Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.
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| The Days of Awe | ||
Longing God, grant us the strength, the wisdom
and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come
when it may, and cost what it will. |
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One of the many riches of ministering at Emmanuel Church is our growing and deepening relationship with Boston Jewish Spirit, synagogue in residence for the last four years. Rabbi Berman and I speak regularly to each other’s congregations, members of one congregation often attend services of the other, and we have a growing number of people in interfaith households joining us. It has struck me lately that it feels like our two congregations are becoming something of an interfaith household. (Marriage and family analogies for congregations are always problematic and they can be useful too.) As a kind of interfaith household, we are a unique and powerful witness in the City of Boston and beyond – to both people of faith and to people who are unaffiliated with a synagogue or church. I said that the other night to the BJS congregation and I thought I should say it to you too.
In the Jewish calendar, we are in the midst of the 10 day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, called the High Holy Days, or the Days of Awe. The themes of the Days of Awe are renewal and return, repair and restoration – of awakening again to the Holy One. (In the Christian calendar, those are the themes of Advent.) And because of our interfaith household, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on those themes early and to reflect on Days of Awe more than I might otherwise. So it’s through the hermeneutic – or the interpretive lens of the Days of Awe that I am viewing our scripture this morning.
The Gospel lesson we heard a few minutes ago is the prelude to one of the best known stories in Christian practice after the stories of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus – the story of the Prodigal Son. These prelude stories are some of the first stories that many of us learned in Sunday School as children. And I’ve got to tell you that while the lost sheep and the lost coin stories are nice enough, I’ve never much cared for the Prodigal Son story. I am, of course, the oldest child in my family – responsible, obedient, careful, and self-righteous. The Prodigal Son story sounds like this to me:
At the audacious request of the younger son, the father divides and distributes the inheritance before he dies rather than afterwards. A few days later, the younger one takes off to live it up and the older one is in the awkward position of having his inheritance and having to use it to care for his still-living father – who continues to act like the boss of the place, while his brother isn’t sharing in the care of his father at all. Later, when the younger son returns, all his money long gone, willing to work like a hired hand for his keep, the ecstatic father says, “no, no, no – you’re not a servant – you’re the guest of honor” and throws a great big party at the older brother’s expense – without even asking him! He’s coming back from a hard day’s work wondering what all the commotion is! And to add insult to injury, the way the story gets told, the old brother just looks bad.
And so I wonder what these two prelude stories might have to say about the Prodigal Son story – what they might have to offer. The religious leaders, Luke tells us, were grumbling that Jesus welcomed extortionists and traitors to share his mealtimes. (We would grumble too.) Since they were murmuring within earshot, according to Luke, Jesus told them two little stories with questions that follow. One preacher, William Willemon, at Duke Divinity School, retells them this way:
Which one of you, if he has 100 sheep, and one strays from the flock, will not leave the 99 sheep in the wilderness — vulnerable to wolves, wandering off, and all manner of other mischief — and go out and beat the bushes until you find your one lost sheep? Then will you not put that sheep on your shoulders, just as if you were carrying a newly found child, and when you see your friends, will you not cry out, "Come party with me! I have found my sheep!" 1Now which one of you would not do that?
And which one of you, like a woman who has lost a coin, will not be like that woman and rip up all of the carpet in your living room, move all of the furniture out into the front yard, then move all of the heavy appliances out of the kitchen into the front yard, and search relentlessly until you have found that coin? And when she has found the coin, she comes running out into the yard, calling to everybody up and down the street, “Come party with me! I found my coin!”
Now which one of you would not do that?
And which professor among you, if you have a student who is having difficulty in Introductory Physics, will you not cancel all of your appointments and projects for the coming semester and go, search out the student in the dormitory, and spend every evening, late into the night, working with that student, in his dormitory room, until, on the day of the exam, the student makes an A? And when that student makes an A, will you not run to all of your departmental colleagues and say, “Come party with me! The one who was an idiot in physics has now made the best grade in the class!”
