In this season of Lent we’ve been focusing on God’s radical invitation to abundance.
So far we’ve encountered the image of God as a mother hen who fiercely and tenderly protects her brood. We’ve pondered God as a gardener who fertilizes a fig tree – even when it bears no fruit. And we’ve hiked with Jesus into the wilderness – a place devoid of normal food – but where God’s abundant love sustained him against temptation.
Lent is often practiced as a season of NO – where we as a church are reminded of what we reject when we follow Jesus. We reject violence, we reject power over others. We lament the suffering and devastation and despair that confronts us. We repent and turn to God because we can’t get ourselves out of this mess by our own power.
But if Lent is a season of refusing the temptation to be anything other than humans in need of God’s love – Lent is even more a season of saying YES to God’s extravagant invitation. Our text for today gives us a glimpse of this love.
Our text is the third of three party parables in the gospel of Luke. Jesus tells them because he’s receiving complaints that he has been eating with too many of the “wrong people.” So he tells three parables about someone or something being found – a shepherd finding a sheep, a woman finding a coin, a father finding his sons. Each of these parables ends with a party, a celebration, with the free sharing of food and music and joy – because the lost has been found, the estranged has finally made it home.
Sometime, when my younger brother Mark and I were both in elementary school – after our weekly family dinner at my grandparent’s house – my mom and dad and grandma and grandpa stayed upstairs talking but Mark and I headed down to the basement to play. As the older brother, I was bigger than him and learning my own limits. One of our favorite games was for me to lie on my back and he’d sit on my feet and then I’d launch him into the air, like a flying acrobat. We’d take pillows from the couch and put them on the floor to cushion his fall.
But as we played that game that evening in my grandparent’s basement… one of my launches was a bit too exuberant. Mark flew through the air and his foot punched a hole in the basement wall. He burst into tears and wanted to hide, saying maybe we could move over a recliner to cover the hole and not tell anyone and no one would ever have to know. But after some discussion, we finally mustered up our strength and shamefully walked upstairs to tell the adults.
The youngest brother in our parable walks a shameful road back to his father’s house. It’s been a long journey for him since he first left the family farm to chart his own course in life. The story doesn’t really tell us why he left. We don’t know what he was running from or what he hoped to find on his sojourns.
But he’s squandered all the money he received from his early inheritance. He’s starving and working for a pig farmer in a foreign land where the pigs have more to eat than he does. And in the mire of the hog pen he rehearses the speech he’ll tell his dad:
“Dad – I’ve sinned against God and against you. I can no longer be your son, let me be your servant, your slave, and at least I’ll have something to eat.”
His hunger leads him back. But his shame whispers that it will be impossible for him to ever again be a beloved child in his parent’s home.
I wonder how long this younger brother had been questioning whether he was worthy of love. I wonder if all of his travels, all of the delicious new foods he ate, and fun times that he experienced came from some desire to belong, to be loved. I wonder if with every card swipe of that pile of inheritance money he was hoping that he could buy himself belonging. But the balance of his bank account just dropped lower and lower and lower with each new and novel experience. The reservoir of his soul dipped lower and lower with each stamp on the passport that brought him no closer to home.
We humans will do all sorts of things, grasping out for love and a place to belong. We will move across the country or world or bankrupt ourselves to feel better or to feel whole or to feel safe and especially to feel loved. The younger brother reveals the depth of our human longing.
We will continue to search in all the wrong places, until we realize just how hungry we are for something, Someone who will sustain us.
The older brother has not gone a long journey or spent all his money to find something that will sustain him. He trusts that his hard work has and will continue to provide. He knows what it’s like to run this ranching operation up close. He has been there through the sleepless nights of calving and the long days of moving the herds to greener pastures, he knows just how valuable these animals are to the family when they’ve finally reached the time to be slaughtered.
The older brother believes that his hard work these many years has earned him the love of his father. The older brother is proud of his persistence and determination and wishes that his dad would say out loud more often just how proud he is of him. But when he doesn’t hear those words – the older brother just keeps working, grinding, repeating to himself that it will all pay off in the end.
