“A Parable of Two
Sons”
The Reverend Donald L. Hamer
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C
Luke
15:11-32
It is
good to be back among you after a couple of Sundays away. As many of you know, most of my first week away
was to attend the annual meeting of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal
Parishes.
I’m sure
many of you have had the experience of attending a conference that has
“sponsors” who are there to pedal their wares – books, insurance, what have
you. It is not unusual for these
sponsors to have items they are giving away as an inducement to come to their
table. One of the sponsor tables at the
Consortium was for the Episcopal Church Foundation, and what they were giving
away tells you something about their target population. Have you all seen those weekly pill
containers? You know, they have a little
box for every day of the week so you can put your medications in there a week at
a time. (I’m not going to ask how many
of you actually use them.) Well, that’s
not what they were giving away. What
they had was the Granddaddy of all pill boxes – it had not one, not two, not
three, but FOUR compartments for each day of the week! Morning,
Aside
from this sad commentary on one of the attributes of the aging process, there
were some important moments for Trinity at this conference:
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Our
own David Carson presented a very popular workshop on “Using Endowments to
Rebuild the Episcopal Church.”
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One
of our wardens, Sara Carson, attended a special one-day meeting for wardens of
endowed parishes.
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Workshops
on encouraging and enabling lay ministries.
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Workshops
on welcoming guests and new parishioners into our community of faith.
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Workshops
on using web sites as an essential tool of evangelism in the 21st
Century.
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At
the special meeting for rectors and cathedral deans, I met with a
representative of the Church Pension Fund to discuss, among other things, how
we might use the resources of the pension fund to further the mission and
ministry of the church. We also
experienced the practice of Centering Prayer as a pathway to good spiritual and
physical health.
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At
the rector’s meeting, I was also able to confer on several occasions with the
Archbishop of Burundi – which neighbors
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I
also attended a breakfast with representatives of some other urban parishes to
hear about and discuss ways in which urban Episcopal parishes like Trinity can
provide unique educational opportunities for the young people of their
congregations and surrounding communities.
In
short, our participation in this meeting was an opportunity to bring back to
Trinity some “best practices,” if you will, from churches that look a lot like
us, on how to mobilize our gifts for God’s mission and ministry through this
church.
You may be asking, “Why do we belong to the
Consortium?” The Vestry decided two
years ago to join this dynamic network of over 100 endowed parishes because we
believed in its mission, which is to bring leaders from endowed parishes
together to foster the development and use of endowments for mission and
ministry in our communities and in the world.
We work
together to create a community where we use our God-given gifts – which we have
only by the Grace of God – in a spirit of creative gratitude in order to give
glory to God and spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. To use a financial term, Consortium members believe that endowments are venture capital
for the communication of the Gospel and are held in trust for Christian
witness. They seek to be catalysts for
evangelism and mission. That is why we
belong to the Consortium. Our leadership
recognizes that as an endowed parish, our accumulated wealth brings unique
challenges as well as opportunities.
This morning’s
Gospel gives us two contrasting examples of how we approach the challenges and
opportunities of wealth, and the contrast is instructive to us as we try to
live out our lives as disciples in the Body of Christ here at Trinity Church.
The
parable of the Prodigal Son which we heard this morning is probably one of the
best known – and least understood – of the many parables of Jesus recorded in
the Gospels. For one thing, the name
that tradition has given to it – The Parable of the Prodigal Son – appears
nowhere in the story itself, and seems to focus the entire thrust of the story
on the son who walks away and squanders his inheritance from his father. But like any parable, there are many ways of
understanding this parable, and to attribute only one
significance to it is to lose sight of the beauty and brilliance of the
story.
We
could, for example, look at this morning’s parable from the perspective of the
father, or from the perspective of the younger son who goes away only to return
in disgrace, or from the perspective of the older son who remains faithful but
becomes angry when his younger brother is welcomed back home after his
absence. We could talk about the
possible symbolic significance of each of these characters, about their
relationship one with another, what the story says about the nature of familial
love.
But this
morning I want to focus on what we can learn from the two sons about the use of
the bounty with which the Lord has blessed each of us. Another way to look at this is by asking
ourselves the question, “How do we respond to a God who promises us all that He has, as sinful and as irresponsible and as
downright ignorant as we can be, just so long as we return to him with the
promise to try harder the next time?”
