March 17, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
That is the point in the story, where our attention often drops off and we take our eye off the ball. We get caught up with the Dad’s abundant generosity: either in amazement and appreciation of it, or uncomfortable with what the youngest son got away with and sympathetic to the oldest son who seems to have gotten screwed by the whole thing. But the story is not over. The Dad also WELCOMES the oldest son… WELCOMES him IN. The Dad reaches across the angry, bitter resentment of hurt and indignation, and invites the oldest son to stay connected.
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SERMONS AT TRINITY
4 Lent
March 14, 2010
“Ain’t No Manna in
The Promise Land”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
The Mother Who Had Two Daughters
So there was a bunch of Church-goers standing around listening to Jesus. Right next to the Church-goers, but not too close (because they didn’t really like Church-goers) was a group of seminary professors and their students. A third group, uneasy with both the other groups, listened also – they were clergy (bishops, priests and deacons). One thing they all agreed upon from their well-established distances, was that Jesus was way too comfortable with the wrong kind of people.
All around Jesus were gathered crack dealers, prostitutes and their pimps, pornographers, registered sex offenders, skin heads and overpaid executives of corporations that reaped fortunes off the credit card and mortgage debt of ordinary people. Jesus overheard one of the Church-goers sneer, “Look at this guy, he’ll eat with anyone!“ Jesus couldn’t resist a juicy retort, so he told them this story.
“Once upon a time there was a woman who had two children. The youngest said to his mother, “Hey mom, I’m tired of working in the business. Why don’t you give me the money you were going to leave me in your Will and I can go do my own thing?” So she withdrew thousands of dollars from her 401k and money-market funds, and gave her daughter a big fat check. Within days he had packed up her room and bought a ticket for Central America. After hugs and well wishes the girl went out the door and yelled, ‘So long Ma, so long Sis! You guys hold down the fort and I’ll have all the fun!’
Indeed, she did have lots of fun. She lived like a queen with a good exchange rate and near-slave labor all around her. Every once in a while she sent a postcard home that read, “Having a blast, how about you? Love, baby sister.”
Then one day the Global Economy went bust. The little empire she had created crashed down around her and she was destitute. All she could manage was to sell snow cones from a street cart, and she only got that job because she made nice with the disgusting owner of the fleet of street carts. All the people she used to boss around when she was on top of the world, loved to stop by to sneer and harass her. They laughed at her folly and joked about her in Spanish spoken so fast she couldn’t understand. She was miserable. Then one day she had a revelation: “The guy who sweeps the stockroom and hauls boxes for my mom gets more respect than I do here on the street. He probably gets paid more than I do too. I’ll go home, acknowledge what a jerk I’ve been and see if she will hire me for that job.”
So she saved her pennies, bought a ticket back to Buffalo, and took a bus from the airport to her neighborhood. The bus dropped her three-quarters of a mile from her mom’s house where one of her mom’s friends saw the daughter walking home. Before she had made it two blocks down the street, the cell phones were binging and chiming and zonking all around the neighborhood. Her mom was in the car and speeding down the 20 mph street within seconds. Suddenly the car screeched to a stop. In the middle of the street, the car was left empty with the driver’s door open as the mother went yelling and screaming, arms wide open, ankle length coat flapping in the wind like a cape until her daughter was totally enveloped in tearful joy. It was almost miraculous how fast the stream of neighbors and friends clogged the street, buzzing and clasping hands and hugging the daughter like some kind of triumphant returning Olympian.
But the daughter was ashamed. She tried to put on a brave face but her shoulders slumped, her body drooped, and her arms were limp at her sides as she was washed with hugs, kisses and tears. Finally, as the crowd dissipated she turned to her mother and said with a weak voice, “Mom, I am no good. I have betrayed your generosity and trust. I do not deserve to be called your daughter.”
To her utter bewilderment, her mom laughed out loud. “No, you deserve a party and that is just what we are going to have, tonight at The Buffalo Club! Honey, I thought you were dead and here you are, back in my arms again!” With that she grabbed her daughter and kissed her some more. Then, if that were not enough, the mom picked up her daughter’s nasty looking duffle bag and took her by the arm to the car.
“Well,” Jesus smiled over at the Church-goers, “you know the rest of the story. They had the party and the older daughter was angry, resentful and bitter. She refused to celebrate her narcissistic, abusive and trashy little sister’s return.” Then Jesus paused, looking right at the professors, bishops, priests, deacons and Church-goers, and extending an arm as if to wrap it around those he was standing with, he asked, “How about you all? Will you celebrate with your brothers and sisters?”
Good morning.