The older brother believes that his hard work makes him deserving of love. The younger brother believes that his foolish pursuit of belonging in all the wrong places disqualifies him from love.
But it is the father – who runs after each of them – to show how much he loves them, just for being his children.
My brother and I trudged up the linoleum covered stairs to where the adults waited with coffee mugs in hand. Mark and I sheepishly admitted that a mistake had happened, and we were really, really sorry and that there was a hole in the basement wall. We thought we’d get a time out or a stern talking to about being more responsible.
Instead – I think my grandparents smiled and said thanks for telling us. “It will be alright, it’s just a wall. Can we go see the hole?” ……It ended up not being too big of a deal.
The next week my brother and I returned with my dad and a bucket of drywall tools in hand and we got an early lesson in wall repair.
The kingdom of God is like a caregiver who when their youngster comes up the stairs to them, full of shame or anger, stammering about something that’s gone wrong in their lives, or about how they’ve been left out… instead gives them an embrace, saying, “It will be alright. I’m so glad that you came to me. Let’s have something to eat!”
God is less concerned about what we have or haven’t done, less concerned about our past foolishness or faithfulness than if we’ll say YES in the here and now to the party God is throwing. That’s Jesus’ message in the gospel of Luke, “Hey you all – God rejoices when any of us returns to loving God and others – and God’s throwing a big huge party with all the best food and wants everyone to come, especially the most unlikely folks.”
That invitation to the table of love that God sets before us may be a hard invitation to say YES to for a variety of reasons. Sometimes shame about our own failures, inadequacies, and foolishness hinders us from showing up and receiving the fullness of God’s blessing. Sometimes our own pride about how hard we’ve worked and how committed we’ve been, hinders us from rejoicing with someone who has made some small, first step home.
But God’s invitation to this party is for all. The Father of our parable runs out of the home to greet his younger son with a big bear hug and kisses. The Father’s compassion also compels him to leave the home to go and find his older son to implore him to join in celebrating the return of his brother.
The point is that God seeks each of us, pulling us out of our pride, embracing us out of our shame, so that we all might feast together in a banquet of justice, a party where we all can receive God’s love.
God loves like a mom or dad, or auntie or grandma or elder or caregiver in our lives… who in the end, all they care about is that we finally made it home. And any of us making it home is a reason to celebrate.
Celebrating doesn’t mean forgetting how hard things have been or how hard they might get. I imagine the father and his two sons – had to have some really hard, difficult conversations in the days and weeks after that party. Accountability and making things right isn’t an overnight event.
Jesus – even though he ate with tax collectors and so-called sinners and spoke of God’s radical welcome looking like a big party – also knew that his life would not be all celebratory. Violent powers will try their hardest to put an end to parties where all our welcome and the lowliest are seated in places of honor.
But I hope we never forget how important it is to celebrate alongside our God who rejoices in anyone finding life. When we celebrate as people of God we remember that it is God’s love that makes us who we are, it is in God’s love where we find our home.
About seven years ago, our family helped move my grandma out of her home to a smaller apartment. As we cleared out the basement – I could still make out the faint lines, covered by paint, where our drywall patch hadn’t been perfectly feathered and smoothed.
And what I remembered wasn’t that my brother and I had rambunctiously caused damage there… but that my grandparents weren’t fazed by it. What I remember is their hugs after we told them and that when we came back to fix the wall they invited us back upstairs for snacks.
How are you finding ways to receive the invitation to come back up stairs, to come back home and join the celebration of God? How are you choosing to rejoice, along with God, when you glimpse someone turning back to love?
For me – I am grateful to have joined with so many of you yesterday at the Mennonite Action event. It was a celebration of who we believe God to be, making public our commitment to following the peacemaking, table setting way of Jesus.
God invites all of us to the party of God’s love. And that’s a party whose love knows no borders. It’s a party where there’s homemade bagels and Costco-sized boxes of snacks and songs in many languages, where there’s a kiddo running around with hands covered in cheeto-dust reaching out to make a new friend. The party of God’s love is open to all.
Thanks be to God that we’re invited, and that God’s love finds us and embraces no matter what.