Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Something occurred to me this week about today’s very familiar Gospel reading for the first time ever, which just goes to show how God can surprise us when we read his Word (and also, when we’re relying on others to help us, so I hasten to add that this thought is not original to me; it comes from Andy McGowan, Dean of Berkely Divinity School, our church’s seminary at Yale).

Now, this may strike some of you as shocking, but here goes–I wonder if the popular name we’ve given this story for centuries is a bit misleading. What do we call it? “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” Indeed, the son is “prodigal”, meaning that he spends lavishly and wastefully. But the son’s prodigality is not the point of the story. His defining characteristic is not that he is a big spender, it’s that he’s lost.

You may have noticed that our assigned lesson skipped seven-and-a-half verses. In this case I think that’s understandable. The folks who gave us the lectionary wanted us to realize that this parable is told in the hearing of both publicans and sinners (“the wicked”) and the murmuring Scribes and Pharisees (“the righteous”), but Jesus tells this motley group two other parables in the elided verses–those of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Those parables deserve their own treatment, which they will get later this year, but the point is about how those valuable possessions are lost, how diligently the owners search for them, and how joyful they are upon finding them. Likewise, today’s parable might better be titled “the parable of the lost son,” because it is not primarily about the precise nature of his dissolution–his partying it up in the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of Las Vegas or Amsterdam–but about the grief of loss and the joy of finding and being found by the one who loves us.

And let’s push it a step further. Maybe, like the other two parables, we are not meant to see the son as the protagonist, the “main character” here. Of course the son does stuff, and he is meant, I think, to symbolize us, all of whom are lost and found at various points in our pilgrimage through life. But are we the “main characters”? Our modern assumption is that we are the main characters in our own stories, and everyone else has a supporting role; or, for my role playing game nerds out there, everyone else is an NPC–a non-player character. No doubt this is a natural reaction to an opposite, equally bad extreme in which the person with power is always the main character and everyone else is a peon, but sometimes the pendulum does swing too far.

If we were to change the title yet again to highlight the person whom I think is supposed to be the protagonist here, maybe we should call this “the Parable of the Prodigal Father.” You see the father is just as prodigal as the son, albeit in a very different, positive way. He’s just as profligate, but he lavishes his wealth not on debauched living, but on celebrating the return of the one whom he loved, despite that one having essentially wished him dead in demanding an early inheritance. He had already cashed in half his retirement savings before turning 59-and-a-half (not a prudent move, at least according to the Church Pension Group), and now he’s throwing a party. Such is the beneficence of a God who would, who did give everything away for every lost child who came back home to him.

This was good news for the publicans and sinners who heard the story, and it was difficult, perhaps enraging news for the Pharisees and Scribes who like the older brother care more about what’s fair than what’s loving. But if those putatively righteous people had been paying attention with an understanding heart they would have noticed that the Father went out to seek and bring back inside the petulant older brother, too. He had thought, perhaps like the Pharisees and scribes, that he was the protagonist instead of the Father, instead of the all-merciful God.

Life is a lot easier and makes a lot more sense when we can just shift that focus to the Lord God as the center of the story. At the risk of embarrassing my wife (which I might do regularly anyway) I think about this a lot when it comes to weddings, and the varied experiences I have officiating them in comparison to my own and others. Sometimes you’ll get a “bridezilla”, but lest I be accused of misogyny, I’ve found it nearly as frequent to encounter a “groomzilla” or a “mom-and-dad-and-wedding-planner three headed King Ghidorah.”

I think our wedding was easy mostly because of Annie’s own view of marriage and mine were worked out before the wedding, and I’m pretty sure we still hold the same view, since I’ve heard heard her say out loud more than once. We’ve been asked more than once by families and friends why neither of us ever got cross with anybody or made unreasonable demands of anybody or ever seemed “stressed out” when we got married. The same was asked about the “layed back” nature of both her parents and mine. I’ll not deny, part of it was that we were both proper adults (both 29, though perhaps that’s now considered young), that my parents had already gone through a wedding with my little sister, and that Annie and I are both pretty naturally amenable people.

But, as much as I like to over-analyze, I think Annie always answers those sorts of questions the same way: well, it wasn’t about either of us. It wasn’t, which doesn’t mean the couple and their relationship doesn’t matter; it does. Nor was it even about the families around us or the friends and the fellow-parishioners who were likewise present. Their presence important, but it didn’t belong to them either. The main character was God himself, the one who owns that marriage, who took the love of two people and made it and continues to make it a a reflection of his Grace. He’s the center, and “it’s not really about us.”

