2022-03-28
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: LUKE 15:1-3A, 11-32
I love reading that story. And I can hardly bear to read that story. I love reading it because I don’t think there’s any place in the entire Bible, or in any other literature, for that matter, that conveys so vividly what God is about. I have the feeling that I hardly need to preach today, because the story says so brilliantly what it is that’s at the heart of our relationship with God.
So I could sit down now and just let the story be. It’s such a gem that what can I or anyone else add to it? There’s my awe. There’s also the matter, though, of the fact that I can hardly bear to read that story. Its rhythms and images, touching and powerful as they are, are also, in a way, so odd and off-putting that I’m drawn like a moth to flame to explore it and to open myself to where it leads.
Because here’s the thing: as brilliant and evocative as that story is, as magnificently alluring as it is, it’s also, at some level, terrifying. Or repulsive. Or so counter-intuitive that it may just make us fume. What God in her right mind would set this up as the way to be in the world? What God who has thought this through would possibly pose this as the model for how the world ought to be organized and set up? It’s totally nonsensical. If things ran the way the parable suggests they should, we’d all be allowed to get away with murder, both figuratively and literally.
There’s no end to the examples we could pose to make the point that the story is sheer lunacy. Your daughter tells you she wants her share of the inheritance that will eventually be hers. You reluctantly give it to her. Off she goes to waste it all on drugs and frivolous luxuries. When she comes back to you, tail between her legs, what are you supposed to do? Pretend it didn’t happen? Or your son takes his share of the inheritance and blows it gambling on the NCAA basketball tournament. What are you supposed to do when he comes crawling back? Hug him to pieces when you have no idea if he’s learned his lesson? Or you have a staff member who absconds with a sizable chunk of the workplace proceeds. What are you supposed to do when they come back to you and sheepishly admit that perhaps they shouldn’t have done that? Throw them a party at the Ritz? You and I can multiply these cases ad nauseum.
Jesus’ solution to sin is really a total non-starter. If we acted the way the story suggests we should, wrongdoing would be rewarded, deliberate mistakes would be ignored, avarice and sexual malfeasance and betrayal would be condoned. You betrayed me? Sure, let’s have a party. You left me when the going got tough? Fine, let’s have a blowout celebration. You made a fool of me and cut me to the quick? Doesn’t matter at all—I’m taking you to Chez Francois for the best meal you’ve ever had.
This is no way to set up a society. There’s not the slightest incentive for us to act responsibly. We’d all be rewarded for acting stupidly and mistreating each other and getting away with as much as we possibly could. And in the most extreme scenario, Vladimir Putin could get away with whatever he wanted to. This stupid story is an utter fiasco as a model for human life. Let’s just throw it out and never again pay the slightest attention to it.
Except for this: it haunts me at a level far beneath the surface. It moves me so deeply that I can barely get through reading it without weeping. As much as an ordered and fair society matters, as much as rules guide us and structure in a culture of honesty and decency, as much as we can’t really get by in a lawless, amoral, and anarchic society, there’s something else that lies even deeper, something that is even more crucial, more life-giving, more beautiful than those standards, those regulations, those deserved consequences. And that is the gripping need we all have to live inside an adoration that is never dissuaded, inside an affection that is offered without condition, inside a love that simply never gives up on us. Yes, rules and consequences matter. Even more fundamental, though, is knowing that we are adored by a Power that will not, under any circumstance, ever let us go.
It’s not hard for me to see that I am the older son in this story, as are, perhaps, many of you, no matter your gender. I fit the stereotype of the older brother who tries desperately to do everything right. As a child, I worked hard at being nice to my parents, respectful to my teachers, polite to my elders. I was the buttoned-up little boy who grew into the buttoned-up adult. Don’t make waves. Do everything right. Obey the rules. As perhaps with many of you, I have made my way in the world by trying to do everything right.
And for those of us who have established our identities that way, it may well be that the interaction between the father and the younger son in that story makes us seethe. We can so identify with the older son’s fury when he hears the party going. “Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!” (Luke 15:29-30, The Message). It doesn’t take much imagination for many of us to see ourselves reacting in just that way. Do many, perhaps most, of us identify with the rule-obeying older son? Oh, you can be sure of it!
And what we may so easily forget is that, no matter how good we may have been throughout our lives, no matter how almost invariably blameless may have been our behavior, we are none of us perfect. As the apostle Paul writes to the Roman Christians, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23). All have sinned. All have fallen short of what we might have hoped we would be.
And if we’re going to be fair as we find our place in this story, we will acknowledge our shortcomings, we will admit that at least a part of us is like that wasteful, erring younger son. As perhaps you do, I have numerous regrets about things I’ve said and done. When I was a child, if I’m honest, my attempts at perfection were never more than an approximation. We had a dog, for example, a small Shih Tzu that my father never particularly liked. One day the dog got lost, and we searched high and low for it. And at one point I snapped at my father that he had lost the dog on purpose, a remark I still regret. My father wrote a book later in his career and I didn’t read it for months. When I told him I had finally read it, there was a look of such pain on his face, as though to say, ‘You couldn’t have read it when it first came out?’—also an oversight I regret to this day. I can remember with horror my trying to cheat on a grade school test by looking at a classmate’s paper. As I may have mentioned before, I was sitting one day in a seventh-grade class with Mrs. Liscomb, our social studies teacher. At the back of the room, while she taught, my friend Steve Jacques and I were busily engaged in conversation—many important things to talk about. Finally an exasperated Mrs. Liscomb asked a question and called on me for the answer: “Hamilton?” I told her I hadn’t heard the question. She replied acidly, “I know.” To which I smartly said, “Then why’d you ask?” That prompted Mrs. Liscomb to make a trip to our house to tell my mother how smart-alecky I had been. Not a good look for a would-be perfect older son!
