A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year C

 

Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."

 

We’ve just heard one of Jesus’ most well-known parables, the story of the Prodigal Son --  and chances are good we think we know what it means:  the father is an image of God’s welcoming, generous and forgiving love, the love that welcomes back the Prodigal Son – that is, the sinner, the outcast, and undeserving.  As Luke sets it up, Jesus tells this story in defense of his practice of welcoming despised tax collectors and sinners and eating with them.  They, like the son who has wasted his father’s gift in dissolute living, find God’s welcome and love in  Jesus’ public embrace of them.  

 

Interestingly, though, this Parable is also known to many Bible scholars by another name: The Parable of the Older Brother – and that changes how we hear the story.  Many of us, I’m sure, desire the generous welcome that the wandering child receives.  But don’t we also feel real sympathy with the older brother?  He, after all, is the responsible child, the good kid who stays at home, working hard in the family business, not causing his parents any trouble at all.  Doesn’t he have a right to get annoyed when his good-for-nothing little brother gets welcomed home with a party instead of the lecture he deserves?  Don’t we want to join in the older brother’s complaint about the unfairness of it all?

 

 “Hey, how come you are giving him a party??  

You never did that for me!  

Don’t I deserve at least as much as that son of yours?” 

 

I suspect we’re not that different from the good synagogue-going folk to whom, Luke tells us, Jesus told this story when they grumbled about the love Jesus showed to the disreputable folk of his day.

 

Which leads me to ask, why is it so common for people to resent the good fortune of others?  Why do we have a hard time rejoicing in a colleague’s promotion or a classmate’s good grade?  Why is it that siblings often resent the attention parents pay to others in the family?  

 

Could it be the feeling that if a brother or sister – or anyone else – receives a rich gift, then there won’t be as much left for me?  Could it be the sense that there is only so much good to be had in life and that there isn’t enough for everyone to get a full share?  Good it be, even, the fear that there isn’t enough love to go around?  

 

After all, we’ve been taught about the scarcity of the good things in life for much of our lives.  Perhaps we competed with siblings for the last piece of pie or for our parents’ affection, or simply found that even the most generous of parents’ love is never quite enough for the hungry heart of a child.  

 

In school, we learned that the good students were often the teachers’ pets; that the better athletes got picked first for teams; the prettiest girls had the most friends.  In the work world, we’ve seen some people receive praise and acknowledgment for their work, while the good work of others is ignored; that some get promoted and others laid off, and often it doesn’t seem fair.

Could the belief that there isn’t enough good stuff for everyone be at the root of many of the political and ethnic conflicts in the world today?  Could this same belief be part of what fuels the ongoing divisions over gender, race, sexual orientation and class that continue to bedevil our society?  If “they” – whoever “they” are –  receive the good stuff of life, then chances are that I’m going to get short-changed.  

 

The assumption behind it all is simple --  the pie of life is only so big, and if someone else gets a big piece, then I’m going to get a small one, or maybe none at all.  We’ve been taught this in countless ways–  and often, it is how life works.  No wonder, then, that many of us feel with the old brother when we see love given away to some undeserving person in our family, or down the street or across town or on the other side of the world or maybe in the next pew.  Life has taught us to fear that if others are loved a lot, then we will be loved less.

 

And then Jesus tells a story that turns everything we have learned on its head.  “With God,” Jesus says, “none of that is true – for God has more than enough love to go around.  That’s why I eat with outcasts and sinners.  God loves them just as much as God loves you responsible, hard-working faithful folk.  And God loves you responsible, hard-working faithful folk just as much as God loves the outcast.  No one is being short-changed.”  

 

Listen to the story again.  When the father sees the younger son, he goes out to meet him and welcomes him home.  And when the older brother refuses to join the party, the father goes out to him and says: “My son, you are always with me and everything I have is yours.”  The father goes out to both sons.  The father loves both sons.  The older brother believes the world’s lesson that love is limited, but the father wants to teach him a new lesson:  “I love your brother,” he says, “and I love you, too.”  I have enough love for both of you.”