I think that’s what the lost son and the prodigal father realize, it’s what the publicans and sinners must have realized, and it’s what the Pharisees and righteous older brothers among us (myself among their number sometimes) have trouble seeing–it’s not about us. It’s about our Heavenly Father, and Jesus our brother, and the Holy Ghost who gives us mercy in our hearts to offer back to the all-merciful God everything about ourselves, the good and the bad, knowing that he loves us all the same and has bought us, once bondservants to sin, and freed us to live as daughters and sons, and every blessing we enjoy is his and may be a small sign to the world of His infinite grace.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Those of you who have been subjected to my sermons over the years know that I have a particular bête noir, namely the myth of human progress that took hold of Protestant theology in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries. The horror of the First World War forced a reassessment, and a rediscovery of more sober views of Original Sin and the sovereignty of God. Naturally, this wasn’t the first time such a dreadful disaster forced a reëvaluation along these lines. Perhaps less known to us, but which stood until the last century as the definitive disaster to befall the West, was not a war but a natural disaster–namely the Lisbon earthquake, which took place on All Saints’ Day 1755 and which killed tens of thousands in Portugal and Spain and what is today Morocco.

This disaster led to an increased concern with theodicy, the problem of evil, the question (to put it simply) of why bad things happen to good people. I am not accustomed to quoting Voltaire, since I think, his being a Deist, his “answer” to the question is not entirely satisfactory, even if his most famous meditation on the problem, in the novella Candide, is redolent of the answer to be found in Ecclesiastes: best to tend one’s garden, whatever Dr. Pangloss says. In any event, Voltaire’s statement of the problem is compelling, both in the novella and in his poem on the Lisbon disaster, which I’ll not read in full but whose opening lines should suffice to highlight the problem:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

The world is an evil place and full of suffering. Voltaire and Job pose the essentially same question, albeit arriving at polar opposite conclusions.

In today’s Gospel Jesus asks the question yet again, and his answer, though not of the warm, fuzzy variety does give us a path forward. Here we have Jesus responding to two tragedies which are otherwise not to be found in the historical record–which I contend is not evidence that they didn’t happen, but rather highlights the fact that in a world full of suffering, the victims of all but the most horrific examples of cruelty are sadly soon forgotten. The eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were almost certainly simply bystanders, victims of slapdash construction and “being at the wrong place at the wrong time.” The Galileans slaughtered by Pilate’s men were not only blameless; they were righteous, having been in the midst of offering the appointed sacrifices to God. Jesus’ point is that bad things do happen to good people. There is no neat correlation between faith and prosperity.

Perhaps the Pharisees wanted Jesus to identify some clear reason these victims “should have been punished.” Maybe they were just trying to trip Jesus up. Or maybe they were genuinely struggling with the same question that Job and Voltaire were struggling with, and with which we, too, continue to struggle. We don’t know what the Pharisees’ intentions were. In any event, Jesus didn’t give them the kind of answer they wanted; if we’re honest, he doesn’t give us the answer we want, but he does give us what we need. He doesn’t say “everything happens for a reason”, as if the Gospels were Hallmark Channel movies and Jesus is the charming love interest character. What he says, rather, is “repent.”

Now that seems harsh, but it only is if we have a very narrow view of the nature of repentance, if we think all it is is saying “I’m a rubbish person.” You see, true repentance includes both a turning away and a turning toward. Yes, it includes the recognition of and sorrow for our sins. It also means finding in our God the assurance of forgiveness and a relationship which can lead to growth and abundance. I don’t mean abundance in an earthly sense–whether it be material prosperity or a shield against life’s difficulties. I mean abundance in bearing the fruits of the spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

I think this is why Jesus immediately follows his rejection of the Pharisees’ desire for an easy answer to the problem of evil with the parable of the fig tree.

You can sometimes tell that I choose the art for the bulletin long before writing my sermon. I think that image, which I chose because it’s interesting, shows Jesus as the vineyard owner and some nondescript guy as the gardener. Now, I think that’s all wrong. I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to represent in the parable. Parables can be tricky that way. Maybe he’s supposed to be God the Father, whose love may take the form of wrath (that’s not the primary mode in which our God “whose property is always to have mercy” operates, but it’s not entirely off the table). Or maybe he’s supposed to be the devil, whose chief delight is in cutting down the child of God, severing that child from the roots of God’s beneficence, before he or she has the chance to bring forth good fruit. So, I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to be. I do know that the gardener is Jesus Christ, whose own good spirit tends and fertilizes and waters our souls that we might flourish.

None of this means that we will be spared hardship. The curse of Original Sin, the fallen state of creation, means that even an old, sturdy tree might fall victim to blight or be torn out by a tornado. But the more firmly rooted we are, the more we allow Christ to tend our souls, the better able we will be to whether the storms of life without losing heart, and the more assured we’ll be that when this life is over there is for us an eternal garden in which every good fruit will be preserved by the spiritual gardener, and where we may commune with him unto the ages of ages.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In one of my sermon-preparation “rabbit holes” this week, I came upon an article from 2019 about a strange occurrence at an agricultural school in Britanny. A fox snuck into the free-range hen house at dusk as its automatic doors were closing, trapping it inside. One would think that this would be an ideal turn-of-events for the fox, a sort of all-night, all-you-can-eat buffet. Well, that was not to be. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it should suffice to say that the facility’s 3,000 avian inhabitants were fine, and the fox was no more. Perhaps this should serve as a lesson about teamwork. Or maybe there’s something inherently hearty about Breton poultry. “Le coq Gallois” being a national symbol (and redundant in Roman times–gallus gallus) perhaps “les poules Francaises” decided it was time for the ladies to show their mettle. (That was a joke which required knowledge of both French and Latin, for which I apologize.)

