Year C
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Heart of God
In the midst of Lent with its somber colors and its theme of repentance and forgiveness, there is a brief taste of Easter Joy today on this fourth Sunday in Lent. Known as Laetare or Rejoice Sunday, today is celebrated with rose-colored vestments and a very slight lightening of the solemn Lenten mood. The Church of England customarily refers to today as Refreshment Sunday or Mothering Sunday. For on this Mothering Sunday, we are refreshed by glimpses of God’s nurture. God mothers us through this season in many ways; God as the one whose body feeds us; God as the one who labors and gives us new life on the cross; God as the one who saves us by grace. With God’s wide mercy and kindly justice, we are given a new beginning every day of our lives and we can rejoice that our God is a God of new beginnings.
Therefore, it is most appropriate that the texts today all speak to that for which we can rejoice. Joshua leads the people into the Promised Land for the first time after wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. In Second Corinthians we read that wonderful passage from Paul concerning how God has made us new creations in Christ-the ultimate new beginning. And in the Gospel lesson we see the prodigal son being given a new relationship with his father, mirroring the reconciliation or forgiveness given to us in Christ. Lent invites us to contemplate the lengths to which God will go to restore us to God’s self and to each other through Jesus Christ.
We read story after story in the scriptures of God’s commitment and promise to new beginnings. And nowhere is this seen more vividly than in what Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the greatest story ever told…the parable of the prodigal son. This story or parable, amid the variety of ways God is known in the scriptures, gets at the very heart of God; a God who is always more eager to forgive than we are to receive forgiveness, always ready to go to any length necessary to embrace us in love. This story of the prodigal son and his brother remind us that there is absolutely nothing more important to God than restoring the lost; the sinful broken relationship we have with God.
Our parable today is one of three parables in Luke’s gospel that are about losing and finding. Today’s parable along with the parable of the Lost Sheep and the parable of the Lost Coin, all speak to God’s joy at finding what had been lost, but the story of the prodigal son changes the emphasis a bit. In the parable of the Lost Sheep and the parable of the Lost Coin, the main focus is the action of God. God seeks, God finds, God rejoices and calls others to rejoice.
But in today’s story, the main focus seems to be the response of the two sons. The younger son, the prodigal, has to learn the value of what he once took for granted. He sees his father mainly as a provider, and the father is there to give his son what he wants and then stands back. He stays home and waits. When the prodigal returns home in great need, and is braced for humiliation, to his surprise the father runs to greet him with open arms, “filled with compassion”…he runs, he embraces, he kisses.
The father doesn’t care what happened before and is not interested in humiliating him any further. He is just glad to have him home and what we can hope is that the son recognized that what he needs is not just bread, but also that unfailing love of the father who welcomes the lost home and celebrates. While the celebration is going on the elder son the faithful child who stayed home returns and is consumed with jealously and resentment. And just as the father reached out to his youngest son who was lost, so too did he reach out to the elder son, who was in danger of becoming just as lost as his brother.
When the elder son makes his case, the father does not disagree or belittle. He says, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” The generosity lavished on the son who was lost outside the household is now extended also to the son who is lost within the household. The father’s love knows no limitations, it is a love that offers new beginnings for both sons but both sons need to learn about the deep, compassionate, determined, infinite love of the father. We humans, we all were lost, mired in sins of sensuality, greed and resentment, hip-deep in the pig slop of envy. But before we knew it, God reached out in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. God raised us up and called us home.
Paul understood this message about God. In the reading from 2 Corinthians today Paul proclaims that God is doing a new thing in Christ; the old is passing away. The active, seeking God, reaches out in Jesus to bring back the lost world. Seeing us with compassion, not wanting to humiliate us or judge us, but to offer us the chance for a genuinely new relationship, a new beginning. And when we accept this relationship, based upon trust and love, we are transformed, made ambassadors for Christ and are asked to become the visible expressions of this new reality to our world. Our being made new in Christ awakens us to God’s love so that our lives proclaim it. It is a ministry of offering to the world that which Christ has given to us-reconciliation.
According to Paul, the next chapter of the story of the prodigal son, is that the younger son goes out of his way to mend the relationship with his older brother and then, together they go out and search for others who need their father’s love. Lent asks us to become its ambassador with the invitation: “Be reconciled to God” Because Lent invites us to confess that we are not the people we should be. This confession requires prayer, meditation, and repentance. Yet, God still leads God’s people out of wandering and disgraceful situations. Therefore, we can rejoice that God never stops seeking us out, saving us and calling us home. The Israelites are now home after wandering for 40 years. They can put the past behind them because God’s promises have been realized.
Once we have prepared ourselves, and this is what Lent is all about, we are prepared to follow God into the wonderful provisions of our promised land, we can enjoy both the land and the feast in due time in joy. Our readings today are a good choice for Mothering Sunday. They speak to the active, healing, life-giving love of God. And every time God’s active, searching, merciful love finds someone and calls that person back home, it is a new beginning and a reason for great rejoicing. It is a reason to do our best to mirror and embrace this infinite, awesome love as Ambassadors of Christ.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his book “God Has a Dream” wrote, “I have a dream, God says. Please help me to realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, where there will be more laughter, joy and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that my children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family.” This is what the love of God looks like. We are not likely to realize this vision for humanity in this world but we can strive to find our way home.