{"id":84,"date":"2010-03-25T14:48:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T19:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=84"},"modified":"2010-03-25T14:59:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T19:59:14","slug":"sermon-for-4th-sunday-in-lent-march-14-2010-made-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2010\/03\/25\/sermon-for-4th-sunday-in-lent-march-14-2010-made-new\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon for 4th Sunday in Lent, March 14, 2010: “Made New”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Texts:\u00a0 2 Cor. 5:16-21 \u00a0and\u00a0Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, dear friends, I don\u2019t care if you are among the piggish or the priggish<\/em>, both of whom were meant to hear this amazing parable, but hearing it again surely gives one goose bumps.\u00a0\u00a0 There is so much here with which to identify, so many meanings that we can pull from this powerful story\u2014one of the most profound that Jesus ever surely told.<\/p>\n

A word about those terms I just used:\u00a0 the piggish and the priggish<\/em>.\u00a0 Note the people to whom Jesus, that first century Jewish sage, was speaking:\u00a0\u00a0 there are two groups of people present\u2014the tut-tutting Pharisees complaining about the company that Jesus was keeping.\u00a0 They are the priggish ones here, and one might even think that the embittered older brother of this story is meant to be their mirror image, reflecting back to them, with a little smile from the face of Jesus, their objections to the scope of the father\u2019s \u00a0generous love.\u00a0\u00a0 And the others are the piggish ones who, through one sort or another of \u00a0problems stemming from feelings of never being loved, or perhaps of decadent living, have found themselves down in the pig slop of life.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019ve been priggish more times than I like to admit, and truth be told, I\u2019ve found myself down in the slimy bogs of spiritual impoverishment and misery, because of things that have happened or stupid things I\u2019ve done.\u00a0 This story\u00a0 speaks to us all.<\/p>\n

Ironically, all the characters in this story are prodigal, if we mean by that word that they are overly indulgent, expansive, even wasteful.\u00a0 The most prodigal of all, of course, is the father in the story, whose love is so wasteful that it\u00a0 endures the shame to the family honor and the cost\u2014half of his estate\u2014that the younger son has wasted.\u00a0 The elder brother is prodigal in his self-righteousness which wastes love itself because he somehow thinks it has to be deserved and earned.\u00a0 And the younger brother, the one named the prodigal, is self-serving, self-indulgent, and even manipulative.<\/p>\n

On one level the story does tell us about the miraculous power of repentance to restore people to wholeness, but, in fact, the story isn\u2019t about repentance, it is about reunion, about being embraced in a love that transcends all that has gone wrong, all that attempts to manipulate the other.<\/p>\n

One commentator notes that the younger son never really repents in the story.\u00a0 He just collapses into self-pity while living down with the pigs (those unclean sorts that the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of spending too much time with\u2014there is lots of hidden humor in this parable), and heads home figuring that at least if he works as a slave on his father\u2019s estate he will have a roof over his head and something better than swine slop to eat. \u00a0But I don’t think so. \u00a0I think he has truly “come to himself,” as the text says. \u00a0 \u00a0If you believe in a divine score-keeper God, maybe that\u2019s all you can count on, that you will get a just penalty for your misdeeds, but no party will be thrown in your honor. \u00a0 In a peculiar way, that is what the doctrine of purgatory, in the Roman Catholic tradition, more or less represents psychologically– that unless you were a saint, after death your soul has to dwell not in paradise with God but do its penance in purgatory until at last one can be restored to the full presence of God.<\/p>\n

The older brother clearly thinks love can only be earned by racking up the goody-two-shoes points and that means he deserves a whole heck of a lot more than that narcissistic little brother gets.\u00a0 The whole thing shatters his understanding of right and wrong.\u00a0 The father\u2019s action is just plain WRONG, as far as big brother\u2019s concerned.<\/p>\n

But note that the father doesn\u2019t really care who deserves what.\u00a0 The father wants a reunion<\/span>\u2014not just with the son whom he lost to that strange attempt to find himself, but with the loyal older son, and he wants not justice\u2014but reconciliation<\/span> to mend all the brokenness in his family.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019ve learned the hard way too many times in my own life that what mends broken hearts and wounded spirits is not so much the \u00a0act of forgiveness which can be supercilious at worst and may be condescending, but it is love\u2014undeserved, unmerited, unconditional that heals and redeems and transforms.\u00a0 That kind of love, of course, includes forgiveness, \u00a0but most of all, it lets the past become the past. You know it when you feel it.<\/p>\n

Jesus concludes his parable\u2014speaking to both the piggish (those sinners with whom he has been hanging out, who know their lives are a mess) and to the priggish (those good church-going religious sorts whom Jesus actually likes and appreciates, except that he knows they have got it wrong about a score-keeping religion) by saying:\u00a0 \u201cLook here, family members, we have arrived at a point where the present is different and the future can be far more than anything the past has led us to expect.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have to repeat over and over all those old patterns of harm, nor do we have to endure them.\u00a0 The past is over and gone.\u00a0 We have a new beginning, a new family.\u00a0 That\u2019s the reason to hold a party.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0The whole Easter story, of course, is testament to a God who runs down the road to meet us, even when we think everything is over for us.<\/p>\n

We have a God of unconditional love whose desire is for a relationship with us, and between us all, in life, and Easter tells us, also in death.<\/p>\n

Jesus told this story to share with us something of the heart of God\u2014not the mind of God, for that is unknowable.<\/p>\n

St. Paul says that in Christ, God was reconciling\u2014note especially the words:\u00a0 not believers, not the righteous, not the prosperous, not the religious, not the heterosexual, not the socially prominent and intellectually able\u2014but God was reconciling the WORLD to God\u2019s self\u2026that\u2019s everybody, it seems to me, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to US the message of reconciliation\u2026that what God wants most is our heart, our love, and then our lives will follow the path that God always intended for us.<\/p>\n

Christ is our norm, our model\u2014this is how he saves\u2014not in some sacrificial way\u2014but in showing us that the old has passed away, and that who follow him will find in him a way to know the God who loves us all\u2014the piggish and the priggish.<\/p>\n

You, Paul tells those quarrelling folk at Corinth, and we, are to be ambassadors of reconciliation\u2014not proponents of division, of casting judgment.\u00a0 The Gospel lesson for this morning makes it clear:\u00a0 it was love that made Jesus draw to himself those whom the world abandoned, those who either through their own fault or that of some external cause had been broken and separated out from communities of love and hope.\u00a0 We who live in his name can do no less, for we\u2014however faintly, however clearly\u2014have been made new by the reconciling, restorative love of God.\u00a0 If that isn\u2019t resurrection, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n

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Texts:\u00a0 2 Cor. 5:16-21 \u00a0and\u00a0Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Well, dear friends, I don\u2019t care if you are among the piggish or the priggish, both of whom were meant to hear this amazing parable, but hearing it again surely gives one goose<\/p>\n

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