Now which one of you would not do that? You know the answer; none of us would do that. None of us. The answer to Jesus’ question, which of you would do this, is that no one in their right mind would do that. (That’s not how I remember it being taught in Sunday School, by the way.) No one in their right mind would risk everything for one sheep or one coin or one physics student. For me, that’s a clue that Jesus isn’t talking about people at all – Jesus is talking about the Divine. The Holy One, Jesus says, would do that. The Holy One does do that. Jesus is teaching something about God to the people who think they have a pretty good handle on what God is all about – how sensible God is.
According to Jesus, God cares about stuff that gets lost that no one in their right mind would search for – either because we consider it not that valuable, or not worth risking our other assets – whatever the reason. So I wonder. What if we were to think of ourselves – of our community – as a flock of sheep or a cache of coins. Jesus is saying that parts get lost. And could we imagine that the Divine considers those parts every bit as valuable and the angels rejoice when they are found? God is like the shepherd. God is like the woman. God is like the father of two sons. Yearning, longing, desiring to seek out, to uncover, to welcome back whatever is lost.
As it turns out, I think, both of the sons in the Prodigal Son story had parts that were lost. The younger son lost his sense of self-worth. His sense of being so dirty and so wrong and so ashamed almost kept him from returning home at all. The older son being “so clean, so right, so angry” lost his sense of joy and it kept him from celebrating at the big party. 2
That makes me want to ask what have you lost that you think is not worth seeking out, uncovering or welcoming back? What have we lost as a parish, as Emmanuel Church, that we think is not worth seeking out, uncovering or welcoming back? What parts of us are missing because of accident or carelessness or shame or self-righteousness? What have we done or left undone that now seems lost forever?
The wonder of the Gospel, indeed, the wonder of our biblical testimony, is that Divine mercy has room for the absolutely worst cases of our action or inaction. The Divine desire for us is so much bigger than anything, good or bad we have managed to do. While looking for a particular scripture passage the other day (which I didn’t find), this one jumped off the page at me from Isaiah 44:22. This is the Holy One speaking, saying: "I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like a mist; return to me for I have redeemed you."
The testimony of Hebrew Scripture, the testimony of the Gospels and the Epistles is that our sins are covered – the bill is paid. The testimony of scripture is that the gates of forgiveness are so wide that you cannot see both sides at the same time. The gates of divine mercy are always open and all who wish may enter. 3 And the Holy One sits on the edge of the seat of compassion preparing to forgive our failures – our over and under-doings, all the ways we have missed the mark. 4 And it’s not just for you and me, but for whatever is least and lost and last in the whole world. That is a given, our scriptures tell us. We don’t earn it – we can’t do anything to ensure it. Our faithful, grateful, and joyful response is what God longs for and looks for, perhaps most of all.
There is a meditation in the prayer book for the Days of Awe for the morning of Yom Kippur that goes like this:
We are not so arrogant as to pretend that the trial of our lives does not reveal our flaws. We know ourselves in this moment of prayer to have failed the ones we love and the stranger, again and again. We know how often we did not bring to the surface of our lives the hidden goodness within. Where we have achieved, O God, we are grateful; where we have failed, we ask forgiveness. Remember how exposed we are to the chances and terrors of life. We were afraid. We sometimes chose to fail. And we ask: Turn our thoughts from the hurt to its remedy. Free us of the torments of guilt. Forgiven, we shall then forgive others; failing, we shall learn to understand failure; renewed and encouraged, we shall strive to be like those who came before us: human. Sinners sometimes, yet a blessing. 5
1. The Very Rev. Dr. William Willemon from a sermon entitled, “Outrageous Parties,” delivered at Duke University Chapel in September 1988.
2. The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” in Christian Century, March 11, 1998, page 257.
3. Exodus Rabbah 19.4.
4. William McKinney, President of the Pacific School of Religion, September 8, 1998.
5. Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 5738, revised 1996), p. 371.
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