I can personally vouch for the qualities of the humble hen. During my previous call Annie and I went on a visit to some parishioners who lived more-or-less off the grid, down a terrifying dirt road in Stone County Arkansas. I had heard it said that going to Stone County was like traveling back to the Stone Age, which was neither entirely fair nor entirely unfair. Anyway, the couple wanted me to come out to meet and say a prayer over a newborn donkey whom they had delivered that morning; I was grateful for the invitation, and all the more grateful not to have been present for the birthing itself. They had quite a menagerie out on their property, I was fascinated by all the types of farm animals I’d never really seen up close, and the couple indulged my city-boy curiosity. We came to an open coop containing a fine looking chicken, and (again, being completely uninitiated in the ways of livestock) I did what anyone would do when encountering a cute, domesticated animal, and reached out to stroke it. Friends, this was not the correct approach. A great clamor arose from Henny Penny, feathers flew and beak sought its target, which I was just quick enough to pull away. While our hosts remained politely silent, Annie quite rightly interjected: “Why did you do that?” My response: “[Shrug]… I dunno.” That was the first and last time I attempted to touch a live chicken.

Despite not knowing anything about the care and nurture of poultry, I should have remembered the image Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel. A mother hen is protective of her brood, as mothers of most of the more advanced species of animals (humans included) are. They know what spells danger ; whether it be a fox in a Breton hen house or a clueless priest.

I believe Christ is communicating at least two things here. First, naturally and explicitly, that the fox, whom he identifies as Herod will succeed in killing him, the mother hen. This is the most basic reading, and it is a prediction which would come to pass very soon after Christ made it. Let’s not get too bogged down in pointing the finger for who historically holds the most culpability–it was not “the Jews” as a people; but the Romans, Herod’s court, and the Jewish temple leadership all had a role to play.

The more interesting thing happening here, and the more apposite for us, is that the risen Lord, now invulnerable to the foxes of the world, protects the baby chicks which are God’s children and Christ’s own sisters and brothers. What I’ve said from this pulpit before about sheep pertains as much to chicks. Humanity may seem a less elegant creation, though this is due to free will and the fall rather than how God made us. The sheep are hard-wired to know and follow the shepherd and the baby chicks are hard-wired to gather under the wings of their mother, while we have the capacity to wander and get lost and fall victim to all sorts of predation. We can be really smart about how to breed livestock and really dumb about doing the very things we’ve bred them to do ourselves. If only we would permit the mother hen, who is Christ, to gather us under his wings we’d be protected from all that assails us. “How often would I have gathered [the] children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings,” laments our Lord, “but ye would not?”

The form of the foxes which seek to devour us–the world, the flesh, and the devil–are manifold. They are social and they are personal. They take forms which those in Jesus day could not have anticipated, through modern commerce and technology and other complex societal factors which would have been foreign to them. But at heart they all prey upon the same human problems that have been with us since the fall–the strong preying upon the weak, charlatans preying upon the lonely and the simple, a selfish disposition preying upon the better angels of our nature, pride convincing us we’ve no need of a savior.

Even the kindest, most loving, most long-suffering human parent might be forgiven in extreme circumstances for cutting us loose. But in the ultimate extremity, the battle against the infernal fox of sin and death, Christ will take us under his wings and protect us. No matter how many times we strike out on our own, he’ll welcome us back to that place of perfect shelter. And he’ll fight fiercely to protect us unto eternity.

I’d like to close with the words of St. Julian of Norwich, who lived as an Anchoress in a cell adjoining the sanctuary wall of her parish church for many years, with one interior window through which she received the Holy Communion and one exterior window through which she dispensed wisdom to those who sought it from her. Having prayed in her cell myself, and seen others praying there, it remains a place of pilgrimage, albeit scandalously often overlooked, to this day. I am personally convinced (though, it not being in scripture, you are not obliged to agree) she was not just some great poet or theological thinker, but was given a series of genuine visions from God, like the prophets of old, between the 8^th and 9^th of May 1373. Among these “shewings”, Dame Julian was given the following insight, which I think neatly sums up this quality of Christ our God:

God chose to be our mother in all things *
and so made the foundation of his work,
most humbly and most pure, in the Virgin’s womb.
God, the perfect wisdom of all, *
arrayed himself in this humble place.
Christ came in our poor flesh *
to share a mother’s care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death; *
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail, *
until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy, *
still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.
All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God, *
for the love of Christ works in us;
Christ is the one whom we love.

+Amen.