THE PRODIGAL: COMING HOME Lent IV, 2022
In the end, he came home. He came home and found a welcome there. The problem with today’s parable is that we have all heard it too many times. It’s one of those passages that’s familiar to everyone.
Two sons/rich father/younger son wants his inheritance/gets money and goes on a toot/runs out of money and goes home/father rushes to embrace him/cloak and ring and kill the calf/big party/elder son feels betrayed/father says “get over it and rejoice”. End of story.
So the preacher asks us to consider “how we’re like the younger son” and “how we’re like the elder son” and “what do we learn from all this?”
We learn about the need to repent our sins.
We learn God always forgives.
We learn how we feel neglected and overlooked and jealous.
We learn that God invites us to go beyond that and join the party.
End of sermon….Time for the Nicene Creed.
That’s the problem with this parable—we know it so well we think we know what it means. The truth just seems so…so obvious.
In the end, the Prodigal came home and found a welcome there.
Perhaps the parable isn’t merely about the characters or repentance or forgiveness or the invitation to rejoice. Perhaps, there is something deeper, something more profound and, ultimately, more troubling and challenging. Perhaps the subtle, quiet tune that repeats and repeats beneath the louder major chords of Jesus’ story is the one we need to listen for.
Perhaps, in the end, that tune is calling us to “come home”.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus says:
“Just as the Father has loved me, I have loved you, abide in my love. If you obey my teachings you will abide in my love just as I have obeyed my Father and abide in him.”
In another place he says, “If anyone loves me…my father will love him, and we will come and abide in him.”
The Greek verb that keeps getting translated as “abide” is monain—and one of the possible translations of monain would be “make your home with….”
How remarkably that changes those verses:
I have loved you, make your home in my love…
…If anyone loves me, my father will love him and we will come and make our home in him….
The noun of the English verb “abide” is abode—a place to live, a place to abide, a home…. As in “welcome to my humble abode….”
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When the younger son has hit rock bottom: alone, disgraced, penniless, sitting among the pigs, longing for their food he came to himself.
“He came to himself”—what a remarkable phrase! We could interpret it any number of ways: “he came to his senses”; “he woke up”; “he realized who he was”; “he had a breakthrough”, “he saw the truth”….add your own way of saying it.
But this we know: once he came to himself, he decided to GO HOME.
GOING HOME is a difficult decision—painful and wrenching and humiliating. “Going home” isn’t something people do unless they are driven to it by the circumstances of life.
When an adult child moves back in with their parents because they lost their job or their marriage broke up, it is often a source of embarrassment for all concerned. What we’re taught, in this culture, from the time we are children is that the “point of life” is to LEAVE HOME and “be on our own” and “make our own life” and “pay our own way.” Going Home in our middle-class society is an act of desperation. It is the last resort.
So this sub-theme of the Prodigal and his brother—this “call” to Come Home—runs against the grain and swims upstream.
The year I went away to college, my parents moved to a different town. So when I came home, nothing was the same. Going Home, even under the best conditions, is jarring and unsettling because the home you come back to is never the one you left.
The great American novelist, Thomas Wolfe, enshrined our view of “going home” in the title of his best known book: You Can’t Go Home Again.
So, what does it mean to us that the story of the Prodigal and his brother is a story of “coming home”?
Henri Nouwen wrote a book about Rembrandt’s painting of “The Return of the Prodigal Son”. In that book, Nouwen relates something a dear friend of his told him. Listen: “Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.”
That is true for each of us. Jesus’ parable calls us to “come to ourselves” and find, in the innermost parts of our being, the compassion and love and un-judgmental hospitality of the father in the story. It is valuable and important to examine how we are “the Prodigal” and how we are the “elder son”. We can grow from that revelation. But the growth of realizing we are just like the brothers isn’t nearly enough.
We are called by God to “come to” our deepest SELF—the SELF that welcomes “home” both the humiliation and the arrogance within us; that welcomes “home” both our thoughtlessness and our resentments; that welcomes “home” both the brokenness and the self-righteousness of our lives.
We are called far, far past recognizing the two brothers in ourselves to un-concealing the wise, gentle and all-loving parent so well hidden in our hearts. And that is there—deeper down and further in. That is there, believe me.
Beyond that—beyond even that—this parable calls to US as a church, to create a HOME where God will dwell with us and we will dwell with God.
Let me say it again, just so I can begin to believe it: you and I are called to create the space where God can make a home in the hearts and lives of each of us and those who aren’t here yet.
What would that “look like”? How would that be?
I wish I knew completely.
I do know a few things about it. Like the father in the parable today, we must welcome “home”—to a place of acceptance—all those who come broken and hurting. Like the father in the parable, we must invite the faithful and the dependable into a celebration and a feast beyond their imagining. There must be no “judgment” here. This must be a place where those who cause pain and those who feel pain are brought together and made one and reconciled. This must be a place of refreshment and hospitality and invitation and healing. This must be a place of “homecoming” to a HOME like nothing we have ever known before. This must be a place where God can make a home with us and we can make a home with God.
What we do up here is invite Christ to “make his home” within us. We literally take Christ’s Body and Blood within ourselves.
“Come home”—bring your brokenness and your prideful-ness—God will give you welcome here.
“Come home,” come taste and see how sweet the Lord can be.
“Come home” to your deepest self and make your home with God.
“Come home….”
