St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday, March 18, 2007
It’s
All in God’s Family – Rev. David Mundy
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those of you who look to
the sermon time in worship as an opportunity for much-needed rest, I present a
challenge this morning that will keep you awake for a few minutes. I am going
to ask a series of questions which I would like you to answer, and you will
need to be physically active in order to do so. Please stand up to respond to
these questions.
How many of you are daughters?
How many of you are mothers?
How many fathers do we have
here today? And brothers?
How many of you have siblings –
brothers and sisters?
Are some of you here this
morning with members of your family other than your partner, or children?
Finally, how many of you have
ideal families where there are never any conflicts or concerns?
That may have seemed like an
unfair question, because you might actually feel that you are a part of a
wonderful family where there is a great deal of love and mutual support. But it
is unrealistic to expect that any family will be “ideal” in the sense that we
will never deal with misunderstanding and strained relationships.
We are here because we are
Christians and we are part of a bigger, extended family of faith. At the same time we
are members of our own families with all their strengths and weaknesses. All of
us have aspects of our family lives that we are so proud of we would gladly put
them on a billboard for everyone to see, as well as those things we would
rather keep in the closet.
This morning we heard a story
in the gospel which invites us and prods us to consider what it means to be
both these families of grace and reconciliation and to allow God into our
relationships.
You don’t have to turn to your
bible to follow the scripture passages as they are read, but you may have
noticed that we began with the first three verses of chapter 15 in Luke, then jumped forward to verse eleven. Let me explain.
According to Luke Jesus was confronted by religious leaders who found his
association with “riffraff” to be offensive: “this fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them.” Jesus responds by telling three parables, those simple
yet challenging little snapshots of life and faith intertwined which Jesus used
all the time to get his point across about God.
The first two are about a shepherd who makes a risky decision to go in
search of an errant sheep, and a woman who turns her household upside down in
search of a missing coin. Message? A loving God seeks
out the confused and misguided and lost.
There is a third parable, one
that raises the stakes because it is about a family. A coin is an inanimate
object and as precious as it might seem to the owner, it cannot respond. A
sheep might be a valuable commodity and even respond to the shepherd’s voice,
but there is a different bond than with another human.
The parable we just heard uses
the interaction within the life of a family to give us insight into the way we
relate to God and how we relate to one another. This story is often called The
Prodigal Son and it has been the subject of artwork through the centuries
including Rembrandt’s famous painting. Prodigal means lavish
or wasteful or rashly extravagant. The title is somewhat misleading
because it is just about one son. It is about the interrelationship between a
father and his two sons. Perhaps if Jesus were telling it today he would
include a mother and daughters as well. The dynamics of a family with one
wayward child who is first alienated and reconciled with his parent and another
who is resentful about this acceptance must have been compelling in Jesus time, just
as it is today, and he may have told it more than once for all we know.
For the first time I actually
added up the verses devoted to each character in this parable and the son who
messed up gets the most, followed by the goody-two-shoes boy, then the parent.
This is much like real life, don’t you think? The family members with the
biggest problems usually get the most attention. “Keeping score” doesn’t matter
in the end because everyone is invited to the celebration feast, whether they
want to be there or not.
Are we all in God’s
family? Are we all invited to the
banquet? Saying “yes” in a general way
is the easy part. God made us all and loves us all and wants to welcome us
home. What a wonderful message. But honestly, what does it really cost us to
say that we’re all part of Christ’s family? It’s not the big picture is not so
tough. It’s our actual families that make the answer a bit more challenging.
I knew that there wouldn’t be
many people here today who would claim an ideal family, if ideal is defined as
without problems. It’s not an exaggeration for me to say that I have been part
of hundreds of conversations through the years about family matters. I have
been privy to more angry outbursts, tears, scathing comments, rolled eyes, and
pleas for understanding than you could imagine. These are not rejects from the
Jerry Springer show. They are everyday families, good people, trying to sort
through the demands of real life. I am married to a trained family counsellor
and mediator and we have agreed that if a family looks perfect we probably just
don’t have enough information!