 

So it is with God.  We do not have to compete for God’s love nor do we ever need to fear we will be short-changed.  Its not that God is really good at cutting up a big pie into equally small slivers so that we each get exactly the same tiny amount.  There is nothing that cold, calculating or miserly about God’s love.  No, in a way beyond our imagining, God loves each of us with a love of the same depth and height, the same intense passion, with which God loves everything.  

 

As Martin Smith writes:  “The love God has for me is not an infinitesimal fraction of God’s love for the whole world.  I don’t get a tiny fraction of God’s attention and care.  [Rather] God is wholly present to me, wholly available.  I receive myself the full force of God’s love for creation.” [1]  And so it is for us all.

 

One of the great joys of my life has been the days of retreat I have spent most years at one of the houses of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Massachusetts –  something I regret I haven’t yet managed to schedule since I’ve been at St. Francis.  I value those times of retreat because again and again in silence and prayer, God always finds ways to convince me, often in spite of myself, of the rich fullness of God’s particular love for me; I catch a glimpse of the full force of God’s love for creation for me, for Jack, that Martin writes about. 

 

One year as I traveled home on the train from Boston to New Jersey, I found myself seeing that rich love God has for me in a larger context.  For much of the trip, the train tracks run along the coast of Long Island Sound, parallel to I-95 and Route 1 in their New England incarnations.  They pass through small villages, suburban developments and good-sized cities like Providence and New Haven.  

 

Looking out the window mile after mile at backyards with kids' swing sets, the brightness of city streets and strip malls, and the headlights of cars on the nearby roads,  I became aware of the enormous numbers of people those houses, streets and lights represented; people I likely would never meet, with lives different from mine in many ways.  And slowly it began to dawn on me with growing awe that the fullness of God's love for me that I had gotten a glimpse of in my time of prayer was being poured out as richly and intensely on each of those people along the Connecticut shore; whether they were aware of it or not, God cared as intimately about them and their lives as I had come to know God cared for me.  Soon, this realization became too overwhelming for me to comprehend – because only God is able to love that deeply, that broadly, that richly, that widely.  

 

Maybe that is another reason why it is so hard for us to believe that we each are loved so fully by God:  not only has life taught us that love is often limited, but the breadth and wideness of God's love for each and every person on this earth is beyond human capacity to take in.  But despite our difficulty in believing or comprehending the height, depth and breadth of this love, the truth is that the fullness of divine love is there for us all.  We do not need to fear, like the older brother, that we will lose our father's love when we see it given freely to someone else.  God has more than enough love to go around for absolutely everyone.  

 

Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son and Older Brother tells us that the difficulty we have in trusting that love for ourselves and for others will never stop God from giving it.  That love keeps coming again and again and again – all the way to a cross on which Jesus says, “Father, forgive them – love them, even when they are doing this to me.”  That's how deep, how broad, how high Jesus' love is.  

 

Jesus, in bringing this love into the world, has come to challenge all the ways the world  taught the Pharisees, the scribes and you and me the lie that there isn't enough love to go around.  Jesus came to change the world so that that lesson would no longer be taught –  and he wants us, the Church, to be in on the changing.  

 

Jesus wants everyone to know that God has enough love for each person to be filled to overflowing.  That is why he ate with outcasts, tax collectors and sinners.  That is why he told the story of the Prodigal Son and Older Brother – each equally loved by their father.  That is why he called together a community of followers that grew from being a Jewish sect to welcome Samaritans, Greeks, and Romans, men and women, slave and free, rich and poor and anyone else who wanted to join.  That is why calls us know to accept the rich love of God for ourselves and to rejoice when we see it given to others.  And that is why he calls us to be a church that invites absolutely everyone to come to the party and join in feasting and drinking at the Father's table.

 

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

March 14, 2010