I can pretend all I want that I was perpetually the good kid, that I always did the right thing, that I was invariably without fault. The bald fact of the matter, though, is that I’d be deceiving myself at the core if I claimed that. I may have wanted to be good. And perhaps I was most of the time. But the fact remains that I also had a rebellious streak, and that I could be a little imp.
Nor are my mistakes limited to my childhood either, of course. I’ve hurt people—maybe you included—I’ve ignored people, I’ve let people down. I’ve preached in ways that missed the full truth, or that shaded things in an unfortunate way. In my last church, I received a call one day from a reporter for the Providence Journal, saying he was doing a story on ministers and whether they ever said things in sermons that they wished they hadn’t said. I told him there was something about every sermon that, upon reflection, I wished I had said differently. And when, the following Saturday, the story appeared, I was quoted as saying that I regretted every sermon I had ever preached! So have I missed the mark, have I hurt you and others, have I regretted something I’ve said or done every day of my life? I suppose that goes without saying.
And it’s this that’s so easy to forget. We who so instinctively identify with the punitive, superior, self-righteous older son in this story may find it salutary to remember that none of us have been completely without fault. “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
And given that, what gets us through, what makes those mistakes tolerable, is that someone has forgiven us. It wasn’t our perfection that saved us, in other words. It was the embrace of someone who enabled us to let go of the “sin that clings so closely” (Hebrews 12:1). It isn’t our faultlessness that makes us whole. It is, instead, the power of a love that holds us close even, and especially, when we haven’t been perfect. Sometimes it’s God whose dear and direct embrace makes all the difference. Sometimes it’s God working through someone else. It’s not rules and perfection that save. It’s love.
I am occasionally haunted by a book I read many years ago, a book by Calvin Trillin called Remembering Denny. Denny was a college friend of Trillin’s, a brilliant Yale graduate who went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, a man with incredible promise, and a man who finally took his own life. And Trillin puzzled over that death, wondering how it was that a man with such brilliant potential would end his own life. And while I don’t remember how Trillin answered that question, what I come back to over and over again is the suspicion that Denny either didn’t experience love in his life, or he wasn’t able to receive that love and take it in.
Richness and fullness of life is not about what you and I do right or wrong. It’s not about whether we’ve obeyed the rules and passed the tests. In many ways, Denny did that perfectly—he was the quintessential older son. It is, instead, about whether we know ourselves to be loved. It’s about whether we can accept the love of others. And most especially it’s about the love of God that is absolutely relentless in its embrace of us.
Some of you may remember a remarkable scene in that long ago Matt Damon and Ben Affleck movie, Good Will Hunting. The incredibly brilliant but deeply troubled Will Hunting, played by Damon, goes to a therapist played by Robin Williams and he’s far more clever than the therapist will ever be, shaming the therapist with his clever repartee. And finally the therapist, addressing the violent abuse Will had suffered as a child, says to Will gently, “It’s not your fault.” And Will, to protect himself from the pain, shrugs it off and says casually, “I know.” And the therapist says it again: “It’s not your fault.” Again and again and again he says it, ten times in all, with Will deflecting it each time, until finally Will takes it in and sobs in a kind of cathartic relief, and the therapist holds him and hugs him as he weeps.
We have celebrated a baptism today. And while I very much hope Jack will be a kind and respectful and responsible child and adult, something Jessica and Shane undoubtedly want, as well, what I want more than anything for Jack is that he will take in the kind of love Will Hunting receives in that scene, the kind of love both sons receive in the parable of the loving father that Jesus tells. It’s that love—the love Jack receives from his family, the love he receives from this church, the love he receives from God—it’s that love that makes all the difference.
When I was in high school, I had something printed in our yearbook that I later came to deeply regret. Underneath my picture, I mocked one of my classmates. He wasn’t cool, I thought, and he had had a dream that I made fun of in the yearbook, in what I thought at the time was such a clever little ditty. What in the world was I thinking? As the years went on, I found I couldn’t shake the memories of my cruel foolishness. I couldn’t look at my yearbook, couldn’t enjoy any memories of my time at the school. I was too ashamed. So one day I decided I needed to write him, to apologize, and to ask his forgiveness. Which is what I did. He could have chosen not to answer my letter. He could have chosen to hold my deed against me forever. He could even—this was my worst nightmare—have sued me for libel and insured that my misdeed would continue to haunt me. Instead, he wrote me back. And this is what he said:
Dear Hamilton,
I do somewhat remember you from back when you were my . . . classmate . . .. You are correct in noting that we weren’t friends at the time, although we may have attended a class or two together. . ..
What I had completely forgotten about, at least until I received your letter reminding me of it, was your quote in the . . . yearbook. And the only troubling thing about receiving your letter was to learn of the . . . years of hell you have put yourself through over something you wrote in a frivolous moment as a teenager. Your quote caused me no offense at the time . . ., and the fact that I had forgotten about it over the intervening . . . years undoubtedly means that it offends me even less now. Since no offense is or ever was taken, no apology . . . is or ever will be necessary. So please put your mind at ease, and feel free to look at your . . . yearbook again: it holds a few good memories for me, and it undoubtedly can do so for you, too.
Yours truly,
[Larry]
Was I wrong in writing what I did in that yearbook? Undoubtedly. My gross error will always live in me as a reminder that I am far from perfect. But even in that reprehensible moral blunder, I have also been held in grace. I have been forgiven. It’s what lets me start my life over, and to live it, as much as possible, anchored in that grace, and willing to pass that love on to others who sin as I do. That’s God’s radiant gift of new life. It belongs to you and me, a gift of the highest order. May we breathe it in. And may we breathe out that love to a world so in need of healing. For that is the richest of all possible lives. We have all of us been lost. And we are all of us found. Thanks be to God.