From the Pulpit:

 
The other day as I was driving to church I was listening to the radio and it occurred to me that if I were making a movie of my life – which I am not and probably won’t – it would have to have a soundtrack. Some of the choices are obvious. You Are my Sunshine would play for my childhood and when John Bennet and I were dating one big hit was Bonnie Raitt’s Let’s Give them Something to Talk About. But it struck me as dark and ironic that the most popular, the most unavoidable song during the most devastating
and painful time of my life was Don’t Worry! Be Happy! It seemed as if all happiness had been sucked out of my life forever and wherever I went I couldn’t escape the lilting skipping stupid song. “Don’t worry, be happy” is useless advice for someone who would trade anything for a glimpse of sunshine. It only makes the darkness darker.

I found a wonderful blog not too long ago and look forward to reading the book that has resulted from it. Gretchen Rubin was the editor in chief of the Yale law review and was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she came to her senses one day and realized that what she really wanted was to be a writer. So she quit her clerkship and dived into writing.

She lives in New York and has two daughters, the younger of whom was too little to walk to school so every morning Gretchen tugged her to the bus stop and they rode the city bus to school. Every morning she thought, “another darned day on the bus.’ She looked forward to the day they could walk, until one day her daughter squealed with joy just from seeing a dog outside on the sidewalk and Rubin realized that those bus rides would end all too soon and her attitude suddenly became, “oh, wow! another day on the bus!” She woke up to the fact that where she was was where life was and pretty soon she started the Happiness Project.
It is a far cry from that dumb song. It is rich and wise and I commend it to you. (1)

I’ve preached on the parable of the Prodigal Son time and again. It is one of the most familiar and among the richest stories in the Bible, but one that is easily domesticated because we know it ends happily even as Jesus begins telling the Pharisees and scribes, “
A man had two sons…” I imagine we pretty much shift into auto pilot as we hear it the way a small child can recite the words of the page you skipped over in reading the bedtime storybook.

I’m imagining that the younger son was pretty much like Gretchen as she rode the bus to school. He didn’t relish working in his father’s fields. He was young, he knew everything, could see how rich his dad was and was hungry to taste all the sweet things the world had to offer him. He thought to himself, “I deserve to be happier than this.” And that’s when he hatched his plan. “If you
don’t mind,” he said, “Dad, I’ll take my inheritance up front.”

You can hear the crowd of scribes and Pharisees gasp as the father divides up everything he has and counts out the tall stack of hundred dollar bills and watches his son skip down the road towards nothing good. We know how it goes. We know that he parties till the last nickel is gone and then ends up mucking pigs, which is much more ghastly for a first century Jew than anything we can conceive of. He’s hungry and he’s so stinky that he can’t even smell the pigs any more. There’s no happiness to be found. But then a little voice inside him says, “I have an idea.” It’s not an idea hatched out of integrity. It’s not born of anything but hunger and misery, but Jesus says he came to himself, and so he turned on a dime and headed home.

The Pharisees and scribes would like to stick their fingers in their ears when they hear that the father left his place of honor at his estate when he heard his boy was on his way and raced down the road, his robes slapping at his legs like a little girl’s dress, that he didn’t hold the kid accountable and even held a party to celebrate. They would have been aghast and they would have understood
all too well the self-righteous indignation of the older brother. I wish I could say I couldn’t identify with it.

It’s a story that doesn’t quite make it to the happy ending that would resolve everything.

It’s not tidy. Even in his rejoicing over the return of his younger son, the father’s heart is broken by the intransigence of the older. It is a story that leaves us asking a lot of questions and one question is what true happiness is.

Many of our hymns were poems before they were put to music, and it is interesting to look so see if some stanzas were left out. Frederick Faber wrote “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” but some of the verses didn’t make it into the hymn, probably for the sake of brevity. They are good verses, words that illuminate this parable. They say:

But we make His love too narrow

By false limits of our own;

And we magnify his strictness

With a zeal he will not own.

Was there ever kinder shepherd

Half so gentle, half so sweet,

As the Savior who would have us

Come and gather at his feet? (2)

Jesus was teaching a difficult lesson in this shocking parable. He was teaching that God wants us all to be happy with a desperation we cannot begin to fathom. We are so often misguided as to what will bring happiness, though, and we tend to think that it is something we’ll know when our ship comes in, when the kids go off to college, when we lose ten pounds, or the stock market gets back to 14,000. When we don’t have to ride the darn bus to school. We chase around like kids on a treasure hunt looking for something that we don’t know what it looks like, when happiness has less to do with finding something new in our lives than with cherishing what we have already been given.

God’s plan in creation was to rest in loving relationship with all he had made. Human beings messed it up, but God has been trying every second since then  to set it straight, to get us back to the table, every one of us, every headstrong, misguided, obstinate, greedy, ornery one of us.

It is not a zero sum game. There is a crimson robe for every one of us, a sapphire ring the size of a hen’s egg, a party with a juicy roast of veal and vintage wine and dancing. But we do have to give up calling all the shots. We sometimes have to first get to that place where our hunger or the muck on our legs get to be too much to handle any more

before that little voice inside knocks us off center so we can come to ourselves. And coming to ourselves to come home and to realize it is where we need to be, where we can find God’s arms wrapped around us, God who is not too proud to come running towards us like a man who has lost his mind and given up on even a shred of dignity.

One little aside. I hope you all have noticed that the picture in the foyer of the Parish Life Center is a print of Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son. The younger son is kneeling in front of his father and the older son is glowering off to the side. But it is the old man’s hands I want you to look at, and when you do, I think you’ll see pretty plainly that one is a man’s hand and the other is a woman’s. This love is the love of a father and the love of a mother. It is a love with a kind of wholeness that only God can give. (3)

God’s justice doesn’t look one bit like human justice. For me this parable trumps every single thing in the Bible that portrays God as vengeful. In his book God Has a Dream Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes:

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,

when 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. (4)

Amen.

(1)   http://www.happiness-project.com/

(2)   The Right Reverend Michael Curry in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, p. 117.

(3)   Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: the Story of Homecoming.

(4)   Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, 19-20