Morning After Preaching

Today, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, is traditionally known as Refreshment Sunday. It is the Sunday in the middle of Lent when we can take a break and think about something happy. Today we put off the sackcloth and wear racy pink vestments instead!

The purpose of Lent, of course, is not to give us a permanent downer during these cold months of the year. With the weather the way it is in New England, there is reason enough to be down in March, without the church adding to our despair! But Lent is not meant to make us more downcast. Rather, it is meant to be a time when we become aware of our failings only in order to put things right. It is a time when we examine the dark side of our character only to let God’s light come pouring in. Lent is a time to try to live up to God’s standards for us only because we realize God has already forgiven us so much.

This is the good news I want to share with you this Sunday. For today we can be refreshed by the good news we heard in the Gospel just now. The story Jesus tells is all about how God overcomes failures in our lives and our relationships, how God forgives us for the darkness in our lives so that we might let God’s light in.

The main character in the story, whom we call the Prodigal Son, is a person who has had enough. Perhaps you have all had enough, too, and are craving spring break. Whatever you do, don’t follow the example of the prodigal and go for a week of sin in Mexico or Las Vegas!

The prodigal is someone who’s had enough of his family, and of the responsibilities that his elder brother is all too keen to fulfill. Later in the story, the elder brother complains to his father: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me” anything. We learn from this that the younger son was judged disobedient. He is the wayward member of the family. And like many wayward ones, the relationships he has with his family are broken ones. His elder brother resents him; and he doesn’t like his place in the family. The prodigal is a man for whom family relationships are a burden he would rather not have – and I wonder how many of us can understand that? So he ups and leaves his family, taking his inheritance with him, and journeys into what Jesus in the story calls “a distant land,” “a far country.” He wants to be somewhere his family is not!

But he, like us, cannot escape his history. That is why we all need forgiveness. For forgiveness is about making our history right – recognizing the mistakes we have made and that others have made to us, and asking that they be overlooked. That is the truth that underlies Jesus’s parable. Unless we seek forgiveness for what has happened in our past, it is very likely we will never be able to let those mistakes go. They will continue to haunt us, in fact, just like they did to the prodigal son. Someone unable to make good his relationships with his family is not likely to have better fortune with those he meets in the far country. And what happens is just as we might expect. “There,” Jesus says, “he squandered all that he had in loose living.” Falling in with the wrong crowd, the son loses everything – except the one thing he really wants to lose, his past. In fact now his past haunts him all the more when, feeding the pigs with food he’d love to eat himself, he remembers the plenty he had with his father.

Let me break into this sad story to remind you this is Refreshment Sunday, a day for good news. Perhaps we, like the prodigal son, have things in our past that we have not put right. Perhaps we have blundered in relationships, or have resented how others have treated us. This Sunday we have a chance to make these things right. For God offers us forgiveness, that we might offer that forgiveness to others. God, like the father in the story, sees us and has compassion upon us.

God should not be thought of in only male terms. Just a couple of weeks back, we heard Jesus describe the work of God in these words, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” – a wonderful maternal image for the work of God in the world. Today, for the message of the parable to come across fully, the imagery of God as a father is crucial. No self-respecting father in the middle east would publicly break into a run, no matter what the occasion. Yet this father is so overjoyed to see his son that he runs to him, runs as fast as his legs would carry him. I remember my Palestinian friend at seminary telling me that this was the most shocking, startling part of the story – that the father runs to meet the returning prodigal.

This is a radical, unconventional image of God as father precisely because God is not like an ordinary father. Our God run to us, runs to embrace us and to hear us say, like the prodigal, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.” For God longs to say to us, “you were lost, my son or daughter, but now you are found.”

The good news is that, if we start to come part of the way to God, God will run to us. Like the father in the story, God’s love for us, God’s desire to sweep us up into his arms, overcomes everything, not least cultural convention. We live in a culture – Harvard, the US, the western world – that is not very good at forgiveness. We live in a culture, as Nietzsche diagnosed, in which we easily become captured by resentment, or seething anger. Yet, deep down, all of us know how psychologically wounding to us it is when we refuse to forgive others or refuse to forgive ourselves. How difficult it is to forgive when we feel hurt or let down. How difficult it is to forgive – and yet how important it is for us to learn how to do so.

We often think forgiveness is only about the person being forgiven. But it is just as important psychologically for the person doing the forgiving. That is the lesson to be learned by the eldest son in the story. The person doing the forgiving receives as much relief as the one they forgive. Both father and eldest son had reason to resent the prodigal; but how much better did the father feel when he forgave the prodigal? The father is able to let things go, to celebrate the return of his son, to make-merry with music and dancing. But the other son? He would rather be left outside, where he can seethe in his anger. How difficult it is to forgive! But how he suffered in his resentment! His lack of forgiveness poisoned his love even for his father. And yet his father forgives him too. Again he breaks social convention by going to speak to his older son, rather than have the son come to him. Like God, this father visits again and again to forgive us.

Think of the Lord’s Prayer. In that prayer we ask our Father for forgiveness with these words: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The two sons in the parable express both parts of this petition – forgive us our sins and may we forgive the sins of others. The parable shows that not only have we been forgiven but that for our own good we must also forgive. Forgiveness is not easy. But Jesus teaches it is good for us. And that is news with which to be refreshed today.