I am fashioning a challenge for those who are thinking of preaching on Luke 15 this Sunday. Are there elements in this text—or elsewhere in our tradition—that make it possible to be faithful to Jesus' story here and still (1) take sin and its relationship-breaking, pain-inflicting consequences seriously and (2) proclaim that forgiveness is never an isolated, individual experience, but instead is precisely the only reality that eliminates isolation and makes true community possible?

Here's a start.

When we were tired of being "It" in Hide and Seek and having no luck finding the hidden ones, we would yell, "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" I thought of this phrase in connection with the way the father of the parable responds to both of his sons. Maybe the goal of the father's love is not that the younger son will see the error of his ways and find his way home (that's important, but not the goal here), or that the father will see him in the distance and run to him in joy (important too, but the story is not over yet). Instead, the climax of the story is something not in the story yet at all: the climax of the story is the community that will be formed when the two brothers are together again. Anything less than this is just same old, same old: little brother, isolated from big brother, thoughtlessly partying while big brother feels isolated by his own sense of responsibility and all the work that needs to be done. This outcome to the story is the theological equivalent of little bro saying, "I like to sin. God likes to forgive. What could be better?" which is (you heard it here first) not the gospel.

God hates sin so much not because God is a peevish scorekeeper, but because sin harms those that God loves: namely, you and your neighbor. It is testimony to just how devastating little brother's actions have been that the father needs to find the older son and try to convince him that reconciliation does not mean, "No harm, no foul" and that the old, unfair relationship between the brothers is not the only possible future for the two. Little bro's sin started a long time before he spent all that money in "dissolute living." He made a hash of his relationship with his brother, and he let his father know he couldn't wait for the old man to kick before he got his mitts on the inheritance.

What makes reconciliation between brothers possible? The father says to the older son, "This brother of yours was dead and has come to life" (Luke 15:32). The past is not the only factor shaping the future of the two brothers. That could be a definition of forgiveness: the past does not have all the power in this relationship. If the past were defining things, little brother would still be dead to his family and maybe not so far from really dead from starvation or HIV or the violence that so often accompanies life in the fast lane.  The father says to the older son, "We have a different present and future than anything in the past has led us to expect, one in which we are all together without the old patterns of harm inflicted and endured over and over. This is the reason for the party."

Comments

[Chris Montgomery]

Although I didn’t go to the book, “The Parables of Grace” by Robert F. Capon, I’m sure that most of this came from there.

The first character in this story of the forgiving Father is the first one who “dies”. Giving his estate to the son he in a sense goes out of the father business… much in the same way that God in Christ has gone out of the God business.
The youngest son, the next character, is the next one to die. At first, with the pigs, he has a near miss at dieing but not quite. He makes this wonderful confession but then for some reason (but something I that think is very easy to do) he decides that he can grease the skids a little bit by adding on the very humble condition “treat me like one of your hired hands.”
Homecoming is wonderful… the father (who has given up the father business) sees the son in the distance and really not knowing why he has returned runs to him and bowls him over with a loving embrace as if nothing had ever happened. The son having been just bowled over by unconditional grace makes his confession to the father this time leaving out the add on … with no strings attached grace as was just shown by the father it is not necessary. Lost now found… death and resurrection! Party time!
Now to the older son who is definitely not pleased. For all these years I have been working like a slave for you … always obeying your every command etc. etc. Not exactly greasing the skids but a more mature and aging version of it. Here is the ultimate bookkeeper and it is his score on which he builds his relationship with his father and it would seem also with his brother.
“Son you have been with me always, all that is mine is yours.” For pete sake give up that anal bean counting way of yours and go inside, join the party and have a drink for God’s sake.
What happens… does the son die to his bookkeeping ways? Is there “resurrection”, does he go into the party…grab a glass of bubbly from the passing waiter, go to his brother and welcome him home with a toast? Now, each walking in the true freedom and equality of the unconditional grace of their father, do they look in each other in the eye and burst out laughing at the wonderful gift that has been hidden but with them all along?
Lost …Found Death… Resurrection Reconcilliation

[Mary Hess]

Yes! I think you've really "caught" one of the more powerful elements of this pericope, Mary, and one of the hardest for us to hear and believe, let alone live into...

[Ruth Worman]

You can read Capon's take on the parable at http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/Capon_4414.htm

One thing that's striking in his interpretation is the image of Jesus, descended into hell, pleading (for all eternity?) with the damned to come on in to the party.

[Ruth Worman]

And for more by Capon on Luke 15, see http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/capon_4012.htm

Sorry I didn't see this soon enough to put it in the same comment!