Coming home

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

One day a priest and a taxi driver both die and go to heaven. When they get to the Pearly Gates, Mort, the taxi driver was given a golden robe, a golden crown, and a golden staff, and is welcomed into heaven. 

When it’s Father... uhm... let's see. (Hmm. What shall we call him?) When it was Father Andrew's (!) turn, he was handed a terry-cloth bathrobe, a Burger King crown, and a broomstick.

Father Andrew was a little incensed about this. He went up to St. Peter and says “Listen here, I’ve served you faithfully. I am a priest of the church! I gave up a lucrative career in business to be a priest! For forty years I was Rector of St. Androcles and All Lions! Why do I get a terry-cloth robe and a broom stick, while this… this… this guy gets all this golden stuff?”

Peter sighs and peers at him over his half-spectacles, and says, “Look. Up here we look at results. For forty years, you preached and people slept. But for forty years, when Mort drove,  people prayed!”

Ta da dum. Clash!

Now stop me if you’ve heard this one. Then again, don't!

There was a man who had two sons. The younger son said to his father, “Give me my share of the inheritance…”

And you know how the story goes from here, right?

The younger son squanders his inheritance on wine, women, and song, and comes home broke, humiliated, and ashamed. The older son stays behind and does his work and remains faithful to his family obligations. The father welcomes younger son home and throws him a party. The older son is angry because he feels that his dad is rewarding unfaithful, irresponsible behavior.

The father says to the older son, I know you’ve been faithful and loyal and I am grateful, but your younger brother was lost, but now he's found. He was blind and now he sees. How can we help but rejoice at his return?

The parable Jesus tells, usually called the Parable of the Prodigal Son, only appears in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32), but for all it’s familiarity, there are some things worth highlighting.

First, Jesus is speaking here to both kinds of people: the righteous people who resented how Jesus’ welcomed and accepted the hospitality of sinners, and he spoke to those very people who may have wondered “why, after all this time does this rabbi welcome and eat with us now?”

So, the parable is for both of us—all of us—those on the inside and those on the outside. 

The second thing about this parable is that we don’t know how it turns out. We know that the father stepped out and welcomed the wayward son home, killed the fatted calf, threw a party. We also know the older son is upset and the father has stepped out to meet him because he is on the outside wanting to go in.

But we don’t know if the older son actually goes in and welcomes his younger brother!

We don’t know if the younger brother repents to his older sibling the way he had with their father.

We don’t know if the younger brother falls off the wagon and whether the older brother gets to say to the father “See, I told you so!”

Here is what we do know: the father meets them both halfway and speaks to them face to face, and meets them at the points of their greatest need.

Which leads us to the punch line: How it turns out is up to us.

We ought to rename the parable from the Parable of the Prodigal Son to the Parable of the Patient and Welcoming Father.

I think that most of us tend to identify with older brother. We who sit in our pews are the ones who have a hard time when people we know to be no good, rotten, very bad people suddenly “get religion.” We especially have a hard time when people seem to get religion and they remain as disagreeable as before.

But there are many of us who identify with the younger brother, too. People in our very midst who know what a second or third chance really means—because they have experienced the second chance as much as they have “blown it” and experience failure. 

And, the truth is that many of us can identify with both brothers at once!

We have all been more than a little lost. We’ve all been more than a little dead. That’s why we are here, now.

Today is our day for healing. Here we are at mid-Lent, Rose Sunday, or (in some places) “Mothering Sunday.” The idea of mid-Lent is give us a little boost to get over the hump of Lent as we move towards the really hard work of walking with Jesus through the Passion.

It is likely a time when all of us experience our inner prodigal yearning to come home.

What is it in you that causes you to feel lost?

What is it in you that knows that, spiritually at least, you’ve hit bottom?

What is it in you which makes you feel resentful and angry?

Did you notice that God has come out to meet you and embraces you, even when you are rock-bottom?

With God, it really is not about outside results but about how we tune our hearts to God.

You may think you’ve heard the story before but don’t stop me if you’ve heard it again. Keep hearing and rehearsing the story because the Good News is that it is still true...for all of us!

Jesus came to welcome us home!

Jesus came to remove all the things that separates us from God, each other and creation. And he welcomes us home. 

So the next time you come to Communion imagine yourself as one of the sons in Jesus’ story…because both of them are you! You are the one lost and found. Your also the one who never left home and may feel angry at people whom come in late and seem to go to the head of the class. I think we feel little bit of both. And whether we experience extreme unworthiness or excessive righteousness, we lay it before God who welcomes us extravagantly and gratefully.

Jesus invites us to remember and lift up all those who come home— whether we've come home from a long, winters spiritual nap now awake and uncertain if God will have us; or if we’ve come home from a long day of hard work wondering if it was worth it. Pray for those who have come home. Come home yourself. And know that God in Christ, who is perpetually and graciously patient, will welcome you with compassion and with celebration!