For any of us who grew up in a Christian Church
the story we heard today –
actually, the story we didn’t hear today from Luke –
is misnamed as the “Story of the Prodigal Son.”
Because the Church loves sin,
sin-loving-theologians
and guilt-stroking preachers
have read Luke’s original story
as a narrative about the youngest son,
who, clearly, is a major league sinner.
But the story,
even as Luke tells it,
is about a Parent with two children.
It is a story about God much more than the sons.
And when the focus shifts to the sons,
it is a story as much about
the choice of the oldest sibling
as it is about the youngest one’s choice.
In Luke, it is the Father with Two Sons
and in our version today,
which is faithful to the content of the original,
it is a Mother who has Two Daughter’s.
Now one thing I know about this congregation
is that we have more than a few
Prodigal Sons and Daughters…
And most adults I know who were wayward
at one or more points of their lives,
and journeyed back to a more typical level of
human imperfection,
really, really like this story.
And one of the things we like about it,
especially if you happened to be the youngest child,
is that, in the story,
the finger-wagging oldest child
is left holding the bag with a sneer on his or her face.
I have discovered that oldest children,
and even some middle children,
often do not feel warm fuzzies about this story.
Instead, their response is something like,
“Now isn’t that just like the youngest,
messing up and getting away with it in the end?”
If this is the first time you have heard this story,
welcome to what Christianity is supposed to be about!
We may not practice it very well,
but if we were ever looking for a summation of the claim that the Gospel’s make,
perhaps this story is it.
But don’t romanticize it
or over-simplify it,
because like all of Jesus’ stories,
it has a barbed hook.
The Story of a Parent with Two Children
is poignant, sweet, painful and challenging.
Luke’s story is in the back pages of the Worship Guide
if you want to check it out.
In fact, for the sake of credibility,
so you don’t accuse me of slight-of-hand by using my 2.0 version with a mother and daughters,
I will use Luke’s version to illustrate.
One son wants his inheritance ahead of time,
and the other son stays home
and works side-by-side with his Pops.
The father gives a portion of his wealth – apparently no strings attached – to his youngest son.
The father neither affirms nor critiques either son’s choice.
The narrative then records the youngest son’s
deep slide into the dark well
that awaits us when we indulge in utter
self-centeredness.
Not surprisingly, he lands in a pigsty;
likely a metaphor for the worst possible fate.
Meanwhile the oldest son is dutiful and successful.
He is an example of the rewards of hard work
and following the rules.
If we to not lavish the events of this story
with a lot of value judgments or favoritism
toward our own position in our families-of-origin,
we might be surprised by the punch line.
It is an easy hazard to get caught up
in the details of Jesus’ parables and
so miss the sharp and single point of their message.
That is why I am running through this
bare-bones outline
of what we already heard.
The action and punch line of the story
hinges like a door on the Dad.
The youngest son wakes up
and makes the long journey toward recovery.
The Dad welcomes him…
The Dad WELCOMES him home.
In an exuberance of joy
the Dad wraps his son in affection,
seemingly with no hesitation.
That is the point in the story,
where our attention often drops off
and we take our eye off the ball.
We get caught up with the Dad’s abundant generosity:
either in amazement and appreciation of it,
or uncomfortable with what the youngest son
got away with
and sympathetic to the oldest son
who seems to have gotten screwed by the whole thing.
But the story is not over.
The Dad also WELCOMES the oldest son…
WELCOMES him IN.
The Dad reaches across the angry,
bitter resentment of hurt and indignation,
and invites the oldest son to stay connected.
Basically, the Dad says to the oldest son,
“What’s mine is yours…”
The extravagant love of the Father
is extended to both his sons
with unbelievable excessiveness:
his love is not predicated on any particular choices
either son makes.
Be they good, bad or ugly choices, the love remains.
Who loves like that?
Love not connected to the choices we make…
Love not tied to a string at the other end of a condition…
Love centered in something utterly differentiated
from the actions of the person being loved…
Who loves like that?
Those of us who have been raised on the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches of popular Christianity,
get smug about the Prodigal Son story
as if such extravagant love
is a unique characteristic of OUR religion.
It is like that god-awful camp song:
“They will know we are Christians by our love”
as if we love better or differently than anyone else.
But centuries before Jesus was a gleam
in Joseph’s and Mary’s eyes,
God took the hand of a people
who had been used as mules
and brought them through the scorching desert,
and set them around a dinner table
on the Plains of Jericho
and fed them.
(Here is where the two stories we heard today
come together).
All the way along Israel’s ordeal –
escaping from the Slave Masters,
surviving wilderness,
living through anxiety and fear,
rebellion and chaos and isolation,
God had fed them with a mysterious
and apparently natural y-formed substance
to keep them alive.