Actually, there is a “parable”
that always comes to mind when I hear this story and I may have shared it with
you before, but I hope it bears repeating. There was an elderly member of one
congregation, a real character who lived in a large nursing home. I always
tried to visit her last when I was at the home because she wanted to take me on
a tour of the entire facility every time. I’m convinced, though, she could
smell when I was in the building and would find me! She would go AWOL from the
home every once
in a while and I was told in hushed tones by a friend that it was to go in
search of liquor.
This woman had three children,
a daughter who lived nearby and was very attentive to her mother despite all
her foibles, and two sons who lived at a distance. When the mother died the
sons didn’t feel that a funeral was necessary because of her advanced age and
the simple fact that many of her friends had already gone to their reward. The
daughter insisted that there be a service, convinced that the brothers were
more concerned about their share of the estate than anything else.
We did have a funeral service
and during it we said all the right words about new life and resurrection hope.
If the “boys,” both middle-aged men, were surprised by the full chapel, they
didn’t let on. Sadly, there was a painful consequence for the choice the
daughter made. Several months later, in the Spring, I went to the cemetery for the
committal and this time only the daughter was present. Tearfully she told me
that her brothers hadn’t spoken to her since the funeral, choosing to
communicate through lawyers in the settling of the estate. Somehow she had
become the “prodigal” daughter – wasteful, extravagant -- because she wanted to
honour her mother. So even though we were at the cemetery for a committal, the
bitterness and hard feelings hadn’t been laid to rest.
This is a dramatic example of
alienation in a family, but just as often the hurts and wounds of our lives are
unspoken, unaddressed. Twice recently I had conversations with folk who
shared with me their sadness that adult children have chosen not to be part of
the Christian community. In each case it was a familiar story. The kids had
been raised in the church by parents who tried their best to live out faith in
Jesus Christ all seven days of the week, not just on Sundays. But somehow it
didn’t “take” and neither children nor grandchildren attend worship or want to
talk about issues of faith. The spiritual inheritance or “estate” will not be
passed on to the next generations and that hurts.
The challenges of family life
are real and sometimes they are painful. It’s odd really. We realize that are
true villains in our world, despots such as Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Kim in North
Korea. But they don’t live at our house. In the practical sense the biggest
“sinners” in our lives are often the ones we eat with and with whom we live from day-to-day.
They are the people we know most intimately, for good and bad.
Jesus still uses parables to
guide us to deeper meaning, if we choose to listen. If Jesus is using these
parables in Luke 15 to speak about a loving, seeking, reconciling God, and God’s
relationship with us, then what do we learn here? Perhaps it is that God doesn’t give up on us,
so we are not to give up on one another.
That doesn’t mean that we must endure abusive situations or live with a
heavy burden of guilt over the state of relationships. What it can mean is that
there is always one more place at the table, figuratively speaking and even
literally. True hospitality begins with the heart. We can pray that a power
greater than our own is able to rout out the disappointment and bitterness and
anger which hold us back from life.
And there is more. Within this
parable of grace we find the unspoken invitation to be each of the three family
members. The late Henri Nouwen a Roman Catholic theologian of great wisdom
wrote a book called The Return of the Prodigal Son: A
Story of Homecoming. When he first saw Rembrandt’s painting of this parable
he identified with the younger son because there had been times when he was
rather confused about his direction in life, although he had never got into
trouble.
Through a friend he began to
see himself as the older son because he had always been responsible and done
what was right and righteous. At times he had been bitter about this in his own
family and he never felt that he had quite enough approval or recognition, no
matter what he achieved. In some respects the oldest child is just as “lost” as
the younger.
Finally he began to see himself
in the father, even though as a priest he would never have biological
children. It was the invitation to live
with a generosity of spirit and a freedom in compassion that reflected the
deepest relationship with Christ. Nouwen puts it this way
I am the
younger son; I am the elder son; and I am on my way to becoming the father. And
for you who make this journey with me, I hope and pray
that you too will discover within yourselves not only the lost children of God,
but also the compassionate mother and father that is God.
We may not have ideal families
but we have real families where God’s grace can be experienced. We are all in
God’s family. Thanks be to God.