Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
In the summer of 1994 I left the
Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and moved into The City. I found a job with a landscaper in the Bernal
Heights neighborhood, just south of the Mission District, and a room in a house
with a couple of other bachelors just up the street from the company yard. Having checked those two items, job and house,
off my list, I moved on to a third. I
got out the yellow pages and looked up “Churches—Episcopal” for one in my zip
code. That Sunday morning I left my new
house and walked down Bernal Hill, across Cesar Chavez St. and up 26th
to Fair Oaks, where I arrived at Holy Innocents Episcopal Church just before
the 10 o’clock service. I went in and
sat down and looked around at the interior of that lovely building, designed by
Ernest Coxhead, the architect of this structure. And the organist came in and began playing
his prelude, something by Johann Sebastian Bach, and I burst into tears. I felt I had come home.
Today’s story from Luke is one of a
number of parables in the gospels that have to do with the celebration that
happens when something that was lost is found again. In the other stories in this genre, like the
one about the woman who loses a silver coin, or the one about the shepherd
whose sheep goes astray, it is pretty easy to say what it was that got
lost. But today’s parable is a little more
complex than those.
To be sure, the father lost his younger
son when he took his share of his inheritance and went away to a far-off
country and squandered it on loose living.
But the son also lost something.
He lost sight of who he was, and what was important in his life. He went off after a kind of freedom that inflates
the value of a false self and its restless desires. And in the process he lost connection with
the one person in the world who really loved him. Until that finally that moment arrived when,
as the story says, he came to himself. And
then he had to lose that false self. He
had to give up his illusion of independence, and swallow his pride, and go back
to his father and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”
Still, I imagine that, even then,
he felt just a little trace of pride in his confession of how far he’d
fallen. He planned his speech carefully
and when he saw his father he delivered it exactly as he’d prepared, and he
probably figured that when his father heard how terrible he felt, and how low
he was willing to stoop in order to have a place in the household again, his
father would give him what he asked. But
the son had to lose even that satisfaction.
He had to accept a homecoming that wasn’t on his terms, that had nothing
to do with the depth of his remorse, or how convincing his performance of guilt
was. He had to surrender even that to
his father, who loved him completely, and was simply overjoyed to have him
back.
This story describes coming home as
a surprise, the surprise of rediscovering something that you used to take for
granted and didn’t really value. When I
sat down in Holy Innocents Church and heard Bach on the organ I was remembering
something about my own childhood and ancestral roots and the sources of my religious
imagination and how I had first discovered beauty and meaning and
transcendence. It was something about
who I was, deep down, and how I was related to the world, something I didn’t
value and appreciate before.
Coming home is one of the great
metaphors for the life of faith. But
today’s readings remind us that when we come home, the place we are coming to
is not the place we left. When the
generations that the Israelites spent enslaved in Egypt are finally over, and
the 40 years they spent wandering in the wilderness are also over at last, they
come home to the land of Canaan. The
people celebrate their homecoming by completing the circle, and eating the
Passover meal that they first ate the night that Pharaoh let them go. But they make their unleavened bread with the
grain of the land of Canaan. It is the
land of their ancestors, and the land of their own future—their promised home. And
not one of them has ever been there before.
When the congregation of St. John’s
Episcopal Church came back into this building after two-and-a-half years of
exile, many if not most of the people who were here to celebrate that joyful
homecoming had never worshipped here before.
This congregation has grown since then, and perhaps many of us who have
come in the last few years have experienced being here as a kind of
homecoming. But each one of us comes
with a different memory of home. Each
one of us has a different story of losing and getting lost, finding and being
found. We are drawn together to seek a
common vision and a shared experience of home, but the home that we are
building is a place we’ve never been before.
It’s continually changing, as people come and go, as relationships
change and grow, and love enlarges and transforms our understanding of what
coming home really means.
You’ll remember that in the Gospel
story the father lost something, and the younger son lost something too. But so did the older son. He lost the capacity to love and to value his
brother, and we never learn whether he got that back. The story ends with the words and actions of
his father hanging there like a question mark.
To understand why that is, we need to remember that Jesus tells this
parable to some Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling because he welcomed
sinners and ate with them. Jesus is
asking the grumblers if they have lost have lost the ability to see those
sinners as brothers and sisters, who are worthy of love, and who just want to
come home.
In his 2nd Letter to the
Corinthians, St. Paul says that to be “in Christ,” means that “we no longer
regard anyone from a human point of view.”
To be “in Christ” is to come to ourselves as God knows us, in the
embrace of an overflowing, reconciling love.
It is to be the guest of honor at a feast that you cannot disqualify
yourself from, no matter how willfully and thoughtlessly and eagerly you have
strayed. It is to receive a welcome that
cannot earned, by any amount of feeling sorry or humble yourself or promising
to start over again at the bottom rung of the ladder. It is to be given a new life, for no other
reason than because Jesus Christ gives his life for us, and God accepts the
gift as if it came from us.
To come home to Jesus is to come to
oneself in a place where the love of God embraces everyone as equally lost and
equally found. It is to find oneself in
a world where self-serving judgments about who deserves a rightful share of the
world’s goods and who doesn’t, who has earned a place of respect in the human
family, and who hasn’t, whose life is worth saving, and whose isn’t, no longer
apply. The world we used to find so
alluring, the world of the false self, and the false freedom, and the inflated
sense of independence, the world of exile and alienation and meaninglessness, becomes
a place of transformation, a world on the way home. And our lives find a new focus and new
purpose, as we become partners in that transformation.
Coming home to Jesus is creating something
new, a place where forgiveness and reconciliation and belonging are a gift that
belongs to everyone. It is to be a guest
but also a host, at the homecoming feast of the whole world.
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