On the
one hand, we have the younger son, the so-called “Prodigal.” He was young; he had dreams, and frankly,
didn’t want to be stuck on the same old farm where he had spent his entire
life. He wanted the good life, he wanted
There’s
only one problem: The world isn’t like
that! It didn’t work out that way, did
it? He blew his share of the inheritance
having fun and then realized he had nothing left. He was reduced to being a hired hand on
someone else’s farm – and if you don’t have a sense of how rock bottom this
must have been for the younger son, you have to remember that for a Jewish
person pigs are considered unclean. So
there is just about nothing lower for this young son to be doing than having to
feed pigs!
But
notice a couple of interesting things about this younger son. Although he has left his family behind and he
has embraced a life of sin, the Spirit never leaves him. Even at his lowest ebb, this younger son
comes to his senses and resolves to return to his father. Without any guarantees of anything further,
without knowing what his reaction will be, he will say, “Father, I have sinned
against Heaven and before you. I am no
longer worthy to be called your son – treat me as one of your hired servants.”
Notice
another aspect of the story: Before this
young son ever says a word to his father, the father runs to welcome him
home. No qualifications, no questions
asked; no crossing of the arms or tapping of the foot waiting for some
explanation for his whereabouts. Just
simple, unqualified, self-giving love is what the father has to offer this
young son. He is ready to enter back
into relationship.
God is
like that with us, too – always inviting us in.
All we need to do is to genuinely want that relationship and to work at
it as best we can. St. Ambrose writes
about this scene: God knows all things
but awaits our words of confession, the words of our desire to return home. He counsels us to confess so Christ can
intercede for us; confess so that the church can pray for us. He continues:
“Do not fear that you will not receive, for the advocate promises
pardon. He has a reason to intercede for
you unless he died in vain.”
But then
let’s look at the older brother.
Compared to his younger brother, he is Goody Two Shoes. He has done everything that his father has
asked him to do, working hard, never disobeying his father’s command. And let’s be clear: That is God’s desire for each and every one
of us. But I think we can be equally
clear that we as often as not fall short of the mark.
But
having been such an exemplary son, this older son is filled with anger that
this runaway has been accepted back into the family fold. He won’t even go in and join the party. He can’t even refer to him as his brother –
“But when this son of yours came
back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted
calf for him.” And the older son seems
to remain angry even when the father assures him that all that remains of his
estate will belong to him. Even so, the
father says, the younger man remains his son, and he will rejoice in his return
to join the family. The older son cannot
understand this unconditional love of his father, and he can’t stomach the fact
that his father can love them both equally.
“How unfair is that?” he would ask.
I think
the lesson for all of us this morning is that we have something important to
learn from each of the sons. The
foundation for both of these lessons is the same:
God has
infinite love and care for each of us and for us as a community together. Just as God provided the Israelites with
manna until such a time as they could survive from the fruits of their labor –
which by the way, is also by the Grace of God – so too God always provides for
us. We as individuals have received
generously from God our talents, our livelihoods, our relationships and
everything we have. As a parish, we are
the beneficiaries of a substantial financial endowment inherited from our
forebears – we ourselves have done nothing to earn it or deserve it, just as
neither son did anything to merit their inheritance. Indeed, it places a heavy burden upon us not
only to be good stewards of what God continues to give us, but to be faithful
and obedient in using that endowment as God expects of us – for the Glory of
God and for the spread of the Good News of Jesus Christ. We should never, like the younger son did
with his father’s inheritance, squander it on frivolous luxuries for
ourselves. And we certainly must stop
using it as an excuse to hide from our personal responsibility to give back to
God in proportion to God’s grace working in our lives. In our stewardship, this morning’s parable
instructs us to emulate the faithfulness of the older brother in the way we
live out the vows we made at our baptism.
At the
same time, the other lesson we can take from this morning’s Gospel is that our
response to God’s incredible love has to be without fear or reservation. R. Alan Culpeper,
dean of the school of theology at
Living
with the faithfulness of the elder brother, and, like the younger son, opening
ourselves without fear to the gracious love of God’s welcoming arms.
As we enter these final weeks of Lent, my prayer is that we will each
reflect on our lives, confess our unfaithfulness to God, and that we will do so
in the knowledge that our God of Grace is here to welcome us home. AMEN.
© Copyright 2007 by
the Reverend Donald L. Hamer