Manna, a sweet-bread of wilderness survival.
Again, whether you think the story of the Exodus
actually happened in some way as an historical event, or you use it as a metaphor,
it doesn’t really change the wisdom embedded in it.
We heard today in Joshua,
that having crossed the Jordan River,
which throughout the Bible is always the boundary between Wilderness and Promise,
God gives them a Passover Meal.
After that Passover Meal, Manna disappears forever.
There is no Manna in the Promise Land.
That’s the punch line of that story:
There is no Manna in the Promise Land.
Manna is what sustains us
when we don’t have choices…
when we are powerless.
In those unusual times
when we find ourselves on a bobsled chute
going down a course that God
or fate
or serendipity
or randomness
seems to have imagined for us,
the story suggests that God takes some responsibility to sustain us: Manna.
In such rude or traumatic times,
Manna may turn out to be actual bread,
or emotional nurture,
or a community of bodies who hold us up,
or a power greater than ourselves we don’t
perceive or know until later…
In such times, I know you have had them,
we almost never realize
we are being sustained with Manna until afterwards; and we look back
and suddenly it becomes clear
we could have never have made out alive on our own.
But the Exodus/Joshua story says out loud,
that when we get to the Promise Land –
or as in the story of the Father with Two Sons,
when we “come to our senses” –
it is then that we must start living again
by our own choices…and the Manna ceases.
A lot of Christians say things like
“Put God in the drivers seat”
even though God doesn’t drive
and clearly if we expect God to run our lives,
we will crash.
And a lot of people, Christian or not,
will say things like,
“It’s all good” or “It was meant to happen”
as if we have no agency
and the choices we make don’t matter.
But according to the Biblical vision of reality,
the Promise Land is the place
where we get to make our own choices,
and where we get to live with the consequence
of those choices.
From the viewpoint of a former slave,
The Promise Land
is a place where we have freedom of choice,
unfettered by powers greater than ourselves –
whether Pharaoh or God –
making decisions for us.
The Promise Land
is the place of choice
where we do not need to be sustained by Manna because we are making choices
that not only sustain us
but contribute to the sustenance
of the whole community.
There is no Manna in the Promise Land
and we need to stop looking for it!
The Prodigal Son
does not expect to return and be rich.
His recovery
is based upon his accepting the consequences
of the choices he made.
His recovery
is based on the realization
that if he is going to be a laborer instead of a Prince, he knows that being a laborer,
in the service of his Dad,
is better than being a laborer in the service of someone who does not care about him.
There is no proposal,
from either the youngest son or the father,
that the he gets to return as a Prince.
The Dad welcomes him back with excessive love
but there is no hint
that that means he is saved from the consequences of his choices…
He gets a feast not another inheritance.
He gets work and wages, not his old job back.
Likewise, the Dad offers the oldest son a bridge back into the household, but he is perfectly willing to let the oldest son suffer the consequence of his resentment…if that is his son’s choice.
The Promise Land
is the one in which we have freedom to make choices;
in which we have the accountability
to live with the consequences of our choices;
and in which our only hope
is a kind of communalism
that creates a supreme interdependence
in which we sink and swim together.
Manna is only for those who are on their way
into or out of the pig sty…and just don’t know it yet.
For what it is worth,
I truly do believe there are precious times when,
for some reason we cannot grasp,
or because we have suddenly come to our senses
at a critical moment,
that we are sustained with Manna.
We only have it briefly,
just long enough to get to the Jordan River
and cross back into the Land of Choices.
But those are rare and unpredictable moments
and we should never seek them
or count on them.
They are utter gifts…which is what “Grace” is.
So the Prodigal Son story –
which is really about the Dad –
is just another version
of an ancient Covenant
that God made with those mule-people
twelve-hundred years before Jesus was born.
It is a relationship of promise that seems to be this:
God loves us
with such wasteful extravagance
that regardless of the choices we make,
we will be greeted on the road of return
with a warm coat and an even warmer embrace.
BUT…
and this is part of the promise too,
the one we have historically ignored:
that radically extravagant love
does not save us from our choices…
In fact,
God promises that we will be given the freedom
to live with the consequences of our choices.
That is the main plot of the Bible
from beginning to end,
and the sub-plots are all about how we humans
keep trying to manipulate God into taking back responsibility for us.
But no such luck, then or now.
There is the barbed hook:
a very sweet Promise Land
in which we are empowered
but have to live with the consequences of our choices.
We want it both ways
while God,
wrapping us now and again with that warm love, sends us right back
to The Promise Land of our freedom.
Youngest,
oldest
or middle,
there ain’t no manna in the Promise Land
and that is where we are living right now.
